RESEARCH REPORTS

The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

CCBE CCBE The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best RESEARCH REPORTS CHARACTER

How might Grade 7 boys have better success in skill development if they self-identify a need for personal growth?

Greg Ryerson

“Building awareness of self-efficacy has proven to be a positive influence in the lives of the Middle School boys”, says Middle School teacher Greg Ryerson. His year-long research challenged his students to explore the development of their 4C skills - communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. Using surveys, reflection prompts from journal entries and interviews, he found that boys became more aware of their comfort zones and were able to leverage existing abilities through skill development. They better appreciated the power of collaboration and communication as they developed effective teamwork strategies; each boy was able to identify and contribute to solutions with his own strengths.

One particular area that Mr. Ryerson found most intriguing was discovering that the boys want to develop new skills coming from a place of strength. This was contrary to his in-going assumption that the students would first identify areas of weakness and work to address those. His research indicated that we would be more successful by first identifying areas of strength and confidence, using those skills to “train up” any weaker areas. Mr. Ryerson is eager to explore this further and dig into how he can make a pedagogical shift to focus on this. He plans to delve further into his findings in the fall and is in a unique position to conduct a 2.0 version of his project with his mentor group next year. He will share his initial and subsequent learnings at the IBSC Conference in 2021.

Link to Report (pending)

Mr. Ryerson’s Action Research poster

The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

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The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

CHARACTER

Adolescent Boys and their Peer Relationships: Their Truth Be Told How might boys be co-researchers in discovering the “boy code” and its impact on school culture?

Patricia Alviano, Sandra Boyes & Trish Cislak

When working with boys to repair the gap between intention and impact, it is our experience that boys are unable to articulate why they make the choices they do. There is growing awareness of the unspoken boy code rules that govern them.

How can we support our boys to make decisions that both honour their need to thrive in their peer group and still support the School’s need for a positive, safe and inclusive culture? The intention of this longitudinal research project is to use the voices of adolescent boys to create a boy code of relational gestures (strategies) designed to meet both of these needs.

This research began in January of 2020 with focus groups of boys from Grades 6, 7, 8 and 9. The boys participated in a series of discussions and activities designed to tease out the different perspectives of boys at each age. Our project was designed to: 1. Discover the current reality of the “boy code” rules that govern their choices and their behaviour by creating a safe space to honour their voices. 2. Identify the dominant themes using individual, reflection assignments and data from focus group recordings and discussions. 3. Create a series of relational gestures recommendations based upon the findings to establish a boy code of relational gestures (strategies). 4. Inform school policymakers, teacher leaders, and mentors of the findings 5. Integrate the co-created relational gestures into the School’s conduct policies and mentor program instruction.

Phase Two of this project will commence in the Fall of 2020.

The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

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The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

WELLNESS

How does Crescent’s Learn and Lead module impact the Operations Teams’ support of mission delivery?

Carolyn Smith-Green

It was exciting to have Carolyn Smith-Green, Crescent’s Chief Finance and Administration Officer, use action research to investigate the impact of a team building program that was implemented for professional development.

Over the past two years, an Operations Series has been conducted for Crescent’s Finance, Facilities, Innovation & Technology, Business Development, and Risk Management departments that make up the Operations Team. The Operations Series was developed to create a forum for team building and strengthen communication using the Portrait of the Graduation questions (Who am I? How do I lead? What is my legacy?) as the basis. The team has developed team norms and service delivery standards with the planned progression to develop learn and lead standards.

There were four planned sessions which combined information sharing and workshops. During the first two sessions, team norms and service delivery standards were reviewed and ranked by importance by each team member. There was clear alignment across the teams showing the majority ranked communicating openly and proactively and showing empathy, compassion, and respect as the top team norms. A subsequent workshop on the topic of “servant leadership’’ was held to determine how this concept applies to the Operations Team at Crescent.

This project will continue in 2020-2021 as it was halted due to COVID-19. The remaining sessions will focus on defining “change agents”, the development of the learn and lead standards for the team, and the link to the mission. Perhaps most significantly is how this reflective practice is being embraced by Ms. Smith-Green and the Operations staff. It is already reaping positive results as the Operations Team better understands their role in mission delivery at Crescent.

The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

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The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

PEDAGOGIES

How do protocols encourage intentional communication, hope, and solution-focused conversations regarding how we support our boys?

Merrick David

As a Learning Support Specialist in Crescent’s Lower School, one of Merrick David’s key roles is supporting individualized learning plans for boys. This kind of differentiated instruction can create challenges for teachers who are supporting each individual learner. Adopting a solution-focused mindset and plan of action protocols can support our teachers. Protocols have the capacity to instill both intentional communication and a sense of hope; two very important things that need to exist when talking about our boys.

Ms. David’s research focused on a more formalized protocol to support the development of intentional and solutionfocused communication among colleagues when discussing boys of concern. This was a small tweak to an already existing structure. Just before the March Break, she assembled a voluntary team of teachers and staff to implement Solution Circles, a solution-focused protocol that leans on community capacity. Their role is to help teachers problem-solve and/or become unstuck when experiencing a new teaching challenge which may be impeding their ability to best support a student. At Crescent, we regularly communicate about our boys. Introducing Solution Circles is a more formalized way to navigate these conversations.

The Solution Circle will be reintroduced to the Lower School faculty in the fall. This concept can thrive in both brick and mortar and virtual learning environments. Ms. David is hoping to capture data that will promote positive protocols as teachers work to create successful learning environments for all students.

The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

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The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

PEDAGOGIES

How might global collaboration and perspective support student engagement and finding solutions to local social justice projects?

Ian Eatock

Upper School Modern Language teacher Ian Eatock’s class project in collaboration with Collegio Los Nogales, a K-12 independent School in Columbia and teacher Beatriz de Hiraldo, began in January 2020. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the project was able to continue through the year. His Grade 11 and 12 students drafted solutions for a social issue of their choosing by following a design thinking protocol. They defined a specific issue, created user profiles for individuals who were most closely affected by the issue, brainstormed solutions for and refined those issues. Finally, they created a path forward by putting that solution into a “SMART” (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timebound) goal framework. They posted their progress online in short videos that were shared on a forum with the students from Colombia. They had opportunities to ask questions in Spanish and English, and give and receive feedback on their projects.

This experience was a good first step in building a prototype for the project. “The students enjoyed the opportunity to work on something ‘real’ and appreciated the opportunity to connect with students studying similar issues in South America,” says Eatock. Student engagement was evident and the boys offered some perspectives for improvement, such as the need for more project structure in the future and that a change in technology might be necessary to simplify the exchange of ideas between schools. The boys would appreciate more grammar and vocabulary connections to the curriculum material during the project itself. Moving forward, he will build out more structured steps for the students to follow during their project.

Eatock appreciates the opportunity to work with CAIS to develop innovative projects for schools. Says Eatock, “Our current circumstances highlight the need for compelling programming that leans into the use of digital technologies to connect young voices and bring the ‘geographically distant’ closer to home.”

Eatock will use this experience to launch Phase Two of his research in the Fall of 2020.

The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

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The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education Discovering How Boys Learn Best

PEDAGOGIES

How might using a Design Thinking Approach build leadership competencies?

Rich Prosser & Alexandra Rodney

Following the second year of their twoyear GPP3O Leadership course, Assistant Head of Upper School Rich Prosser and educational consultant Alexandra Rodney found that students’ leadership competencies, particularly in the areas of interpersonal interaction and learning and reasoning increased.

Students reported that experiential learning was key to their leadership development. They identified six strengths they developed while taking the leadership course: the ability to recognize community needs; identify strengths in self and others; recognize and overcome challenges; personally grow through challenges; take ownership of problems; and manage their time.

“These findings provide support for leadership education,” says Prosser. “We will be thinking more about how that can be incorporated into the curriculum in a way that doesn’t overburden students with busy schedules.”

The research did uncover an area warranting further exploration. “We would like to understand more about whether intentional teaching of leadership competencies is necessary for youth to develop these competencies or whether these competencies naturally develop in youth over time,” says Rodney. Additional research would involve a larger-scale experiment that compares students in a leadership class with their peers who aren’t taking a leadership class (control group) to see whether there is a causal relationship between teaching and leadership competency development in youth.

Prosser and Rodney will be analyzing their findings more deeply over the summer and sharing this work with the Crescent Community.