The Possible Tensions Between Maintaining Friendships And Working Hard In School Can Be Lessened

By Author: Stephen Covey
Total Articles: 74
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First, at the end of the fifth-grade year at Jefferson School, before students move into middle school they participate in a project developed to directly confront issues of academic identity and motivation, called Recollections. In finished form, the annual Recollections project is a book of essays written by fifth graders about themselves as learners, with each essay accompanied by a self-portrait painted by the student. The essays and paintings are collected into an artfully bound volume for each participant and celebrated at a Recollections breakfast, where students read from their essay to an audience of family members, peers, and teachers. Before students write their reflective essays, they look through the collected Breitling Bentley Replica work the school has kept in an archival folder, approximately 20 pieces collected from each year. Students reflect with a teacher about their work, and the teacher takes notes of the students' memories, which become the basis for the essay. Here is an excerpt of the Recollection essay Orlando wrote ...
... in fifth grade:

I really like to read. I read all the time at home. I even have a mini library! In fourth grade I took a reading test and my reading level was at 9th grade. When I finish my homework I like to read on my bed until dinner. Some of my favorite books are: the Ramon, series, by Beverly Clearly and the Jones series by Barbara Park. During school I read at math timid and I get in trouble.

The Recollections project gives students a chance at the end of elementary school to make a public statement about who they are as learners. The essays give students an opportunity to affirm a public identity aim an academically talented and engaged student, even! if today Orlando would say his favorite authors were] Christopher Paul Curtis and Walter Dean Meyers, as he reported in our interview.

Second, graduation portfolios at Jefferson School are based on the work of Central Park East Secondary School (Darling-Hammond & Ancess, 1994; Meier, 1995). Jefferson students must complete portfolios in eight subjects and defend each portfolio before a panel of two teachers, their parents, a community member, and a younger peer. Portfolios are uniquely individualized and each student chooses, within limits, the topics about which they will research and write in each discipline. The completion and public defense of these portfolios is a powerful way for students to make public a personal identity that combines aspects of home and school identities and interests, while using critical elements of a secondary, academic Discourse.

The power of Recollections and portfolios lies in their attention to the tensions adolescents may be experiencing between their public identities as social actors in a group of peers and their public identities as students attempting Breitling Replica Watches to acquire, learn, or resist a secondary Discourse powerful in schools. Recollections and portfolios create a situation in which it is more difficult for students to say, "School is not for people like me." Rather, students may be more likely to conclude, "Part of who I am is a student, a reader, and a writer; and I can challenge myself at this." It remains to be seen whether John, and other students at Jefferson who resist reading, will benefit from the portfolio process. The hope, based on this hypothesis, is that when enough students in a school or class include statements such as these as part of their identities, the possible tensions between maintaining friendships and working hard in school, learning secondary, academic Discourses, can be lessened.