"Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world." –Nelson Mandela
What does a Director of Culture do?
I had this question on my mind as I had the opportunity to sit down with student experience maestro Jason Lewis at Merit Prep this week. Through a series of questions and observations, I found out that Jason is a relentless relationship builder for our students and staff at our Matchbook Learning School in Newark, NJ. And, he’s someone who enjoys creative playfulness to come up with better ways to improve the student experience. By definition, he’s a hacker of the student life.
Jason “schooled” me on a few things during my visit:
Daily Data Reviews: Jason reviews several data dashboards from our Kickboard system, coaching data, and student pacing data on our Spark platform that helps him to focus on what supports are needed for student and teacher development. Also, he tracks who can potentially become a student leader to help others progress or reach success in their behaviors, habits, and academic progress. These relational tools are what he uses daily for developing family and student trust at parent conferences and in student community circles as well.
Leading Morning Assembly: Jason often uses music to engage kids and have them sing along verbatim to a couple of songs. Next, he asks them how many students can recite verbatim what they are learning in a given teacher’s class.
A few students often try, and then Jason issues a dramatic pause, “Let me ask you a question: If I told you there was a million dollar prize inside of this laptop and all you had to do was find the files with the right clues, what would you do?”
As multiple students offer different approaches, Jason connects their thinking with how many times in life folks either try and give up, are persistent without a plan, or put it all together to have a plan and effort to achieve their goals.
These short vignettes are customary for Jason as he maps students back to how it takes quite a bit to put a song they like together and how what they are doing in their classroom maps to effort, persistence, and planning to achieve things in life.
Facilitating Community Circles: As Jason works to develop the potential of all students, he often looks for ways to accelerate a student’s leadership potential. During one of our office visits, he ran out on me to grab a student briefly to have the student tell me about his journey at Merit Prep. The student talked with me candidly about where he was in terms of when he entered and where he is now because of Jason’s constant tough love and follow-up. Jason is grooming these young men and women for success in the way they carry and lead themselves, others, and their community.
His specific focus on a most recent visit was describing an inconsistent student who came up with a design for the black history community circle day. This student found a passion and something that he wanted to share and Jason and some of the other team members worked with him to help his dream take shape.
Student Incentive Programs: Through Kickboard and our Spark points system, student earn pay checks at Merit Prep to be used at the school store or incentives like a recent movie night to see the Jesse Owens’ film – Race.
Scenario Based Training for Teachers: During our weekly professional learning sessions at Merit Prep, Jason often employs a scenario based learning approach. He shares a poignant profile of a student with our staff. He describes in detail the student’s strengths and weaknesses and multiple evidences of conflict with teachers. He then opens the floor to ask the teachers how they would approach dealing with the student. Using a protocol to organize responses and keep the approach in the affirmative, teachers begin to share student rapport and classroom management techniques that could prove to be effective with the student in the scenario.
Jason then levels the room with, “that student was me”.
He then expounds on how some of the approaches listed turned out for him. Which ones were not effective and why. Next, he offers some additional strategies for hard to reach students like he was at one time.
While Jason is a virtuoso at making relationships matter, what impresses me most about his work – is his growth mindset. Therefore, we also used our time at Merit Prep this week to begin planning our “hacking sessions” as ways we could accelerate the student experience to even more meaningful and impactful levels.
We’ve decided to rely on the design principle of empathy to really understand a day in the life of our students. Through a variety of methods including home visits, student shadow days , bus ride-alongs, interviews, and design sessions with students, our aim is to hack a better experience at Merit Prep over the next few months.
We anticipate that we’ll learn several things about our methodology along the way. We’ve also formed a set of hypothesis statements that we want the students to push and hack with us as we learn more from their experience. Our early intentions and questions include:
- If students play certain roles in the home before they arrive at our school, how can we make that time for them matter?
Push technologies from our platform SPARK to students and their parents on school communications, reminders, and recognition are early instincts we have, but we need to better understand the access and connectivity needs of our students.
- If students are balancing screen time at Matchbook Learning with project time in our conference and apply cycles, then what types of projects do they help us hack?
How does this work map to their passion and interests? Can we involve our Dream Director in this cycle more intentionally?
- If our students gain more time in physical activity and mindfulness then we believe this will translate to academic success and joy.
What types of schedules would make this possible? What types of curriculum would be useful to make this happen?
- If our students spend more time in social and emotional learning, then they’ll be more empowered to help themselves, their families, and their community after hours.
How can we ensure that this work filters back into our morning assemblies and community circles? How can we feature and recognize this work more broadly through student incentives and recognition? How can we engage and support parents in this journey?
In all, Jason and I are norming around culture being about continuous improvement when it comes to hacking the student experience. He is a restless optimist like me. We are both encouraged by the success we’ve had and impatient in terms of the opportunities we do not want our students to miss. Can’t wait to keep hacking the student life with Jason and our kids at Merit Prep.
By Bryan Setser and Jason Lewis, Director of Culture at Merit Prep
