MindShift – Linda Flanagan
Want to change your school’s culture? Start with the right students.
A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals some important clues on how to change a school’s mores. The gist of the findings? To change school norms, the most well-connected students have to lead the way.
Scholars Elizabeth Paluck, Hana Shepherd and Peter Aronow, who conducted the yearlong project in 56 New Jersey middle schools during the 2012-13 academic year, sought to discover the impact of student-led anti-conflict programs on kids’ behavior. When it was over, they found that groups led by influential students were most successful in changing the way fellow students treated one another. Indeed, in those schools where an average number of well-connected kids took part in the campaign, reports of student conflict dropped by 30 percent.
These results offer a promising new approach for schools in the midst of a cultural crisis, whether from bullying, cheating or some other undesirable student behavior. To aid educators, the scholars have made their detailed curriculum available online.
The study team designed the investigation with care. To ensure the accuracy of their results, researchers put half of the 56 schools into a control group — which received no specialized anti-conflict programming — and offered the remaining randomly selected 28 schools a carefully designed intervention that sought to reduce friction among the students.
To test the idea that the most socially connected kids have the greatest influence among their peers, the researchers first had to figure out who those kids were. Here, they took a novel approach: All students were given a survey that included every student’s name at that particular middle school. Each child then was tasked with identifying the 10 individuals they’d spent the most time with during the last few weeks, either in person or online. The survey also asked about student perceptions of conflict in school.
This “social network mapping” strategy, which aims to identify the most influential people in a group, differed from typical research methods in two important ways. First, it was driven by students rather than adults; grownups had no role in selecting the influential kids. “When adults pick out students to intervene with, they often pick the popular kids or the traditional leaders,” Paluck said, leaving out some less visible but more influential students, including those who aren’t models of good behavior. Second, by asking kids who they spent time with, rather than who they called friends, the survey revealed which children had the most actual influence.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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