A GC Super Tuesday

2012 March 7 by generationcitizen

Several years ago a published author came to speak to my high school English class and offered us a memorable piece of advice: when it comes to writing, learn all the rules so you can break all the rules. The notion of deciding which rules are worth following resonated with me then and continues to today, especially as I’m learning how to teach. When I woke up Monday morning ready to deviate from the GC curriculum, I knew I was in the midst of a teaching breakthrough. A handful of classes into the semester, I’d finally developed the confidence to take creative liberties for the sake of keeping my students excited.

“Who knows what tomorrow is?” I asked.

“Tuesday,” someone offered from the front row.

“Yes. But it’s more than that. It’s Super Tuesday.”

Super Tuesday. What a wonderful little phrase. I didn’t even have to fudge the facts to make the crucial day in the election calendar sound intriguing.

“The goal for today’s class is for you to be able to walk onto the street and know more than any adult you run into about why tomorrow is important. You guys game?”

We all learned something on Monday. As the lesson wore on, they learned the irritating intricacies of the primary process. I explained what a delegate was once… twice… three times before anyone understood it. They pushed me to re-think a concept I thought I understood. They challenged me by asking questions ranging from the factual to the abstract.

“Why do we even have a President?” a student yelled from the back.

Good question. It’s one that my Political Science professor posed to my 400-person lecture just last week. She got a stunned silence in reply. A seventh grader was able to ask an equally provocative question.

“Why aren’t all of the primaries held on the same day?” someone else asked.

The primary process isn’t perfect, we discovered. We spent much of the class critiquing the system our country uses to decide presidential candidates. Perhaps most excitingly, I didn’t come to class with such an agenda in mind. But once they’d mastered the facts, they wanted to challenge the facts.

I settled myself into a desk in the front row, raising my voice over the heated one’s of my students, and began reading a Washington Post article about the significance of Super Tuesday. I’d stop every few sentences to make sure everyone was following. They were. And as I read, the abstract concept of primaries became concrete… relevant… exciting. Everyone seemed struck by the same thing that I was: that we had no idea what was going to happen on Tuesday.

“So, basically, Mitt Romney really needs to win Ohio,” I summarized as we got ready to transition to the next part of our lesson.

Fast forward and it’s 10:19 PM on Super Tuesday. As I write this in Brown University’s library, Santorum is leading Romney by 2% in Ohio. As the precincts gradually report their numbers, the gap between the two candidates is shrinking, yet no one else around me seems to grasp the gravity of this particular contest.

I take comfort in knowing that, tomorrow at 11:48, I’ll be back at Gilbert Stuart Middle School working with a group of students who appreciate the importance of Super Tuesday. And while I feel proud that I thought to tackle such an ambitious topic with such young students, I’m mostly grateful they were willing to humor my teaching experiment with patience, thoughtfulness, and vigor.

- Liz Mills, Brown University

MA February Program Update

2012 March 2 by generationcitizen

Generation Citizen Spring 2012

We’ve finalized our partner schools and classrooms, recruited and trained some outstanding college student Mentors, and connected each of our Mentors to their teachers and students.  Now the fun is beginning!  Read on for some great highlights from our first few weeks of GC Spring classes.

Key Statistics

We have currently engaged 41 Mentors in Generation Citizen’s Greater Boston programming and partnered them with 23 secondary school teachers.  These partnerships have enabled us to implement Generation Citizen in 13 schools and 45 classrooms, thus reaching over 1100 students.

Save the Date for Civics Day!

Civics Day in Boston will be held on Friday, May 11^th at the Massachusetts State House.  Representative Gloria Fox will again be sponsoring the event.  This dynamic event will gather over 200 students, college student Mentors, classroom teachers, and local luminaries.  Please join us!

A Story from the Program

Generation Citizen’s mission of empowering students hinges on the unique partnership between classroom teachers and our college student Mentors.  Our college students’ enthusiasm, near-peer mentorship, and advocacy training and experience combined with our teachers’ classroom expertise and deep student relationships ensures that we are delivering the most effective action civics experience to our students.

Nowhere was the vibrancy of this partnership more apparent than at the Phoenix Charter Academy where Carrie (pictured here), an Education Major from BU, is working closely with teacher Kathy Yang.  On the day I visited, Carrie arrived to the school 45 minutes early to ready all materials and finish planning out her lesson with Ms. Yang (although the two had emailed back and forth even before then).  During the lesson, Carrie took the lead in guiding students through the activities, but Ms. Yang actively participated in the discussions and activities, helping to frame Carrie’s questions for individual students so that they each could be pushed towards deeper reflection.  After class, the two talked even more, debriefing how the class went and talking about individual students and how to build off of their different styles and preferences.  Through a rich collaborative dialogue, Carrie and Ms. Yang shared their thoughts and aired questions and challenges, and came up with some specific facilitation strategies to try for next class.

NY February Update

2012 March 2 by generationcitizen

The weather is heating up, and so are our classes!

Save last week’s February break, students and Mentors have been hard at work for a few weeks and are now in the midst of Unit 1 and a guided exploration of their communities. Students began by looking at examples of youth making change around the country. They then considered how issues such as these affect populations at different (school, city, federal, etc.) scales. Now they are identifying needs and assets within their own communities as they brainstorm issues upon which they would like to focus their action for the semester.

News: A Strong Start to the Semester

• All classes up and running – this semester, we’re working with 26 middle and high school classes at 13 schools throughout all five boroughs, all under the guidance of at least one excellent college Mentor and GC-trained teacher. In classroom observations, it’s clear that Mentors are more than stepping up to the challenge of leading their classrooms, inventing management strategies, engaging hooks, and meaningful opportunities for student participation which are already pushing their students toward empowerment.
• This semester, we are piloting a program in partnership with the I Have a Dream Foundation in which four Mentors are leading a series of after-school civic engagement workshops at public housing sites throughout the city. The series’ kick-off event was last week, and students are pumped to begin their workshops. Students with 100% attendance during the semester may apply for internships working on election campaigns over the summer. We at GC are excited offer students this new opportunity for civic engagement.

Words from the Program

“We are lucky to benefit from the great work that Generation Citizens does.  Our students absolutely enjoyed the final presentations last year and with that in our school’s collective memory, I think we are ready to do even better work this year.”

- GC Principal, on looking forward to a second year of partnership

Classroom Stories:

The Oscars are over, but students at the High School for Public Service have their sights set on a different golden statue. After students advocated for and agreed upon the “one mic” (one speaker at a time) rule when building their classroom contract, Mentor Lucy Drummond stumbled upon a golden plastic microphone at the store. The students now vie for the mic as they seek to voice their opinions and perspectives to the class.

Key Statistics

This week, Managing Director Daniel Millenson will condense our five weekly university chapter meetings into three extended two-hour advocacy trainings, in which Mentors will learn the steps and strategies necessary to construct a strong action plan for their students.

RI February Update

2012 March 2 by generationcitizen

Generation Citizen Spring 2012

We’ve finalized our partner schools and classrooms, recruited and trained some outstanding college student Mentors, and connected each of our Mentors to their teachers and students. Now the fun is beginning!  Read on for some great highlights from our first few weeks of GC Spring classes.

Key Statistics

We have currently engaged 40 Mentors in Generation Citizen’s Providence programming and partnered them with 14 secondary school teachers.  These partnerships have enabled us to implement Generation Citizen in 10 schools and 20 classrooms, thus reaching over 500 students.

Save the Date for Civics Day!

Civics Day in Providence will be held on Monday, May 7th at the Rhode Island State House. This dynamic event will gather over 200 students, college student Mentors, classroom teachers, and local luminaries.  Please join us!

A Story from the Program

“”We need to make schools better for the kids in Providence. I care about the education of this city’s children, do you?”

So concluded the “”State of Providence Address”" by Danny, an 8th grader taking Generation Citizen as part of Ms. Cappalli’s current events class at Roger Williams Middle School in Providence, RI.  Danny (pictured left) wrote this speech because his Generation Citizen class, led by Brown Mentors Elena Maker and Evan Coleman, was participating in the Community Mapping part of the Generation Citizen, in which students take stock of their local community and identify community assets and community needs. Community Mapping is the critical step GC students take before they can identify the focus issue that forms the basis of their Action Plan and then their Action Project.

In this class, Elena and Evan, in partnership with Ms. Cappalli, introduced a creative spin on Community Mapping by leading students to write and deliver “”State of Providence”" speeches. After an impassioned recitation of a section of President Obama’s recent State of the Union, the Mentors led a class discussion on the purpose of the speech, types of content it included, and key rhetorical elements it used. With this in mind, the students composed their own speeches to convey the realities of their own communities. Their final products touched on such issues as school funding, homelessness, drug use, and health services. Students left the class with a list of key issues to choose from for their subsequent Generation Citizen advocacy work, as well as some important practice in speech crafting and public speaking.

Seeding the Demand for Civics

2012 March 2 by generationcitizen

As every social entrepreneur knows, the first part of starting any organization is identifying a need that is not currently being met, and figuring out an efficient way to meet that need.  For Generation Citizen, it was recognizing that there were not enough actors providing effective civics education to our nation’s students.  We found an efficient and effective way to meet this need through training college students to partner with teachers to implement an action civics curriculum in our lowest income schools.  Essentially, we were providing a necessary “supply.”

But what about the demand side?  Do people actually see the need for an effective civics education?  This has been a much tougher problem for us at GC.  While many recognize that our educational space needs to be reformed in some capacity, and that student performance needs to be improved across the spectrum for Americans to once again be competitive in the international marketplace, the need for young people to understand how to participate in the political process is not seen as vital of a priority.  We want our young people to be college and career ready.  But citizenship ready?  It’s not quite there yet.

So, for the past 3 years, as we improve our method of systems delivery (the supply side), we’ve been simultaneously trying to strengthen the demand.  And we’re starting to get there on the school side.  After 2 years of promising results, we are in the process of formally partnering with numerous school districts, including Boston Public Schools, the Providence Public School District, Somerville Public Schools, and individual networks in NYC.  This essentially has involved districts noting that their students need to learn effective civics education (demand), and that we are an organization that can help them do a good job at this (supply). We will work together on professional development and curriculum, and provide college Mentors.  They will pay us for this, which is extremely exciting on our part.  We’re hopeful that 25% of our overall costs will be covered by district and school partnerships next year, or most of our overhead.

Candidly, we’re still working on the fundraising side of things.  We’ve done a good job growing up and expanding our budget, but it’s been a little bit of a struggle convincing both individual and institutional funders that we are vital.  Innumerable foundations have told us that what we’re doing is important, but that their focus is on student achievement or systems reform.  Or they’ve said that their civic engagement efforts are focused outside of the classroom, on initiatives like voter registration.  Individuals follow this same path.

So how do we convince everyone that forming an effective citizenry is vital?  I’d argue that people just have to watch the news every night to understand the need for citizen-ready young people.  But we’re going to have to help seed the demand in more comprehensive ways…essentially by proving our impact.  By proving that our model, and action civics, can help transform  young people in both measurable and immeasurable ways.  That it can help transform the political process into something that people can actually participate in.

Twenty years ago, when Wendy Kopp first started Teach for America, the “achievement gap” was a buzz term that no one had ever heard of.  Money was scarce, and it was difficult for districts to let them in.  They had the supply, but not the demand.  Twenty years later, districts are knocking at their door at a greater pace they can handle, and closing the achievement gap is one of the most hotly funded issues in the country.

I’m not saying we’ll ever be at that same level.  But in order to be successful as an organization, we need to both ensure our supply is excellent, and that we’re seeding our demand.  It’s going to be a challenge.

- Scott

How We Talk About Evaluation

2012 February 23 by generationcitizen

One of our persistent challenges is, A) How to evaluate what Generation Citizen does, and perhaps more challenging, B) How to talk about success. Democracy itself is messy: how do you measure an organization that tries to create a more engaged citizenry?  What does an engaged citizen even look like?

Lucky for us, we have a fantastic evaluation team that is starting to tackle these issues, even though we’re a young and growing organization.  This group, comprised of leading scholars and current graduate students from UC-Berkeley, Columbia Teachers College, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is completely dedicated to objectively analyzing our work in the classroom, and iteratively providing us with feedback.

So you all get insights into how we see things, please see the note below from our Director of Evaluation, Alison Cohen.  It’s great stuff, and we’d welcome your feedback:

Telling the GC Evaluation Story
Alison Cohen

Our commitment to rigorously evaluating and understanding our impact on students and mentors includes multiple methods. First, there is an inductive case for action civics, which has been vocalized by Harvard Professor Meira Levinson and CIRCLE’s Peter Levine. This inductive rationale weaves together theory and evidence to explain why the key tenets of action civics—student-centered, community-based, action-oriented collaborative learning—will lead to increased civic and academic engagement.  This speaks to why intuitively we believe Generation Citizen in particular should work, and was the underlying rationale for creating the organization in the first place.

Unlike many of our peer organizations, though, we didn’t stop there. We have a team of researchers whose training ranges from social studies education to statistics. Quantitatively, they created a quasi-experimental study, which means that it is comparable to a randomized controlled trial; this method allows us to isolate any causal impact of GC.  They found that participating in Generation Citizen is associated with increased civic engagement and increased civic knowledge, after adjusting for other student and school demographic and academic factors. This means that Generation Citizen students still learn the basic facts taught in traditional civics classes in addition to having this more engaging action civics experience.

Qualitatively, we want to understand how GC had this impact. So, our research team examined case studies from GC action projects, and identified specific facets from each of the cases that contributed to student learning and engagement; the results were published in Social Education, the flagship journal of the National Council for the Social Studies. In another study, a GC mentor and college coordinator and our director of evaluation identified characteristics of successful mentors based on classroom observations and survey data, which we are using to inform our mentor selection and training process.

D Block Flurry

2012 February 22 by generationcitizen

The JROTC D block at Brighton High School is a flurry of activity before the bell rings. Budding Pollocks scribble frenetically on papers and handouts, laughter erupts in patches across the room, and gossip swirls through the room at dizzying speed.

Against this whirlwind, my co-mentor and I do our best to hide our nerves and project a confident demeanor. I gulp hard and raise my voice to introduce myself. “Hi everyone, my name is Log…my name is Mr. Gallagher.”

The classroom teacher, Lieutenant-Colonel Fife, had instructed us to use our last names in order to maintain a level of professionalism, but the words felt odd tumbling out of my mouth.

After my introduction, the lessons I had learned at the Generation Citizen mentor training came rushing back. Walking around the room helped maintain control of the classroom and keep the kids in the back of the room in check. Asking students to explain their one or two word answers elicited thoughtful, critical responses.

Generation Citizen has given me the tools I need to help run an effective classroom. I cannot wait for the upcoming semester because I think D block has a lot of potential.

~Logan Gallagher, Mentor from Boston College working at Brighton High School

Cue the Open Mic

2012 February 16 by generationcitizen

You can tell the air is affluent with our anticipation. It’s a Saturday morning in early February and we, the new and veteran mentors, have just congregated at the Boston headquarters of Generation Citizen to embark on a daylong workshop. Into the room shuffle students from the metropolitan area, including Boston University, Boston College, and Tufts University. Naturally, the Northeastern turnout is unrivaled. In these first few minutes, the room serves as the haven for our qualms. But the surplus, special edition, Valentine-inspired Boston crèmes from Dunkin Donuts in the corner will keep the trepidation of our tasks on standby.

Instead of stifling these insecurities, the directors, Gillian and Daniel, crave for ‘em at the kickoff. They divulge to us: “Yes, you’ve got responsibility on your shoulders… but we’ll always give you a scaffold of support.”  One by one, we chirped out concerns. “When I’m teaching in the classroom… I don’t think these kids will think of me as the authority figure.” As voices continue to be cued into the discussion, the fears mainly ricochet within the realm of the classroom: how we are going to maintain discipline, keep our professional poise, stoke the momentum of “civic education,” and avoid ruffling the feathers of administration.

Illuminated on the wall, there’s this multi-media presentation that Gillian and Daniel navigate throughout the day. Slide by insightful slide, it ameliorates our qualms as we become connected with a deeper sense of the mission of GC, the genesis of “civic education,” and the role we’ll adopt as Mentors. As agents in the enterprise, we will amplify the GC visage to the world alongside our middle school and high school students.

By our midday, Dominoes-pizzaquipped recess, we’re laying forth the methods we’ll use to effectively Mentor in the classroom. It grows evident that the only guaranteed way for us to demonstrate our newly-bred expertise in how to discipline the students is… well, to practice on each other. Assembling in clusters to rehearse the technique, we each stand menacingly over our peers. “Sharon. I’m asking you to put the phone away. (pause) Put the phone away. (pause) Sharon. Phone.”

For these Mentors, is asserting authority still a residual fear? I think not. Or at least, not as much. Departing the room that day shortly before 5 o’clock with the Mentor handbooks and curriculums under our arms, the collective sentiment was more something along the lines of solidarity, satisfaction, and great expectation. This season we’ll be riding in tandem, as Mentors, to encourage these students to engage in their democratic classroom and walk up to the open mic.

~Erica Rigby, Mentor from Tufts University working at Kipp Lynn

Insights on Gender

2012 February 14 by generationcitizen

Planting the Seed

2012 February 10 by generationcitizen

As a new Mentor for Generation Citizen, I came into last Saturday’s training event with only a rough understanding of its general purpose. An opportunity to work directly with students, get involved in downtown Providence, and attempt to decrease the achievement gap, it seemed like the ideal step forward as I eased into my second Brown semester. Excited yet skeptical, I arrived at training with an open mind and excited attitude, desperately trying to disguise any hesitations and trying to throw my sleep-deprived self into the activity as much as I could muster. Once we began the program, however, I realized just how effective GC really is. An organization in only its fourth year, GC had already gone through the effort to create a meticulously well-thought curriculum and an analysis of the urban Providence area. The clarity of the program was a relief, as I knew the other Mentors and I were in good hands, but I soon realized that the high standards expected me would provide a new kind of anxiety.

After seeing the striking statistics of poverty and minority representation in Providence, I was expecting a huge challenge on my first trip. Yet arriving in Highlander Middle School was like stepping onto a college campus. Kids showed enthusiasm for learning, teachers spoke bilingually to diverse groups of students, classrooms utilized SMART Board and iPad technologies. Rather than a bleak look into potentially challenging urban equalities, the visit was inspirational, even exciting. I realized that, with the resources in place to do great things, GC really could be a catalyst in these kids’ lives.

As of tonight I have just taught my first class. The kids were all eagerly attentive and participated in discussion enthusiastically. As we played get-to-know-you games and an Agree/Disagree activity, each got the chance to voice their opinions and began to explore what it is they care about it and want to do something for. I’m sure my co-Mentor and I were quite a spectacle, he with his Jordanian English accent and I with my Southern one, acting out elaborate stories from “Two Truths and a Lie” and pacing around the room explain the goals of GC. But what was clear in the room was that there was shared enthusiasm, and no awkward mishaps or first-day nervousness could break that.

I can’t wait to get back in the classroom. The kids I have met are more excited than I could have ever imagined, and the possibilities that lay before them seem endless. Even though I may have been nervous about my first day in the classroom, I know that this week Generation Citizen planted a seed, and it’s one I’ll have the pleasure of watching flourish in the months to come.

~Carter Robinson, Mentor from Brown working at Highlander Middle School in Providence RI