The Great Communicators

THE GREAT GREA COMMUNICAT A ORS: AT Finding Your Voice at SPA

BY LAURA BILLINGS COLEMAN | PHOTOS BY SCOTT STREBLE

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At 9:45 a.m. on a Friday morning in March, Upper School students file into the Randolph Campus gym, as they do almost every Friday of the school year. Long rows of folding chairs are set up in front of the lectern, many already filled with parents and grandparents—a few of whom look nearly as anxious as the four students about to present their Senior Speeches.

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Public speaking is the number one fear of Americans, according to several polls that place it ahead of death and disease as life’s leading source of anxiety.

At many high schools, the opportunity to stand in front of hundreds of people sharing a meaningful personal reflection is an honor—or perhaps a horror— reserved only for valedictorians and class presidents.

But at SPA, it is a requirement for every student during the senior year: three to five minutes that can loom very large.

“It’s very much a rite of passage around here,” says Tom Fones, the Upper School history teacher and debate coach who also serves as Senior Speech advisor. In the moments before the speeches begin he shakes hands with parents and alumni/ae, and gives a reassuring nod to one young woman making a last minute dash through her note cards and taking deep centering breaths. Nearby, her friends sit with fresh flowers on their laps, giggling and giving her the thumbs-up.

In the age of Facebook status updates and 140-character tweets, the practice of standing up and delivering a speech in a packed gymnasium feels decidedly “old school.” But SPA enjoys a stellar reputation for its classic liberal arts emphasis on the very skills required for this moment—the ability to organize your thoughts, write with style, present yourself with confidence, and plow ahead, in spite of sweating palms and thumping heart.

“We often hear from college reps that our students present themselves very well—they answer questions with confidence, they make eye contact, and they’re well prepared to approach almost any style of communication and writing,” says Mary Hill, SPA’s Director of College Counseling and Academic Planning. Colleges attended by critical masses of SPA graduates also report that they recognize a set of skills these students bring to their college experience.

“They’re not thrown off by workload, but they’re also trained in the skills of self-advocacy, and are very

Senior Speech advisor Tom Fones gives Rebecca Xu ’12 a few last minute pointers before her speech. “It’s very much a rite of passage around here,” Fones says of the Senior Speech program.

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Birk Mitau ’12 makes a point in class. “We often hear from college reps that our students present themselves very

Communicating community

well—they answer questions

Planning for the Senior Speech starts in May of a student’s junior year, when every member of the class draws their assigned date at the Junior Retreat—a moment that many graduates say they never forget. Yet as Head of School Bryn Roberts explains, preparing for this moment starts many years before.

with confidence, they make eye contact, and they’re well prepared to approach almost any style of communication,” says Mary Hill, SPA’s Director of College Counseling and Academic Planning.

confident speaking up, talking to professors in and out of class, and asking good questions,” Hill says. “That means that when they get to college they’re ready for it, and every door is open to them.”

In surveys of SPA graduates over the last decade, 95 percent of alums report that SPA helped them develop strong college-level writing skills, while 94 percent believed they were better prepared than their college classmates for college work. Anecdotally, many more report that those skills are even more important when SPA alums make their way into the work force.

“What I hear from students who are in their thirties is that they’re working in corporations, in law, in the sciences, where workplaces have evolved into these very collaborative settings,” says Fones. “Instead of working at the same place for 20 years, they’re put on teams created to solve problems for short periods of time.” With a global economy and nearconstant technological changes, Fones says, “the ability to communicate face to face, to collaborate, and to present your ideas in a persuasive and informative way is more important than ever. I think the future really belongs to people who know how to express themselves and the SPA experience is good preparation for all of that.”

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“What we’ve developed over the decades at SPA is a clear understanding that you should be able to express yourself on your feet, and that training can’t start in the senior year—or even in grade 6,” he says. “So beginning in the Lower School, there are all kinds of ways, very carefully crafted through the school experience, for students to be ‘on stage.’”

Whether it’s through performances in kindergarten, sharing an experience in a classroom “morning meeting,” or discussing how to solve a math problem in class, each opportunity Lower School students have to share with their peers, parents, and other adults is a teachable moment, says Roberts. “Through the accumulation of these small experiences students begin to acquire a sense of confidence. They know that they can articulate their ideas and be in front of others and ‘perform,’ and it need not be a terrifying or awkward moment.”

Lower School psychologist Tim Elchert calls these “scaffolding skills,” a deep foundation of positive experiences that help young students understand that their voice and participation is important to their teachers and classmates.

“Communication skills are integrated into everything we do,” he says, noting that the Lower School’s small class size, with two adults in each homeroom, is essential to building a sense of belonging and trust between students and their teachers. “From a very young age, we’re encouraging students to communicate with grown-ups.

Whether they’re worried about something happening on the playground, or confused about a

concept they’re learning in class, we really encourage them to share with adults, and reinforce those moments by letting them know ‘I’m really glad you told me’,” says Elchert.

The development of students’ ability to communicate effectively with adults and take an active role in their own intellectual growth are the hallmarks of the “Accountable Classroom” philosophy emphasized at SPA. “We like to say that there is no back of the classroom at SPA,” says Bryn Roberts. “Every student’s voice is essential. From kindergarten up to and through Grade 12, our students learn that they are accountable to their teachers, their classmates, and ultimately to themselves for their own success.”

The “Accountable Classroom” approach helps draw out quieter students who might need more encouragement to contribute to class, while allowing students to assume more responsibility for their own education with each passing year. By the time students are in 5th grade, they are MCing the Lower School’s assemblies and taking prospective parents on tours of the school in the Lower School’s student tour guide program.

“That may seem like a very small thing, but to a 5th grader, it’s very important,” says Roberts. The result is a student body with a sense that their contributions are essential to the group’s learning process, and that their insights and observations have value.

A question from the floor: “We emphasize speaking when you have questions even more than speaking when you have answers,” says Middle School English teacher Carrie Clark.

Kelby Wittenberg ’19, Tour Guide Kelby Wittenberg is a member of the Class of 2019 and a part of the SPA Fifth Grade Tour Guide program.

He leads prospective families on tours of the Lower School, answering questions and serving as a school ambassador. Here are some of Kelby’s thoughts about being a tour guide, excerpted from an entry he wrote in his classroom journal entitled “Proud.”

“What I am most proud of this year is becoming a tour guide. Why I am so proud is because being a tour guide is a big job. It really helps to serve our school. Giving a tour is exciting because you get to show new kids and new parents our environment here. It’s just really fun.

“I enjoy meeting new people.

That is a reason I love being a tour guide: you’re always going to meet someone you don’t know. I met a mom and dad from West Virginia who were looking for a school here.

They were fun to talk to. They had a lot of questions about our school, but I like answering questions.

Tour guiding can be hard though.

My very first tour, the parents brought their son with them. He ran around like crazy. I can’t blame him though, he was only in preschool.

“I love being a tour guide for SPA.”

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Learning to listen Of course, making their voices heard is usually not a problem for Middle School students. “This is an age group that loves to talk and discuss. If you tell them they can’t go to the bathroom that very minute, they want to debate, ‘Why not?’ It’s a natural outgrowth of where they are developmentally,” says Middle School English teacher Carrie Clark.

That’s why SPA’s curriculum is designed to turn the curious and challenging nature of the early adolescent years to advantage, leveraging students’ growing desire for independence with a pedagogy that calls on students to take responsibility for their work, and come together to agree on community norms and expectations.

How does that translate in the classroom? Instead of telling a disruptive student to quiet down, a teacher might ask the group, “How do you think that noise is affecting others?” It’s a subtle shift in thinking, but Clark says the effect can be powerful. “Young adolescents don’t think about other people very naturally, but here they really do,” Clark says, noting that Middle School students learn that they can’t “get by with raising their

hands with the answer and then sinking back” into the woodwork. “Instead, we really work on relationship building, and the value of listening to others.”

For instance, Clark often starts her English students with a shared text—a short essay, memoir, or opinion piece— that the students must read and then come together to discuss. “At the beginning of the year, the discussions are chiefly about building trust with each other as a class, and in the second trimester it’s more about risktaking, and in the third trimester it’s about connecting ideas to what others have said.” The goal is to encourage students to speak up and carry the conversation forward, and Clark notes that teachers tend to “emphasize speaking when you have questions even more than speaking when you have answers.”

Roundtable discussions This early introduction to seminar-style learning serves SPA students well when they advance to ninth grade and encounter one of the hallmarks of the SPA experience—discussion-based classes often held around

Upper School history teacher Ben Danielson (upper right) and his students around the Harkness table in a senior History seminar.

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Asialy Bracey-Gardella ’14 with friends in the library. “Every student’s voice is essential,” says Head of School Bryn Roberts. “From kindergarten up to and through Grade 12, our students learn that they are accountable to their teachers, their classmates, and ultimately to themselves for their own success.”

Harkness tables. The large oval tables, found in many Upper School classrooms, are the physical manifestation of the SPA philosophy that there is no “back of the class” at SPA. When every student has a seat at the table, instructors can employ a Socratic teaching style, posing questions, parsing and picking up on the nonverbal clues critical to good communication.

Small class sizes allow teachers to be sensitive to these signals, while the Harkness table helps keep students involved in the discussion.

“The Harkness table doesn’t change your basic philosophy of teaching, but it is a good tool that makes it very clear that participation in the conversation is required here,” Tom Fones says.

While this approach is intended to duplicate that of a college humanities course, the interactive, discussion-style emphasis of SPA’s curriculum also serves students well in the sciences, says physics teacher Steve Heilig. Free-wheeling roundtable discussions encourage science students to push the envelope as they consider new ideas together, especially in the space science course Heilig teaches. “What I like about teaching a seminar-style science class is that it encourages the quiet students to say something that they might consider a little risky,” he says.

“That’s wonderful because in space science, the wacky ideas are often the ones that turn out to be true.”

Extra-curricular communication Perhaps the most public expression of the high value SPA places on communication can be seen in students’ high achievement in extra- and co-curricular activities that showcase these skills.

SPA’s student newspaper, The Rubicon, is nationally recognized as one of the country’s best student newspapers, earning a slate of regional and national awards for excellence in student journalism. The IBID yearbook and arts magazine, Art & Literature, are also regular recipients of arts awards, and SPA’s debate team is a perpetual powerhouse. This year’s debate team was ranked first place in the state and boasted the the state’s largest debate program based on school size with 75 team members—nearly 20 percent of the Upper School student body.

For Roberts, the debate program’s success over the years underscores how much SPA students themselves value effective communication. “There’s no question that having enjoyed success over the years matters, and having highly skilled teachers matters,” says Roberts. “But the sheer numbers of students involved, and the engagement and the enjoyment they take from doing well in debate is really an expression of the culture here. Our students care about forensic ability as a craft; they care about being articulate and skilled at argument and being persuasive. These are ideas that are woven into the value of an SPA education.”

Though many students enter debate class with finely honed skills already, many more sign up because they’re not quite as confident about standing up in front of a crowd and thinking on their feet. In fact, one such student is on the roster for this Friday’s Senior Speeches; she gives a moving account of a challenging medical diagnosis she faced while a student at SPA. When she finishes, her classmates give her a standing ovation.

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