Few organisations shut down for a long vacation, and then re-start with 25% turnover in community. But that’s what High Schools do each year – and it’s invigorating to have to step back from the day-to-day and focus on the big picture of establishing the conditions of great success. Term has started well and I wanted to share with you an important message we have given the students.
In these first couple of weeks, students, naturally, are busy re-establishing social connections and making new ones. Friendships groups, grade level groups, classes, activity groups and so on, are re-forming, re-calibrating and adjusting to the changes of the long vacation, and of changed membership. We know this is vital – serious learning cannot take place unless students feel safe, secure and cared for. For teenagers, this means cared for by each other as much as by teachers and parents. So we need to be active and intentional about setting them all up to help each other; if we get it right that means they will all be helped by each other – it will make a huge difference.
So at the first HS assembly last week, I told the High School students about a famous experiment, conducted by two psychologists (Darley and Litané), who invited students to participate in a survey. A scientist took the students to an office where they were met by a scientist who told them to sit down and to fill out a questionnaire. She then went into and room separated from the office only by a curtain.
After a few minutes the students heard noises suggesting that the scientist had climbed on a chair to get something from a high shelf and had fallen over. She cried out “My ankle …I need to get out of here… my ankle…” clearly in pain. When students were alone in the adjoining room filling out the survey, the vast majority offered to help. So far so good; nothing unexpected there, I think.
But, and this is where it gets interesting, when the psychologists fixed the experiment so that there were one or two other people in the room – stooges who were part of the experiment, planted there told to do nothing – guess what happened? Under these circumstances almost no-one helped.
That’s shocking, because it tell us that most people who would have helped, who would have intervened, did not intervene simply when there was someone else present. People who would have acted, would have made a difference, were turned into passive bystanders, simply by being in company. It turns out that this is such a common phenomenon that the bystander effect as it is called, is part of common parlance in the emergency services.
Fortunately, it’s rarely a matter of physical harm in schools. But the idea is relevant, and in asking students what does this mean for us? I posed them four questions.
- When there’s someone new in your class, do you leave welcoming them to others? Or do you acknowledge them and take the first step?
- When you see someone upset, do you walk on by thinking someone else will help, or do you stop, smile, and ask if there’s anything you can do?
- When you see someone struggling with some work, confused, do you shrug and move on, or take a moment to ask if you can explain something or help in some other way?
- When you see or perhaps even are part of a group that’s excluding someone, do you stay quiet, or do you quietly ask “is this really what we should be doing?”
By considering their own roles, our students will be better able to make good choices, and this will result in everyone benefiting in ways that may well shape them as people. Last week I shared with students a quote from last year that I think will resonate with you:
When coming to the school, I figured out quite quickly that the social side can be very selective. Everyone has their groups and may not talk to anyone outside of their friendship group. I found my friends, who without doubt, l loved from the first day I met them, but stayed with them and only them for the most part of the grade. From class to class no one says ‘hi’ unless it is their close friends. It was then that I met this one guy. Even though he was in the grade below I had never met someone who I warmed to such much.
After I had talked to him once or twice, every time I saw him in the hallway he would simply say ‘hi’ to me, he would ask me how I was, and we would laugh. It sounds so simple but it would make my day. This taught me that there was so much I was missing out on outside my friendship group and since that day I have tried to be as open and friendly to as many people as I possibly could hoping that one day I might make half the impression that that boy made on me.
I am always so grateful to students like this who speak with such young wisdom, and remind us that we can all make a difference to others, every day. And of course, that we should all be open to others making a difference to us. I hope this message got home to your children this week. Please do ask them.
Have a great week.
