What Would You Do? A Question for Middle Schoolers (and Everyone)

"What would you do?" was the central question that Jason, Director of Diversity and Inclusion, posed to Middle Schoolers during a recent Meeting for Worship. He asked them to consider a variety of scenarios in which invented Middle School characters, all of which he role played, experienced exclusion and alienation because peers failed to accept them fully. Evoking the value of empathy, Jason asked students to imagine themselves in the shoes of each character. What does it feel like not to belong? What does it feel like not to be enough? Transported into each scenario by the dramatic nature of the presentation, students considered the moral dilemma faced by all bystanders: Should I intervene when I see unkindness or unfairness? If so, how? These questions ripened students for the silence, which, as always, asks them to turn inward in reflection, then outward in transformation. Please click here to access Jason's script. Consider reading it and continuing the conversation at home with your children.

Jason's presentation is part of a wider, year-long focus in Middle School on social-emotional learning. This focus kicked off with an exploration of positive community norms by advisories and homerooms. Each advisory and homeroom was asked to devise a short list of positive guidelines that students believe, if followed, would make the Middle School a supportive and inclusive community. All of those proposed norms were collected and categorized under broad themes like respect, inclusion, equality and acceptance, and grit and persistence. Representatives from each advisory and homeroom were invited to meet with Jason and Penney, Middle School Dean of Students, in grade-level lunchtime caucuses. Representatives’ task was to combine and dwindle down all of the proposed norms generated by students and teachers in their grade. The new lists of norms from each grade were combined and shortened. They they were reformatted into positive “I will” statements and recategorized according to the SPICES, a neat acronym for the Quaker values of Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. In a recent Middle School assembly, students discussed the final list of norms and then affirmed them with an emphatic “yes!” Please view the gallery of photos to read the 2017-2018 Middle School Community Norms.