Earlier this week the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program recognized our middle school campus as a model for its “Mix It Up” project. The project is designed to get schools to find ways to encourage students of different backgrounds to interact with one another and engage with issues of diversity, equity, and justice. Thanks to the good work of our middle campus students and teachers/staff aimed at taking deliberate steps to create these kinds of opportunities, ANCS was highlighted as “a beacon for other schools striving for inclusiveness”.
In sharing this news, someone remarked to me that helping students learn to work together like this was “great” because it helps students “to have a better school environment so they can be more focused on learning”. While I agree with this sentiment, I think it misses the larger point: the skill of collaborating with different types of people, especially when the focus is on those differences, is important in and of itself, regardless of its impact on student learning.
With a rise in attention being given to “social-emotional learning” or traits such as “grit”, much of the support given for why schools should focus on these areas is tied to research connecting them to improvements in reading or math as measured by standardized tests. In my view, though, we should be making room for teaching and learning about working in teams and dealing with conflict because these are valuable skills to have in life. The fact that they may lead to a boost in test scores shouldn’t be our main motivation for our focus on them.
I’m reminded of a book I read a few years back called Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy. Though the book—published in 1996—is somewhat dated now, it’s core ideas that students were best prepared for life after K-12 school by being equipped with both “hard” (math, reading, problem solving) and “soft” (collaboration, communication) skills remains just as true today. In fact, with the increasing connectedness of our world—economically, politically, and socially—across many borders, those “soft” skills are probably more important to students today than they were even 20 years ago. So we’ll keep on with the sometimes messy work of helping students to develop their “soft” skills because it should be an essential part of every child’s education for the world they encounter today and the one they’ll encounter in the future.