An Authentic Test for Our Children: Ten Common Principles in a Time of Grief

Students are not numbers, and schools do more than just teach academic skills. Ms. Silva offers some advice for helping adolescents confront the profound questions of life.

By Peggy Silva

OUR HIGH SCHOOL recently lost two brothers -- two great kids, a senior and a junior. They were coming home after spending the night with their grandmother when they were in an accident that took their lives. And the next day in our high school we calculated the loss. We had lost a member of our Odyssey of the Mind team, a lacrosse player, a member of the track team, a member of the marching band, a member of Habitat for Humanity. We had lost two friends from the lunch table, from our classrooms, and from our advisories.

We spent the week helping our students through this wrenching loss; we taught them the rituals of attending wakes and funerals and of offering solace to their peers. We taught them that there are no magic words that will heal after such a loss, but that hugs and tears always help. And finally, on the Friday morning of that terrible week, we sat in our school's gym and witnessed our students' memorial to their classmates.

As we watched this solemn ceremony, all conversations about high-stakes testing took on new meaning for me. In that ceremony, I witnessed authentic assessment of the work we do with students every day to prepare them for their role as active citizens. The death of two valued members of our school tested our students in an enormous way, and they stepped up to the challenge as they prepared to honor their lost friends.

Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire, is a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools, an organization built on a shared foundation of Ten Common Principles. As our students planned a ceremony to mark the loss of these two brothers, I found strong evidence of several of these principles at work.

• We ask our students to use their minds well. As they planned the memorial service, students needed to consider how to honor their lost classmates, how to include many voices, and how to care for the boys' family members who would attend this ceremony. They needed to balance sorrow and stories, music and poetry, grief and celebration for two lives.
  
• We believe that our school's goals should apply to all students. As we shared the loss of these two students, there was no hierarchy in place, no tracking of levels of loss, no measuring of ability to grieve. Each student who spoke was eloquent -- each understood the task as he or she stepped up to speak heartfully of shared memories.
  
• We believe in personalizing teaching and learning. We leaned heavily on our advisory program that week as we tried to cope with our massive loss. Normally, we spend 30 minutes each day in these small groups of 10 students and one adult. We typically spend this time together just hanging out -- celebrating birthdays, sharing lunch, and talking about things that teenagers are interested in. We have found that this investment of time yields great dividends in moments of crisis in a high school. That week, we spent a lot of time with our advisees, making sure that each student had a caring adult with whom to process this tremendous loss. In our classrooms, we knew when to rely on the familiarity of learning content and when to let it go in order to offer our students comfort.
  
• We pursue our dual goals of student-as-worker and teacher-as-coach. Students met with teachers, community council members, administrators, staff members, and counselors to plan the content of the memorial service. In order to craft a service that included many perspectives, students sifted through many offerings of songs, poetry, and memories.
  
• We assess our students on their performance of real tasks. There is nothing more real than planning a ceremony to honor the loss of two brothers from a small town. Each speaker and performer set very high standards for this high-stakes presentation. Each singer and musician performed with authority and grace. By creating this memorial service, our students demonstrated that they could do important things.
  
• The tone of our school explicitly and self-consciously expresses values of decency and unanxious expectations. Our 1,000 students filled the gymnasium with a profound silence -- surpassing our general expectations for them to demonstrate trust, respect, and courage. Each student held a carnation during the service, and as we filed silently out of the gym, the flowers were wrapped into bouquets for the brothers' family members.
  
• We are a democratic community. We knew that our students needed to take the lead in preparing this memorial service. We offered them counsel and provided them guidance, but the adults always followed the students' lead.

We have had too much experience of loss in our school; it is work we do well. The seeds of the work, however, were not sown with the deaths of these students. At our school, we consciously and deliberately work to create a culture that supports student learning in a highly personalized environment. We provide each student with an adult mentor who monitors both academic and social relationships. We do this routinely, not just when confronted with a crisis. But we rely on this routine when we come face-to-face with the profound questions that adolescents must consider as they approach adulthood. This is the true work of school -- and this work is the reason that educators and parents must fight against reducing the conversation about schools to a number, a test score, a statistic, a point on a graph. Our students are not numbers; they have their own stories and they are affected by the very real events that surround them. These are the stories we must tell as we struggle to define what students must know and be able to do. We learned a lot about our students and our school community as we all worked through our grief -- and there wasn't a standardized test in sight.

PDK Home | Site Map

Last modified 28 April 2004
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0405sil.htm
PDK International respects your privacy
© 2004 Phi Delta Kappa International