Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support
From Oneville Wiki
Written by Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Maureen Robichaux, and Ted O'Brien for the texting project, with input from students at Full Circle/Next Wave
As we documented this project, we thought about OneVille's project-wide questions:
Who needs to communicate what info to whom, through which media, in order to support young people?
Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?
How might basic tech help increase community cooperation in young people’s success, by supporting diverse students, teachers, parents, administrators, service providers, and other community members to share ideas, resources, and information and to build relationships?
Summary
(A bird’s eye view for the quick reader. We're addressing these questions:)
a. What communication did we hope to improve, change, or create? Why?
b. Main efforts, and concrete communication improvement(s). (Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish? How did communication improve? What new support for young people may have become more possible?)
c. Main realizations. (At this point, what's our main realization about improving communications in public education? (We'll say a few overall words in response to OneVille's research questions, above!)
Over the 2010-11 school year, we worked with two teachers and 40 young people at Somerville’s alternative middle and high school to test texting as a tool for rapid youth support. All 40 students have chosen or been forced to leave Somerville’s mainstream schools and are vulnerable to dropout. They’re also awesome young people, and great research partners!
So far, we have all been testing private texting between teachers and students and secondarily, between students and eight graduate student mentors from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’re using Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This allowed two researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts (with students’ advance, overall permission), to see if texting was helpful to students and teachers. GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.
Here’s our MAIN COMMUNICATION AHA: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.
In discussions throughout the year and in several focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting had two key benefits: individualized, timely student support and the ability to strengthen student-teacher relationships. Students argued that texts were supporting them to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Texting teachers and students are also having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. Teachers and students said they were experiencing greater trust and strengthened relationship. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we have seen that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.
Most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours. But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school walls end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through wakeup texts or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate reach into the home or out of the classroom? Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires real relationships between students and teachers – a form of friendship with role boundaries-- how can they communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? It may be that we need to redefine “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age: as Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level.” Texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!
In Phase 1, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth. In the fall, we plan to test ways to enable youth and a "team" of their chosen supporters (including afterschool providers, peers, and family members) to communicate about any topic via rapid group texting.
We’ve augmented Google Voice with group texting software made with the Twilio API, to afford teacher-whole class messaging. (With regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time). Before we work to create any other open source texting tools, we’re going to see if group texting even works for people: we’ll use xxx, a software that xxx. So, in fall 2011, we’ll continue teacher-student texting and start teacher-full class texting with GoogleVoice, and we’ll all test group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if multiple supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.
Now, let's expand on each aspect of the project. Here we go!
Communication we hoped to improve
A bit more. What aspect of existing communication did we hope to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
In the texting pilot, we wanted to enable supporters in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person about how he/she was doing personally and academically, and what supports might enable his/her success (from both the students' and stakeholders' perspectives). Our vision was to support an entire “team” in rapid communication. When we decided to try texting as a rapid communication tool, we started with student-teacher texting and planned to add in new “team” members over the year. We ended up finding student-teacher texting so fruitful that we stayed with it for the entire year. We’ll add next “team” members in fall 2011!
There is often a gap in such rapid support communications in schools. People don’t always have time to meet face to face to discuss students’ needs and experiences. Increasingly, people don’t have (or answer!) home phones. Often, teachers don’t know how youth are doing outside of school and other supporters are unaware of how youth are doing in school. Many students at risk of dropping out are absent from school quite a lot. All this in an era when technology could make rapid communication with young people more normal than ever in schools!
It is cell phones that are with us all day, and keep us connected and available. Texting and other mobile text based communications give people even more control over when and where they communicate. In theory, people can review and respond to texts at their leisure--in the evening from home, or over the weekend after sports practice. They can fit communications to their schedules. At the same time, a text is particularly hard to ignore, and responses to texts often arrive in seconds -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support.
Process: How did the project change and grow over time?
How we realized and redirected things. Two sections, one short and the second long:
Basic History
The groundwork needed to support the current work.
Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. Our work proceeded in stages but in a more rolling manner over two years, based on ongoing reactions to students’ and teachers’ ideas, interests and efforts.
Throughout, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? And we came to ask: how might texting support needed communications?
We started working on a tech strategy for ongoing youth support in a OneVille-organized afterschool club involving 4th-6th graders at the K-8 Healey School in 2009-10, and then in Somerville’s summer school 2010, with two high school classes of SHS teacher Sabrina Trinca.
In both cases, we learned that media was inherently attractive to youth but it wasn’t attractive enough to use if it wasn’t social enough yet! Students in the afterschool club wanted to go on Wee World (http://www.weeworld.com/) to check in generally with all their local and online friends, instead of use our private social network to talk about school. So, we realized that students were used to rapid personal support communications, but that it would be difficult to form a new social network for these (what we came to call a “separate place to go”) without a critical mass of interested members. (One successful exception: students were immediately interested in creating “vlogs,” where students spoke into a Flip camera or iPhone video to an intended audience of teachers and administrators about strategies that supported their learning in class. Students immediately grabbed the chance to speak, even though we didn’t have people lined up to watch! [LINK TO VIDEO HERE!]). This thread took off later in the ePortfolio project, where SHS teachers and students realized that certain types of questions about students’ learning styles and interests could get students “flowing” in typing about their learning online.)
In summer school 2010, we again tried supporting young people to communicate with each other via a new private social network. Where the previous network was created for a loosely connected group of mixed grade students in a new afterschool club, this network was created for two summer school classrooms with the explicit purpose of helping the teacher communicate with students daily for six weeks about class and homework. Still, the “separate place to go” didn’t work: there still wasn’t enough reason to “go there”! Because the network was computer based, some of the students--who didn’t have computers or internet access--were limited in their ability to connect outside of class time. But beyond this technical obstacle, many of the students also expressed limited interest in interacting with the teacher or peers on class topics via a computer, even when available. There simply weren’t enough compelling online school activities yet to draw them naturally to a separate online site. (Again, the eportfolio project may solve this chicken and egg problem by prompting lots of online assignments, leading students to go online for work and conversations.)
We decided to spend time talking to Trinca’s students about the overall support communications they had normally and how those communications could be improved. We found that:
1) Students focused on connecting with people that they felt close to, regardless of whether those people were “best” placed to provide them with resources and/or help. One student looked for help from his teacher from the previous year on history assignments instead of seeking out his current history teacher, simply because he connected with the previous year’s teacher better.
2) Besides parents, guardians, peers, and key school personnel, students valued connecting (virtually or not) with “older buddies,” near peer mentor-like figures that would advise them on matters both personal and academic.
3) Students told us that they used different technologies to interact with different people. For example, they might talk to their parents over the phone, hang out most with their best friend in real life (what some people today call “IRL”!) and text message with individual friends or classmates.
Uche: ADD GRAPHIC HERE FROM THE SURVEYMONKEY
Also, the students said they preferred texting, phone, and talking in person over other methods such as email, IM, and even Facebook--even though many of them had Facebook accounts. Students told us that texting was the best way for anyone, including teachers, to reach them rapidly and a natural way for them to communicate back. The students initially expressed skepticism at interacting with teachers over text, because it was what they typically used with friends. But in the end, they agreed that it was the most reliable way to contact them. So we decided to try assembling texting “teams” around kids one member by one, by starting with student-teacher texting.
A big aha came from a first fumble: at one administrator’s advice, we first asked a “cluster” of teachers at Somerville High if they wanted to work with us to test texting. (Some of these teachers would go on to be key leaders of the ePortfolio project!) The teachers worried that the use of texting between students and teachers might break a longstanding and to them, necessary boundary between the formal/academic classroom sphere and each group’s private, informal social lives. The teachers also thought that using texting to remind students of events, help them with homework, and other transactional uses could result in “babying” the students. These were high school students, they argued, and as such should not need or be given such basic assistance. They also worried about supporting poor grammar and inappropriate language in texts.
We then called Mr. Willey, principal at FC/NW, who had already told us months earlier that he had major trouble reaching his youth’s parents and supporters and at times, youth themselves. He agreed immediately that young people seemed more likely to pick up texts than any other form of communication. He invited us to come in and talk to his teachers, and Mica and Uche gave a basic presentation in early fall 2010 where we discussed what students had said about texting as a key channel for youth support. One of the teachers around the table was Ted. “When can we start?” Ted asked. He and Mo, respectively high school and middle school teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, were excited to try it out, and we began.
MAJOR IMPLEMENTATION AHA/TURNING POINT: go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.
Rather than assemble entire texting “teams” for each student, we decided to start with private student-teacher communication. Uche set Mo and Ted up with Google Voice (see “Technical How-To’s” below). In January 2011, Mo and Ted and Uche/Mica held an open meeting with all of their students to see who would be interested. We brainstormed ground rules (e.g., don’t expect a text back before 7 a.m. and after 10 p.m.; no inappropriate language; no sharing of anyone else’s business), gave students the teachers’ new GoogleVoice numbers, invited students to share their numbers with teachers, and invited them all to text whenever they wanted. GoogleVoice recorded all of the texts for the teachers and allowed them to type from their computers (Mo and Ted still mostly used their phones). Young people received texts on their phones.
Note: Unlike in our ePortfolio pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some series of communications made a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.
Some students already texted teachers at the school (“If I'm having problems at home I text Maureen, or Maryanne or Edith,” one student told us; she did this rather than have her own parents “"know her business."). Some had never texted teachers before and found the idea weird. Texting to them felt like something you did with friends or relatives. But as students would tell us later in June, there were two kinds of texting relationships with teachers that felt OK – businessy ones for school related things you had to get done, and more revealing personal texts sent to people you really trusted.
So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking about actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week max) for their time piloting the tool and analyzing data, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal ‘research day,’ and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot. For course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people who wanted to share questions or thoughts via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention later, logistics and low interests later fizzled that plan.
We held regular conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. Eight HGSE students informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts at the school; Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took a “team” of students on as a texting partner. Everyone was invited to analyze the texting conversations together in two research events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building.
Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!
Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. This section captures our learning across the project. Learn the story at:Texting/ahas
Findings/Endpoints
Here's where we describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion! Three sections below:
Concrete communication improvements
What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?
We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting and have dozens of students and more teachers excited about continuing. The principal is interested in exploring texting with more of his teachers. And both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for serious school support that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter. We’re all set to test group texting among “teams” of students’ chosen supporters this fall.
Main communication realizations and implementation realizations
At this point, what are our main realizations about improving communications in public education? (Here are our main thoughts on OneVille’s research questions.)
What big changes would we recommend re. improving the “communication infrastructure” of public education, so that more people can collaborate in student success?)
What’s the main thing we’d recommend to other communities or schools implementing similar innovations? (What would we expand or do differently were we to do this again?)
We want to repeat two core “ahas” we stated earlier:
Here’s our MAIN COMMUNICATION AHA: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.
MAJOR IMPLEMENTATION AHA: go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.
We have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.
Texting of course can’t replace other needed youth supports. But it can definitely help. At our April Research Day at Harvard, students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; even to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”
Later in the school year, Obens would point out that texting got him to school, but couldn’t keep him focused in class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement. One student made clear that student-teacher texting was a start, but linking in other people in her life was crucial too: “She has been building a better relationship w/ Ted via texting. Dad doesn't have a phone, she says, and she doesn't want Ted texting him. Dad doesn't text, but she does seem to lean on him for some support. Girlfriends not helpful to her for graduation she says. She doesn't know how to apply to college, either. No guidance counselor??” To support students fully, it often felt necessary to tell person A about an issue facing person B. As Mica wrote to herself in February after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an individual kid, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.”
So, our next step is still to test texting “teams.” (see below!)
Next Steps
What do we plan to do next?
The principal is interested in expanding teams to include other current and former teachers within the school. While many teachers still didn’t know how to use a cell phone, some were newly starting to text. We joked that maybe the principal himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff!
The principal felt that for some students, a parent would be problematic to have on a “team”; for others, it could be helpful. Interns there briefly, then gone after a while, would be less useful on a team, he thought.
When we asked students who they’d want on their “teams,” young people suggested a range of people, from parents to best friends to inspiring older buddies who were “making it” in work and school (one student mentioned such a “get it done person” cousin who was a role model). Some wanted adults who had inspired them at summer jobs, or counselors or teachers also at the school. While we’d love to get local youth workers on students’ “teams” so they too can learn first hand the potential of texting for rapid youth support, we’ve learned by now that you can’t just add people in and start texting. Real relationship building gets texting started and texting takes the relationship further. So, we’re going to go with youth-constructed teams as planned and we’ll see where they take it.
Next COMMUNICATION QUESTION: Is the private and personal nature of communication via one-to-one text a key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not?
Throughout the pilot, one-to-one texting continued to feel particularly private -- which was, perhaps, why so much relationship-building was possible over it. So can a “team” use texting to communicate rapidly about student support, or will the “group” communication make texting less desirable? Which communications should be private, which public to a “team”? And who should be in a texting “team”? As one student said, she was now up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” As Ted put it, “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both? He wants to honor the kids’ sense of privacy.”
This will remain our core inquiry in Phase 2 as we move forward to test “team” texting. Who needs to share which information with whom on the “team,” and can a group texting tool support a complex “team” conversation?
Again, we’ll offer youth and “team” the channel and learn together what they do with it!
Technological how-tos
Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!
SETH AND UCHE ADD HERE
Setting up Google Voice (screen shots, etc.!) IT'D BE COOLEST IF TED OR MO DESCRIBED THIS, FROM A TEACHER'S PERSPECTIVE. MAYBE THEY/UCHE COULD DO A POWERPOINT WITH A VOICEOVER?
Google Voice: Google Voice is a free web based phone and text messaging service provided by Google. With Google Voice, teachers can view and send texts from a computer without incurring texting charges. Teachers can also view texts arranged by student or time, and easily search through their history of texts. Teachers can also choose to have the service forward any texts received to their phones’ regular text messaging accounts. Or, they can check those messages directly on their phones via smartphone apps.
Google Voice also provides a separate phone number that teachers can give out to students. The use of a separate number helps preserve the privacy of teachers’ personal phone numbers. This separate number, coupled with some of the service’s advanced features, such as number blocking, provide the teacher with an added sense of privacy and security. Finally, we chose the Google Voice service because it allowed multiple people—teacher and researchers—access to the same account, providing a general transparency and accountability and allowing Uche and Mica as researchers to review the teachers’ text communications by agreement.
The simplest add on to Google Voice so far was to create a one to many “blast” that the teachers could use to message their entire class. (SETH EXPLAIN HERE?)
Using the Twilio API, Seth then created a many to many group “chat” tool that we came over time to call a “reply to all” tool. Technologically, it was hard for Seth to quickly create a tool where people could choose to text some in the “team” but not others. A student already noted that getting your own text back in group chat felt a bit weird. Kinks to be worked out! In the meantime, before we seriously tweak an open source version, we’ll test xxx software just to see if group texting even works in personal terms!
Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live
If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!
Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
- -In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to rapidly reach their supporters?
- -Could texting help with rapid youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?