Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support
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Summary
(Note to documenters: In this summary, quickly tell the reader a, b, and c: a. Communication we hoped to improve. (What aspect of communication did we hope to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?)
b. Main communication improvement(s). (What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?)
c. Main communication realization. (What's your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)
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 HGSE 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 it was helpful to students and teachers. GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.
COLORED TEXT BOX: 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’s key benefit was individualized, timely student support. 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. We'd now like 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 and group “team” messaging. (with regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time.) So, in fall 2011, we’ll be testing teacher-full class texting, tutor-student texting, and group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.
Communication we hoped to improve
Say more. What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
In the texting pilot, we wanted to support a team of people in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person and each other about how young people are doing personally and academically, and what supports they might need to be more successful -- from both the students' and stakeholders' perspectives. There is often a gap in such rapid 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; tutors don’t know what youth have to work on; parents are unaware of school goings-on, and more. All this in an era when technology could make rapid communication more normal than ever in schools!
It is cell phones that are with us all day. Cell phones allow people to always be connected and available. Texting and other mobile text based communications give people even more control over when and where they communicate. In theory, they can review and respond to texts at their leisure--be it 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 -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support.
Process
How we realized and redirected things, over time.
Basic History
The groundwork needed to support the current work.
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. To read the full accounting, see main article: Texting/ahas
Findings/Endpoints
Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion!
Concrete communication improvements
What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?
Main communication realizations and implementation realizations
What is your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? (Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)
What is your main realization about implementing these innovations in education?
Technological how-tos
Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!
Things we’d expand/do differently
If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!
ADD IN
We've begun our mobile messaging pilot by testing texting among young people and their supporters.
Texting stuff here!
for visualizations, include EXAMPLES OF TEXTS and iNTERVIEWS W/ KIDS/TEACHERS
take from blog posts and from the data on the old oneville wiki