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.
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, based on the ongoing development of students’ and teachers’ actual interests and efforts.
Throughout this pilot, though, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to quickly share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? How might texting support needed communications?
We started working on a tech strategy for 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 enticing if it wasn’t social enough yet. Students in the afterschool club wanted to go on Wee World (http://www.weeworld.com/), where all their local and online friends already were, instead of use our private social network to talk about school. So, we realized that it was quite necessary, but difficult to form a social network without a critical mass of interested members. (One successful exception were “vlogs,” where students just spoke into a camera to an intended audience of teachers and administrators, about strategies that supported their learning in class. [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 student skills could get students “flowing” in talking about their learning.)
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 after school club, this network was created for two Summer school classrooms with the explicit purpose of helping the teacher communicate with students about class and homework. Still, it didn’t work: there still wasn’t enough reason to “go there”! Because the network was computer based, many 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 class topics via a computer, even when available. There simply weren’t enough online school activities yet to draw them to a separate social network. (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 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 the resources and/or help. One student looked for help from his teacher from the previous year 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 technology to interact with different people. For example, they might talk to their parents over the phone, hang out with their best friend in real life (what some people today call “IRL”!) and text message with individual friends or classmates.
GRAPHIC HERE FROM THE SURVEYMONKEY
Also, the students expressed that 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. The students initially expressed skepticism at interacting with teachers over the medium, because it was what they typically used with friends. But in the end, 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. 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. Willie, 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 we gave a basic presentation 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.
COLORED TEXT BOX: 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 put an entire “team” together at once, we decided to start with private student-teacher communication. In January 2011, Mo and Ted and we 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 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 proposition 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, 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 with questions or thoughts they wanted to share 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; 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. All were 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. 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?
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.
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