A Collaborative Approach for Crafting Everest Statements With Your Students

Quick note from Dave: I'll be keynoting at the SDCTE virtual conference in a couple of weeks, and SDCTE will also be using the keynote as a kickoff to a summer book study of The Will to Learn. You can find all the details here; attending my talk costs as little as $10. Special thanks to the amazing team of South Dakotan educators putting on this conference. — DSJR

Dear colleague,

Last week, I shared Mandy from Brooklyn's adaptation of my work into her new setting, and some of you asked for more details on her “School: Why Bother?” mini-unit to start the school year. In the unit, her goals were:

1) To collaboratively construct Everest statements for each class period
2) To guide students in independently constructing their own Everest statements for the school year

Already when I read that, I'm pretty pumped. Though I've not done this exact kind of thing in my classroom, what Mandy's tapping into here is lots of Value, Efficacy, and Belonging juice.

As students spend time thinking about and articulating their view of the peak, that's strong soil for Efficacy growth. Most of our students who struggle with Efficacy do so because success is a vague and unexplored idea. This is why “Define Success: Wisely, Early, and Often” is one of the 10 focal strategies in The Will to Learn.
The entire mini-unit is essentially an exploration of the apologetics for school. Good apologetics start with a simple foundation: skepticism is a reasonable and respectable point of view. And as Mandy guides her students to come up with their Everest language, she's tapping into the power of the most underestimated strategy in my book: Valued Within.
And finally, all this work quickly signals to students that their thinking and words and voices are important parts of the class they enter each day, which cultivates Belonging.

So, how did it go?

Here's what I heard from Mandy as the school year progressed:

Hi Dave! Thanks for checking in. I've been meaning to send you an update about my Mission Statement mini-unit.
I'm really glad I started the year this project. It set the tone for the class in surprising ways. I teach two sections of 10th grade English, and their different outcomes and levels of buy-in really became clear when we co-created our class mission statements, five days into the school year.
After all our readings, I took notes on the board while students engaged in a pop-up discussion about our driving questions.
Here's the idea board for my Period 1 class:
Here's their final mission statement (in the box on the right side of the board), on the poster I created:
This has become the class I most look forward to teaching every day – they are willing to wrestle with big ideas, to be vulnerable, and to take risks.
My 4th period class required a lot more prompting. Here is their idea board:
And here is the final poster:
I have found that this class is more guarded and less willing to take chances. They want to get their work done, but they're less interested in engaging with it.
I'm definitely going to keep incorporating this mini-unit into my beginning-of-year curriculum, and next year I think I will expand and combine it with a project I have done for the past two years and have students *also* co-create a class AI policy (or just class policies, period) at the same time.
Thanks for your work, Dave! It has really been meaningful for my practice. 🙂