Team Problem Solving: Paving the Path to Success for Every Student (Transcript)

Dan St. Louis: All right, good morning, everyone.

Teachers: Morning.

First, there was a conflict between the two students in item nine yesterday. Kind of came out of nowhere, got real heated real quick. Jess and Jackie sequestered them, they both talked with me. Meghan?

Meghan Rosa: How about if I meet with them every day after school for like five minutes?

Dan St. Louis: We don’t have kids falling through the cracks because we meet every single week and address what’s going on. There’s nothing quite like getting everyone in a room, getting everyone’s brains on the same issue right now and coming up with a solution.

We have a really diverse urban population and the range of issues we have to deal with, whether it’s in the classroom, outside the classroom, is a wide range.

Kaitlin Kelley: We know that these kids have a lot of stuff going on in their lives. They’re going to have trouble not just academically, but socially, emotionally, behaviorally. They have a lot of issues, so we need to figure out a way that we can fix those problems and not give up on them. So our culture is basically, no problem is too big.

Lauren Mills: So we have a regular team meeting on Wednesday mornings every week.

Dan St. Louis: When we build the schedule every year, we do whatever we need to do to keep that time, because we know how important it is.

Lynnel Reed: It’s a chance to share information about students in a problem solving way.

Dan St. Louis: So that takes care of items one through six.

It is agenda driven so that we can stay on track. There might be as few as ten agenda items or as many as twenty some weeks, just things that we need to address.

To the final item on today’s agenda, could someone let me know what exactly was going on with some of this online drama?

Teacher: Yeah, in my journalism class, I heard a couple of the girls and guys talking about how they are chatting with people on an online dating site. That was a bit of a warning for me and I talked to some of them. Mainly talking to them, was more like, “That’s crazy, get off, don’t do that.”

Dan St. Louis: Right, stay away. They think they’re just chatting?

Teacher: That’s what they think. I mean, that’s what they’re saying.

Kaitlin Kelley: All right, now what are we going to do about the problem? That’s where somebody usually steps up and comes up with a plan or we establish a plan, and then it’s delegation. Who’s going to be responsible for the follow through? So for the issue of social media, our faculty decided that it might best be handled by our students, actually, our peer mediators.

Dan St. Louis: That’s a good message for the peer mediator group. Is this something that we can pull off, Lauren?

Lauren Mills: I think that they could easily get together a group of the peer mediators to talk about like social media safety.

Kaitlin Kelley: Sometimes hearing it from a student perspective is better for our kids.

Student: In such a small town, so many people know each other and that’s when the gossip comes around.

Student: When it goes out, even though someone says, “Oh, it’s only there for five seconds to ten seconds,” but in reality, it stays there forever.

Lauren Mills: What about if they make a racist joke and they’re just not mature enough to recognize that there’s an audience that’s much bigger than them and their story?

Student: Before you put it on the screen, you’ve got to think about what is the outcome?

Student: So that’s one thing we want to really attack is, how it can affect their future and how like, even the things that they do now can last forever.

Lauren Mills: The problem solving structure here really is, I think, of mutual accountability. Everyone takes responsibility for solving student problems.

Dan St. Louis: Our kids see themselves as problem solvers and see themselves as keepers of the culture. So they’re going to put together a workshop for the middle schoolers about what’s going on online, what’s the kind of okay stuff to do, where do you have to be careful?

Student: Vin and I will be doing a Snapchat. When Vin and I present a Snapchat, we’ll say, “We would like a volunteer.”

Dan St. Louis: And hopefully that reaches them when it’s someone closer to their own age saying it.

Student: We are the peer mediators and our topic is going to be about social media.

Student: Colleges look at your Facebook, they look at your Twitter, so it’s really important to keep in mind that it’s not just your friends looking at it.

Dan St. Louis: Because we do so much team problem solving, our kids know that they’re not alone. They know that a team of smart adults are on their side.

Teacher: We tried to get to the root of what was going on.

Dan St. Louis: That no problem is too big or too bad to be addressed in some way. It doesn’t mean that we can fix everything tomorrow, but nothing can’t be addressed.

Teacher: That’s great news.