Joan Goodman Advocates Student Authority

May 19, 2011 - In Philadelphia, as in many urban school districts, the dropout rate regularly tops 40 percent. 

Penn GSE Professor Joan Goodman – an expert in moral education – sees that number as an indicator of alienation between students and their schools. “Students deliberately violate school expectations and rules,” she explains, ignoring assigned work, resisting in-class assignments, setting their own “rules,” and even resorting to violence.

Recently, Goodman has been focusing on the sources of student alienation. Her prescription for reengaging students in their own education is both startling and commonsensical.

Give them authority, Goodman advises.

The kind of aggression that leads disaffected students to walk out mid-lesson, blow off schoolwork, or threaten fellow students is, at base, simply a means of gaining respect – and the security that comes with respect and control of one’s own destiny. But empowerment, Goodman speculates, might be an alternative for students looking for respect and security – an alternative that benefits them and their schools.

To test out her ideas, Goodman worked with four second-year master’s students in GSE’s Teach For America program to perform a collective case study of interventions in Philadelphia classrooms. Each case was unique, with each teacher tailoring the intervention to her particular class, and each was met with varying degrees of success.

Goodman’s first teacher, Jessica Hoagland, was faced with a recalcitrant class of seventh-graders. She appointed disruptive but influential students as peer leaders for small-group work. The initial response was enthusiastic, with individuals embracing the prospect of receiving a group grade. But the groups disintegrated over time, and in retrospect, Hoagland realized her students’ enthusiasm for a differently structured class had been tenuous at best. Her students hadn’t really embraced the new rules but merely gone along with the teacher.

Another teacher, Christina Sanabria, found herself in a school where it was difficult to do a whole-class experiment in shared authority. So she opted to change her “in-the-moment” decision-making with individual students. An opening came when JJ, a chronically angry student, came into conflict with another teacher, Mr. B. Sanabria helped JJ channel his indignation – arranging an afterschool talk between the two, encouraging him to write down what he want to say to Mr. B. Her strategy – a shift in the authority relationship – enabled JJ to rise to the occasion and develop the self-control necessary to resolve the conflict.

In another example, Celeste Rodriguez, who was teaching in a school designated “persistently dangerous” by the Philadelphia district, introduced a student-driven service-learning curriculum that culminated in a school-wide assembly on sexual abuse. Facilitated by their teacher, the students selected the topic, developed their program, and elected their own managers. Among the leaders to emerge was one girl who had not only been suspended from school repeatedly but also arrested by the police on more than one occasion. This formerly out-of-control youngster morphed into a competent, responsible leader who elicited the cooperation of her fellow students. What is more, her transformation – and her classmates’ as well – was paralleled by academic improvement.

Finally, in her ninth-grade Algebra class, Nadel Pierre-Toussaint created a series of mini-experiments, selecting two students to grade their fellow students’ behavior, two to grade a quiz, and two pairs of students to peer-teach a lesson. In each instance, one was given “power” (a checklist and a strict rubric to follow) and the other “authority” (discretion on how to proceed). To her surprise, Pierre-Toussaint writes, the results “clearly favored the advantages of giving students authority rather than power…. The students with only power were worried that I would blame them if they failed to complete the task correctly.”

Key to the success – or failure – of these various cases, Goodman observes, was the granting of genuine authority. Allowed to use their own judgment and to work on their own initiative on projects that reflect the values of their peers, they will commit to the work at hand.

Much in the same way adults do.

For more on these experiments, read Working the Crevices: Granting Students Authority in Authoritarian Schools, which appeared in the May 2011 issue of the American Journal of Education.