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Sharing their Skills: Volunteers Around the Citizen Schools Network
Jump Associates, Design It! Apprenticeship, Kennedy Middle School, Redwood City, California
In Design It!, three Citizen Teachers from Jump Associates, an innovation consultancy based in San Mateo, California, mobilized students to improve upon a system that affects them daily: their cafeteria lunch. Roxann Stafford, Kathryn Wakid, James Moed and their team of middle-school students presented their prototypes to the head of nutrition for the Redwood City School District. “Their ideas aren’t just new things to eat, but new ways to distribute food, new ways to package it, and new ways to pay for it,” says Roxann.
In this design apprenticeship, a group of students at Kennedy Middle School walked through the same process each day that Jump Associates’ innovation consultants do when they work on innovative projects like the collaboration between Nike and Apple's iPod.
Apprentices identified their cafeteria lunch as a major system with potential for improvement, and brainstormed creative solutions. They refined and built on each other's ideas to tackle problems like long lines and lack of food options. They proposed specialized food carts for grilling and smoothie stations, and portable food like pizza sticks, dispensed from a vending station that plays music.
“One student named Marc loves robots,” said Roxann. “Every week his ideas involved robotic automation of some kind - robot waiters, robot maids. Somehow, he was able to translate his love of robots into a cool idea for a smoothie kiosk.”
Roxann, James and Kathryn often brought in additional volunteers from Jump to help them incorporate their office culture into their lessons each week at the school, from an opening meeting to the many visual aides decorating the classroom. Each Citizen Teacher connected with the apprentices in the class, though sometimes with that special attitude beloved of adolescents. “One of the students affectionately called me tornado hair,” says Katherine. “Ah, the price of one bad hair day.”
The Jump team hopes they shared some important lessons that will help them in school and beyond. “I hope they learned that the best way to solve a problem is to fearlessly create lots of ideas – that what we think is the way to solve it at the outset is rarely the way to solve it once we're done researching and designing,” says Roxann. “I want them to see that the things they are learning in the classroom can lead to an interesting career that can help them change and shape the way people live.”
Carol Ball, Stock Market, Lehman Brothers, Boston, MA
Carol Ball knew she wanted to volunteer the moment she learned which middle school was being served—her own. When she was a teenager, Carol attended the Wilson in Dorchester, Mass. Now she’s a Senior Vice President at Lehman Brothers, but the idea of returning to her alma mater to teach young people about her expertise “really appealed to me,” she says. “It is great when I see that a student is truly interested in the market and wants to know more about investing and asking about why the market fluctuates.”
Carol learned about Citizen Schools almost a year ago, when a representative of the organization approached her and others at Lehman Brothers in the hopes of finding a professional willing to teach back what they know and love. In Ball’s case, that was the stock market. The apprentices she and co-teachers Philip Altamura and Laurie Endlar worked with learned the basics of the stock market and invested in their own portfolios. They watched their stocks, tracking them against current events and analyzing how what’s going on in the world affects stocks. “We brought it down to their terms, to everyday things that they use and they buy,” says Carol, “and they liked the idea that they could track the games they played or the fast food restaurants they liked, and could actually invest in them.”
For two semesters, she has brought her teams of middle school students to both the Lehman Brothers offices in Boston and the Boston Stock Exchange. “They talk to people about what their jobs are and what they do.,” she says. “Once they’re in the office and talking, people at Lehman say, ‘Oh, wow! These are really kids!’ People see how much fun I am having. And they get to thinking, ‘How can I get involved?’” Carol has inspired several of her Lehman Brothers colleagues to become Citizen Teachers as well.
“When you see things from a kid’s point of view, it just really opens your eyes,” Carol observes. “Every week I would look forward to listening to their point of view on current events and how they affect the stock market—having a connection with the students. They really bring it home.”
Carol’s proudest moments are when apprentices teach back what they have learned. Two of her apprentices were invited to present their work at Citizen Schools’ gala, A WOW! Affair, in April. At tables set up outside the banquet hall of the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, Citizen Schools apprentices from across the country explained the projects they had created with Citizen Teachers.
“Our kids had five or six people engaged in what they were saying,” she recalls. “They were just drawing people out of the [crowd], engaging in thoughtful conversation about stocks with adults, and they felt comfortable! They knew exactly what they were talking about. My co-teacher and I just [thought], ‘Wow, everything we taught them—they got it!’”
Brenda Ross, PowerPoint Apprenticeship at Paul Revere Middle School, Houston, TX.
Brenda Ross is a busy woman. On top of being an active graduate student at the University of Houston in Clear Lake, Texas and “visiting with and kissing all over my [seven] grandchildren,” this spring she volunteered one afternoon a week to lead a PowerPoint apprenticeship for Citizen Schools at Houston’s Revere Middle School. “I felt that knowing how to effectively prepare a PowerPoint project would be something that the students would be able to use in their academic as well as business careers.”
Brenda is not simply a teacher, but a mentor who is passionate about building trusting relationships with her apprentices. “Only through trust can you inspire someone to make changes,” said Ross. “I build trust by sharing my own life experiences, solutions and decisions—good and bad. I am not afraid to tell young ones that I have made mistakes in life. They can share with me problems and concerns, and know that I will be there to help wherever I can.”
Brenda combined her personal story with her professional experience to create a unique lesson plan that built a range of life skills. For the technical expertise, she drew on an internship at the Department of Transportation in Washington D.C. where she created and used PowerPoint presentations in her work.
Students used their presentations to help define who they want to be, and how they will change the world. “The questions that they had to answer before making their presentations were: What do I want to be when I grow up? Why do I want to be that? What college would I like to attend to achieve my goal? And what contribution would I make to the world?” says Brenda.
During one class, Brenda confided in the students that she has a hard time remembering names. “I even had them put name cards on their computers,” she said, “and still I called everyone by the wrong name.” Ross spent a lot of time apologizing. “Then, last week, as we prepared for our WOW! presentation, I suddenly found myself calling everyone by their own name. I had accomplished a milestone, and they had also accomplished a milestone: they had prepared extraordinarily powerful PowerPoint presentations.”
“Being a Citizen Schools teacher has been an amazing and rewarding experience,” Brenda says. “My experience teaching PowerPoint to these students has helped me grow. Each week I looked forward to standing in front of a classroom of eager young minds who wanted to learn something new.”
Thomson Financial, Video Game Design, Edwards Middle School, Boston, MA
In response to the recent loss of two students to gun violence, apprentices and Citizen Teachers from Thomson Financial changed their video game curriculum to replace guns and bullets with positive images.
Using a program called Dr. Scheme, David Emhardt, Yelena Viktorov and Patricia Kelliher of Thomson Financial taught apprentices in their Bootstrap video game apprenticeship the language computers speak: a complex code of mathematical functions. Each week, students learned how to write computer codes that reinforced the concepts they were learning in their core math classes and allowed them to create their own video games.
During the second class, the Citizen Teachers introduced the three moving pieces the apprentices would be creating: a gun, a bullet and a target. In the past, students had created aliens and other moving objects as targets. But the students were uneasy about representing gun violence in their games. Two of their schoolmates had been killed in separate shootings earlier in the year. “I don’t want guns in our game,” said a sixth-grade student named Rage. He asked the Thomson team: “Can we have something other than guns and weapons?”
The Citizen Teachers from Thomson thought it was a great idea. They adjusted the program to leave more room for the imagination: instead of guns and bullets, apprentices now work with a “player” and an “object” to which they could assign any image. The resulting creative thinking led Rage’s group to program a basketball game with a moving basket. Other teams designed games with cars, robots and other surreal, intersecting shapes. There was no rule against a traditional shooting game, but none of the apprentices ended up creating one.
In celebration of his decision to speak out against violence and create a positive change for others, Rage was recognized in front of his peers in the class. The staff and volunteers awarded him stars representing Citizen Schools’ core values of courage and pride.
“I was very impressed with the students,” said Emhardt. “I must say, my expectations were mixed. The students exceeded the expectations that I had after the second class.” In the fourth class, Alex, another 6th grade apprentice, began playing around with a code they had been given for a basic rock-paper-scissors game. Taking the knowledge he had gained in the previous classes around what each value and function in the code meant, he experimented with the numbers and discovered where and how the timing of the game had been embedded into the code. Alex raised his hand and shared with the class how changing certain numbers sped up or slowed down the time between games. “I hear all about the classes at Thomson,” Alex’s mother said, picking him up from school. “Every Thursday it’s all he talks about!”
The apprenticeship culminated in a presentation at the MIT University Media Center, where apprentices presented their games to apprentices from other schools, family and community members. “I hoped that with this apprenticeship, students would feel really good about learning new things and seeing their creations come to life as a video game,” said Emhardt. “I hoped they would feel that they really accomplished something great.” Emhardt’s hopes were met as students showed off their hard work at their WOW!, the end to an amazing and inspiring experience.
Antonia Perlacia, Flamenco Dancing, Grady Middle School, Houston, TX
Antonia Perlacia began teaching a Flamenco Dancing apprenticeship with Citizen Schools at the request of her daughter, Adrienne. “I love Flamenco and Adrienne knew that I would do anything to teach this Dance Art to anyone who was willing,” said Antonia, “and we had a more than willing group of talented students.”
“I got involved with Citizen Schools at the request of my daughter, Adrienne, who is a Teacher Associate with the program. At first, I was reluctant because I was recovering from an infection and some serious kidney problems. Yet, despite all that I joined the program and only missed one day. That day I sent a video of a performance from Spain.
The group of children I worked with at Grady Middle School is remarkable. They were attentive and respectful. They got the dance steps right away and were always excited to be in the class. Because of their interest, I created a copy of the music I use in class and their performance piece so they would be able to listen and practice at home. Each student was given their own CD.
We had so many great things happen in our class, but the most unique one was the student showcase. I asked each student to bring to class a favorite piece of music that they like and can dance to. I gave them exactly 1 minute to perform to their favorite music. I got rap, break-dance, country/western and salsa. It was extremely interesting to watch the flexibility and ease of movement with each performance. I was so fortunate to have such talented children in my group.”
Anastasia Agrafiotis, Design It! Apprenticeship, Eastway Middle School, North Carolina.
The young apprentices in architect Anastasia Agrafiotis’s Design It! course learned the basics of architectural design and created a plan for a community recreation center to take the place of several abandoned buildings in their North Carolina community. In addition to working after school on their campus, Anastasia exposed them to the work environment of professional architects by bringing them out of the school building to the high-rise office of her architectural firm, LS3P Associates LTD, in downtown Charlotte.
For their WOW!, apprentices showcased their recreation center at a public forum held at the American Institute of Architects. “At the public forum, one of the people in the audience asked our students what they thought about architecture after doing this apprenticeship,” said Cyrena Ivie, the team leader who supported Anastasia throughout the ten-week apprenticeship, “One of the students said that at first he didn't want to do it because he thought it was going to be boring. But Anastasia made it interesting and fun.”
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