Empowered and Unbounded

A student of mine has been engaging with my writing, and she asked me what I meant by integrity in a post from last week. While integrity is less a direct focus for me in my teaching than it used to be, it's still my foundation for living empowered and unbounded, especially in the classroom.

To me, integrity can be both a powerful access to fulfilling on my visions and goals as well as a daunting and boring topic that I'd rather ignore to talk about something else.

The exciting part: imagine having such a powerful level of integrity that the universe itself aligns around honoring your word. To say "I am well" and then to be well. To say "I am content, empowered, and unbounded" and then to feel it. To say "All people are at ease and in love with life" and to have it be so.

The first time I ever thought about the word integrity, I was about 12 or 13. We were at a school function, and an adult was wearing a jacket with "INTEGRITY" embroidered onto the back. Having observed how this person treated his own kid from time to time (as any of us can treat our own kids from time to time 🤦‍♂️), it occurred to me then that integrity was something you put on when you're out there in the world, but that how you acted behind closed, private doors wasn't as important.

Other than conversations about honesty and trustworthiness, I never came across any conversations specifically about integrity until my mid-20s when I took the 3-day Landmark Forum workshop. It was this workshop that introduced me to integrity as a powerful tool, and that workshop's perspective on integrity remains a strong influence on how I see integrity today.

Though I can talk about someone having integrity, I see integrity much more in our actions than as something we can have. A person has integrity when their actions have integrity. So integrity comes down to how we engage in the present moment, with our lives and the people and objects around us.

If a person has integrity, that person can be trusted to reliably act with honesty and courage in any situation. A person with integrity can be trusted that their words match the person's underlying values, commitments, and intentions. A person with integrity speaks words that honor who they are, then acts consistent with the words they've spoken to the best of their ability.

Integrity is a necessary condition to effectively align my actions with my goals, intentions, and passions.

Integrity is something that teachers so often poorly model for our students. It's not our fault, since most of us didn't get the best integrity lessons growing up either. But integrity offers us and our students the potential to positively impact our well-being and the well-being of others, so I think this is a worthy conversation in education.

In my next post, I'm going to offer three steps to becoming someone who has integrity.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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3 Ways to Foster Well-Being in Teens

Adolescents aren’t just big kids. Their hormone-driven behaviors and attitudes are evolution’s way of showing us that they are seeking independence and autonomy. Yes, they’re big kids. But they’re not just big kids.

Neither are they adults. Their brains won’t be fully developed until their mid-20s, and their desire for independence doesn’t usually also bring with it an understanding of responsibility. Yes, 18 is the legal age in the U.S., but we all know that age is more about capability than ability.

Adolescents are in the process of becoming adults. In fact, prior to modern schooling, adolescence didn’t exist as a separate thing: adolescence was literally the beginning of adulthood.

Adolescents’ biological readiness for parenthood (i.e., sexual development) helps propel their social and emotional drive for independence and autonomy, and their risk-taking was likely crucial in our ancestors’ exploration of new lands and lifestyles. However, just because they’re in a state of social, emotional, and biological becoming, doesn’t mean that they’re in any way deficient.

I love the perspective that Joseph and Claudia Allen take in their book, Escaping the Endless Adolescence: “seeing adolescent brains as different should not automatically mean seeing them as less capable.”

Students often progress through adolescence in our classrooms and schools without really growing much closer to the potential of adulthood (at least not with much help from schools themselves). We graduate high schoolers with a pat on the back that somehow the right of passage of high school graduation marks a coming of age in their becoming. I’ve sat through nearly 15 years of high school graduations filled with well-meaning platitudes and aspirational messages to which the actual measures of high school rarely apply.

I think there’s an inherent opportunity in our schools to better foster, encourage, teach, and model the behaviors, attitudes, and well being of a fully realized adult.

Here are three ways to foster adult well-being in our students:

1. Trust that our teens are innately well, wise, and capable.

I remember learning as a new parent that talking to a child in baby-talk can limit their growth - talk to them with big words and with big trust that they can and will understand. Similarly, teens are capable of adult conversations: talk to them like they can handle it, and they will be able to handle it. Trust that teens have the capacity to understand and care about those things with which we approach them with meaning, care, and honesty. Trust is an invitation to grow and develop. Teens are craving it.

2. Allow teens to answer their own questions about life, choices, and pursuits.

Perhaps we adults have that 30,000-foot view and can anticipate what will happen next. So what. We certainly don’t know what will happen next for the specific teen in front of us. Give them space and encouragement to develop their own answers and to allow their own insights to arise. The truths that stick for us are the ones that we’ve seen for ourselves. Teens don’t need us to impart our wisdom to them; they do, however, need us to guide them to hearing and trusting their own innate wisdom.

3. Model the behavior and attitudes that we want to see from teens.

From my post The Capacity to Respond Without Constraint: there’s an immense opportunity to positively impact the lives of our students by modeling the being of an adult. By demonstrating thoughtfulness, creativity, compassion, enjoyment, engagement, and satisfaction. By demonstrating honesty, courage, understanding, respect, and collaboration. By demonstrating ease, love, and passion.

Time and again I am reminded how much teens want to be heard and trusted. Most of them will rise to meet our expectations, so let’s keep our expectations high and trust our teens to rise to meet them.

We don’t want our students to make the same dumb, dangerous, selfish, and unwise choices that we, our friends, and kids we grew up with made. We’ve now got our own kids’ safety in mind, and for many of us, society seems to be sitting precariously on a dangerous precipice. But our fears and insecurities are partly what’s holding them back. Our fears and insecurities are certainly holding us back.

Many adolescents are craving our trust and partnership. By fostering adult well-being in our adolescents, we invite them to join us in fulfilling the possibilities and potential of being an adult.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.

We've Had Agency All Along

We were five minutes into our high school senior-level engineering design course when Amin (a pseudonym) walked into class late. A presentation had run long in his previous class, and he apologized when he came in.

I asked him, “What does the presentation running long have to do with your being late to this class?”

He was taken aback. “Um, the presentation ran long and I couldn’t leave to make this class on time.” He obviously felt called out and that he was getting into some kind of trouble. This particular school where I was working had demerits and detention to induce the right behaviors in students, though I maybe gave out two or three actual demerits in my seven years there (I gave them all in my first year).

I told him: “Amin, I don’t actually care that you’re late to class. I 100% trust you. But I do think there’s another level of honesty and awareness that you can get to with yourself and with me.”

So I asked my question again: “What does the presentation running long have to do with your being late to this class?”

He thought about it and then gave more reasons, each following by more questions from me:

• “The teacher didn’t dismiss us until the presentation was over.” And couldn’t you have asked to leave when class ended?

• “It would have been rude to leave the presentation early.” So?

• “I didn’t want my peers and teacher to think I was rude.” Could you have cleaned up any sense of rudeness with them?

• “Well, I guess. And I was actually interested in the presentation and wanted to stay.” What else?

The whole conversation took about 15 minutes of class. Initially, most of the class thought I was just being hard on Amin and that we were wasting class time. By the end of the conversation, though, I could tell that the students seemed to be starting to get something.

Amin wasn’t really getting it, though, so I asked other students to participate. What were they getting out of this conversation?

“Amin, you came in and basically blamed your last class for being late. Mick is trying to get you to just own up to the fact that you could have been on time, but it was your own actions that caused you to be late.”

Amin was an honest, thoughtful, kind, trustworthy, and hardworking student. I mean, he basically radiated integrity, maturity, and responsibility, and he had since freshman year. He was my advisee for two years, I taught him freshmen math, then I taught him for two years in this Engineering Design course. So when I told other teachers this story about him at lunch, they were shocked - you had that conversation with Amin??? You can't find a more honorable kid at the school!

And I told them: that’s exactly why I had the conversation with him. His baseline integrity was already solid, so we could go deeper. Why not reinforce that solid foundation. After all, a consistent appearance of integrity is not the same as actual integrity.

What I intended for Amin in that conversation was that he would get in touch with his real reasons for sticking around while the presentation ended. Yes, he could 100% still decide to stay in the presentation and be late to his next class. But at least then he would be clear that he had agency all along.

Our excuses and reasons are an easy way for us to avoid responsibility.

In my post last week on the question that always delivers insight, I shared about taking responsibility in a class of students. Only once after taking responsibility like that did a kid come up to me to challenge me on it: “You shouldn’t apologize. It makes you look weak.”

So I told him the truth: “Actually, taking responsibility is the most powerful thing I’ve ever done.”

Here’s what I want all my students to get by the end of high school: We tend to shy away from the truth because we think it will dictate our actions, when in fact integrity and responsibility free us to act from agency instead of leaving us at the effect of our reasons and excuses.

Responsibility: the capacity to respond.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.