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Honors Assembly Remarks
Honors Day Remarks: September 16, 2014
Good morning. Today we gather to recognize the hard work of those students who earned places on our effort and achievement honor rolls during last year’s third trimester. If you are in sixth or seventh grade, or if you are new to St. Andrew’s this year, we can’t call your name this morning, but we can at our next honors assembly in December. As Mr. Brown will explain in a few minutes, we have an academic honor roll, which depends on your grades, and also an effort honor role, which depends on how hard and consistently you prepare for and participate in class. So, seventh graders, new students, every student here: Here is a goal for yourself today, one that is in your control to reach: Earn a spot on at least the effort honor roll this trimester, so we can call your name at the next honors assembly in December.
This weekend, I received an email from a former student whom I haven’t seen in person since he graduated from high school 13 years ago. I’ll call him James, and change a few facts to respect his privacy. James wanted to let me know that, at age 31, he had just been appointed principal of a large public school in Pennsylvania. He thanked me for being a good mentor for him when he was in high school, and asked for my advice as he started his new job. I was touched, and wrote back to him, and then thought more about James and his journey.
I met James 17 years ago, when he a rising 9th grader and I was the Upper School Head of his school. I taught and advised James for four years. He was a determined student and athlete, close to all the faculty and students, and very happy at school. James wasn’t at the top of the class—in fact I’m not sure his GPA was above the class median—but he was successful student. You see, James had been born many weeks premature, and weighed less than 2 pounds at birth. James’ father told me that he was the first child that small born in Philadelphia to survive infancy; so James’ residual mild learning challenges were neither surprising nor a problem in the eyes of his family and the school. James’ ability just to be a normal kid was a minor miracle, and he had a strong appreciation for his life, including his school and his teachers and his friends. At the time I thought that his joy at school and connection to the community were great add-ons to his all-importance work ethic, and that his grit came from a good upbringing and something innate in his personality. I felt lucky to have an advisee who made the most of his academic abilities and who happened to a happy teenager as well.
My 13 years at St. Andrew’s have changed my perspective. Not about the importance of gritty persistence—I hope that you all work as hard as James in your classes and sports and activities. Instead my understanding of the role of happiness in your education has changed significantly.
I came to St. Andrew’s 13 years ago because it was a happy school. Students and parents smiled when I met them, and teachers and staff clearly enjoyed their students and each other. Especially after visiting other schools with grimmer cultures, I predicted that I would probably enjoy my headship and my life at St. Andrew’s more than at other schools. Most days, in most ways, that has been true ever since.
At that point in my career, I might have described St. Andrew’s as a challenging but happy school. Schools are supposed to be challenging, right, so you learn what you need for college and beyond. If you and your teachers weren’t miserable in the process, that seemed like a great bonus, a fortunate exception to how school cultures were supposed to be.
After a few years, I started to refer to St. Andrew’s as a challenging and happy school. I had grasped that student happiness came from a deeply positive faculty and staff culture. The adults set the tone, and you responded. That simple truth, which is part of St. Andrew’s DNA, is something that many schools still struggle with. You have to hire happy people who can teach well, not toxic people who know a lot of stuff. Everyone here knows that.
I now say that St. Andrew’s challenges students and their teachers successfully because students and the adults who serve them are happy in school. Your happiness—that deep sense that you are known, and accepted, and connected to your fellow students and teachers and administrators—is the foundation for your academic motivation and development.
Right now, some of you are thinking “duh, that’s why I chose the school as a student or parent or employee.” Some of you may be a bit skeptical of my claim that happiness positively affects students’ work ethic and yes, your GPA. So here are some data for my claim to affirm the believers and assuage the skeptics.
Most of you know that St. Andrew’s, through our CTTL, has a close relationship with professors from the Harvard School of Education. Veteran students may remember last spring filling in an online survey about whether you were happy in school, and if so, why. Our Lower School students also participated in interviews with our Harvard partners to gauge their happiness in school. About a month ago I read the results of the survey: By staggeringly high margins, you reported feeling happy in school, because you felt known and supported by your peers and your teachers. Our Harvard partners were amazed by the near unanimity of your responses, which indicated both your long-term sense of contentment at St. Andrew’s and your day-to-day positive feelings about your classes and your social lives. I was happy to hear that more than 90% of you said you were happy to be at St. Andrew’s, but I wasn’t surprised. I notice your happiness at St. Andrew’s every day.
The Harvard researchers were also amazed that Middle and Upper School students would say that your relationships with teachers were almost as important—in some cases more important—than your peer relationships at schools. Adolescents, after all, are supposed to focus on their friends’ opinions and tune out adults completely (according to most movies and many frustrated parents of teenagers, at least). But that response didn’t surprise me either. I hear about your connection with the faculty and staff all the time from you and your parents.
Two other parts of the survey results did jump out at me. First, I learned that no peer school or group of schools had conducted a similar research study on the effect of happiness on student motivation. Not one. That told me how far ahead St. Andrew’s has gotten in promoting happiness as an instrument of learning, and in our commitment to test our assumptions so we can keep improving. I like being out front.
The second part of the results that surprised me was the connection between your happiness in school and your intrinsic motivation. There are lots of reasons to work hard in school: to please your parents, to look or feel smart, to make honor roll, to get into a good college. None of these reasons are bad, but none of them make you happy while you’re doing your work. Even getting into that great college (seniors) is a transitory emotion. These are extrinsic motivations: the reason you’re working hard in each case is to achieve a goal (yours or someone else’s), not because you just to want to learn the material. Imagine if your soccer team could defeat its bitter rival without ever getting better at playing soccer. You would be motivated to play hard in the game, but what would happen in practice the next day?
The Holy Grail of education—what teachers really want students to develop and hang on to—is intrinsic motivation. That’s when you really want to learn the material, or improve your soccer skills, because you enjoy the process of learning and improvement. Intrinsically motivated students make honor roll and win games and get into college more often than their peers, and they don’t lose their motivation over time. That’s why it’s so important to enjoy school or your job; enjoyment leads to sustained commitment and success.
Our Middle and Upper School students reported that intrinsic motivation was much more important to them than extrinsic motivation. You said that you would rather learn challenging material than get an easy A; you would rather tackle an interesting problem with your classmates and teacher than get something right the first time working by yourself. That connection with classmates and teachers—what the researchers named the “pro-social environment” of St. Andrew’s—is an essential part of your learning and correlates strongly to higher GPAs. That authentic connection creates durable intrinsic motivation—the Holy Grail for St. Andrew’s and for your academic success. Congratulations to you and your teachers and parents for making that happen.
In closing, I’ll return to my former student James. In his email he asked me for advice as he started his leadership role. I’m sure he’s thinking about a thousand policy decisions and problems that face him in year one. I gave him two specific suggestions: Learn as many names as possible, and listen carefully to everyone. But I closed with: smile and laugh whenever you can, and enjoy your new school. After all, a happy James will be a successful leader.
Thank you very much for listening this morning, and thank you for enjoying your friends, your teachers, and your learning. Now Mr. Brown will explain to us how the honor rolls work. Mr. Brown?
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is a private, coeducational college preparatory day school for students in preschool (Age 2) through grade 12, located in Potomac, Maryland.