Mr. SG Selected for International Boys’ Schools Coalition (IBSC) Action Research

Mr. SG will now go through a process of reflection and fine-tuning his goals in order to solidify his research project. Read his research proposal below: 

1. Briefly tell us about your professional background, current school responsibilities, and interest in this action research opportunity. How will you manage your time to ensure you can participate fully in the IBSC Action Research Program? Please remember that in addition to time spent undertaking action research in their schools, program participants spend 3–4 hours per week on average participating in online discussions with fellow researchers, reading and researching, and preparing submissions for their research report.
   
   The 2023-24 school year is my second as a teacher and my fifth as a member of the Seven Hills Community, as I was a student from 6th to 8th grade. I am currently teaching one section of 8th Grade Language Arts and two sections of 6th grade science. I co-teach all of Physical Education. In addition, I am the on-site IT person and responsible for day-to-day maintenance and troubleshooting. The school has another off-site systems administrator to whom I report for that role. Like all of my colleagues, I wear many hats. To ensure full participation in the IBSC Action Research Program, I anticipate dropping my Physical Education responsibilities, or perhaps one of my 6th grade science courses. Either of these changes would represent a 3-4 hour difference in workload between in-class time and prep work. 
    
2. What excites you about this year’s topic? What might you focus on for your project? What are some of the positive changes the project might bring to your classroom, the boys you teach, and your school? Of course your ideas may change substantially once you engage more fully with the program. This is merely intended as an introduction. Share your ideas in a few paragraphs (maximum 3000 characters). Make sure you acknowledge any references used.
   
   The topic of belonging is personally meaningful to me. I am an alumnus of the boy’s school where I teach, and so I can speak first-hand as to how Seven Hills cultivates a sense of belonging for students. Before I attended the school, I was in a parochial school where I struggled with my sense of self and self-worth. Attending Seven Hills was for me, like for many students, a necessary change that allowed me to grow into the person I am today. By feeling that I belonged in middle school, I was able to engage in my natural intellectual curiosity which set the foundation for a lifelong passion for learning. My story is a common one among my former classmates and among current students at the school. It is my hope that by participating in IBSC Action Research I could help students at Seven Hills and boy’s schools worldwide feel the sense of safety in and out of the classroom that can only come from the feeling of true belonging.
   
   However, there are still areas that Seven Hills struggles with, and there is always more we can do as a faculty to facilitate this sense of belonging for every student in school. The area of focus I have identified is how Seven Hills uses “Houses” as a social organizational structure. Students are divided into four Houses: Knights, Midnight Blues, SWAMBIE, and Unknown Prophecies. These Houses compete in various challenges of skill and luck for the annually-awarded “House Cup.” The primary function of Houses is to facilitate a sense of belonging to a group different from their own grade and class. Students can build friendships with others of different ages by sharing a task. This has the potential to provide a continuity to the culture of the House, and the school as a whole. I believe that Seven Hills underutilizes the House concept. Through quantitative and qualitative research methods, I could change the organizational structure of non-class events to be House-based and measure how effective this is at making students feel more like they belong to a group.
   
   Based on casual observation, students in Houses prefer to spend time with their classmates when working in a House-based setting. This makes sense, as classmates share schedules and have worked through the same tasks together, leading to greater sense of relatedness. My goal in undertaking this project would not be to alter these relationships, but to supplement them with cross-class relationships. The relationship structure is currently largely horizontal, or segmented by grades. Increasing the amount of vertical, or cross-grade relationships would strengthen the social fabric of the houses and the school as a whole, bringing more students into closer relationships with each other.
   
   This project would be worth pursuing by the IBSC for a number of reasons. Other schools use houses or similar organizational structures, and could use my findings to build a toolbox of inter-grade relationship building techniques. These tools have the potential to permanently alter the outcome of school-wide belongingness because they are structural. Structural changes lead to a blossoming of outcomes stemming from each other, and are more human resource efficient than a case-by-case intervention.
   
   At 89 students, we could measure the social effects of systems changes quickly and thoroughly. Using our small school to model techniques for increasing a sense of shared identity on this level would allow for an agile approach to research methodologies. Because students are already aware of the intentional community-building we do using Houses, they would be able to think about and answer questions about how changes in the application of this structure impacted their sense of belonging. The small size and already-existing groundwork make Seven Hills uniquely suited for this line of research. Additionally, the four Houses of Seven Hills allow four simultaneous trials of this concept every year.
   
   I will rely upon self-determination theory as the theoretical framework for my research. SDT identifies three needs – competence, relatedness, and autonomy – as essential for “social development and personal well being” (Ryan and Deci, 2000). My proposed research will aim to increase the self-regulation of students by providing for these three needs, creating a more interconnected and cohesive social fabric. The need for competence is met in the current structure, as students volunteer for house competitions, and will tend to prefer the competitions they perform well at. The need of feeling relatedness is the most directly relevant to this year’s Action Research Topic, and as such I will devote time in the literature review phase of the cycle to studying this psychological need.
   
   Within the group, there are no official student roles. The eight graders, being the oldest, typically take unofficial leadership roles. The ad-hoc leadership for competition is disorganized, as students are not empowered to direct their House. By empowering autonomous student decision-making through elected leadership positions, students would feel a greater sense of ownership over their House. There could be a number of elected positions: historian, head of House, and so on. As student leaders, boys may take greater ownership of the House’s morale and level of effort. Additionally, outside of the names of the four Houses at Seven Hills, there is not much in-group “lore” passed down. Students are able to recall the House Cup placement for the years they attend, but know little else about the great successes and mistakes of their bygone Housemates. By sharing this common past, students will feel a greater sense of relatedness to their peers.
   
   Currently, Seven Hills divides students into Houses in the following situations: weekly House competitions, monthly River Days, and some school-wide field trips. House competitions are structured to include students across the range of grades. This shared sense of purpose appears effective at building friendships, but has not been measured. I propose changing more field trip groups to be House-structured, and taking sample surveys immediately before and after these trips. By asking students how they feel about same-House, other-grade students, I could measure if this structure increased group belongingness.
   
   Seven Hills is a school that already benefits from a profoundly intentional community. I say this as a teacher and an alumnus. Students are already implicitly engaged in the act of creating belongingness for others because of structures we have in place, namely, intentional relationship-building. Despite the current success of Houses in achieving this goal, I believe that Houses are a currently underutilized structure. I hypothesize that by structuring the House system to empower the students to engage with one another in new ways, I could create a stronger sense of self and of belonging to their group. Additionally, I hypothesize that by increasing the amount of time students spend together in their House, we could create more meaningful cross-grade relationships, increasing the sense of belonging that students feel.
    
3. What grade/age level and subject would you most likely use for the project? Remember it may be challenging to find time to work with senior classes during the months of August through November when the action is implemented, particularly if they are writing examinations.
   
   I intend on working across grade levels (5th through 8th Grade).