#2 Seeds of a relationship-building curriculum for males

(You can find PART 1 on December 10, 2010)
As you can notice, we believe that every opportunity for relationship building, including pen-pal letters, shared interest activities, team sports, especially in a house league, social activities implementing formal lessons on how to be a good guest, and how to be a good host...these are all valid exercises within the school ambience, the family ambience, if relevant the church, synagogue or mosque ambience.
And at the point where the male student has arrived in grade six or seven, specific instructions in the expectations of the opposite gender become important. And these expectations do not start with, or even include, those of a physical or sexual nature.
There are skills in active listening that require formal instruction. Such activities as feed-back, mirroring, interviewing, summarizing, "subbing" (or serving as a substitute for the other's thoughts and feelings), and in general empathy for the other's thoughts, feelings, opinions are extremely important, relevant and useful beyond the arena of formal dating.
Differences in the perceptions of male and female students can be explored in co-ed classes, and formal experimental sessions in learning how to dance, and how to hold another person (in ballroom dancing style) and how to make and sustain eye contact with another person will require considerable planning time and sensitive deliberation from the instructors, hopefully both male and female will be participating.
During these instructional, experimental sessions, which could also include pairings while on field trips, each participant would be expected to keep mental notes about those feelings, both positive and negative, that were generated at various times in the event, and a formal opportunity to present those 'notes' to the partners would follow the event, as an integral part of the exercise.
Early in adolescence, students find part-time jobs, and for males, this might include yard work, shovelling snow (in certain climates), and apprenticeships in various job sites. Prior to the start of this exercise, it is important to teach the expectations of the employer, as an integral part of the building of relationships for the male student.
Here is an opportunity for the teaching of concepts like the meaning and importance of power and authority, how to negotiate within the boundaries of that power and authority, including the power and authority of the parent. Formal classes with both genders and their parents would include negotiating skills for the students, which would then be practiced with the parents, while the process is supervised by the team of instructors.
(Naturally, all instructors would have already participated in their own learning sessions, in such skills as active listening, negotiating, mediating, and the exercise of power and authority, both as a part of this curriculum, and as part of their training as classroom teachers.)
Guidelines for these encounters, classes, interactions, feedback sessions...would include the rejection of any form of abuse, name-calling, bullying, and judgemental statements. Only "I" statements would be permitted.
"When X did (or said) that, I felt ............" is one example of a statement that would pass muster.
"I think (or feel) this about that observation"....is another statement that can be both taught and practiced, during these sessions.
Whn there is a larger conflict, especially between two individuals of the opposite gender (or same gender) it could be an opportunity to teach such interventions (from Adler) as the following:
1) Speaker A expresses a view for an agreed time limit (such as 2 or 3 minutes) while person B remains completely silent, and listens intently taking in each nuance of the statement from person A;
2) Speaker B then feeds back everything that he has heard from person A, in a shorter time frame (such as 1 minute)
3) Speaker A makes some minor alterations, if necessary, in the statement from person B's feedback (again in a 1-minute time)
4) that session is terminated, without additional comversation, comments, observations, retorts of any kind.
(The goal here is that both people come to understand precisely the view, feelings, position of the other, without entering into debate. Time apart, for reflection, is both needed and permitted before any additional contact is contemplated.)
Perhaps the next day, the supervising teacher might ask each person for any reflections, in the presence of the other.
The opportunity for clarification, through both feedback and clarifying questions as part of the relationship-building process could ideally be reinforced by the inclusion of the process in the academic classrooms of the teaching faculty. This is a skill whose need can never be overstated, in many life situations, at work, in the home and in any social relationship.
Another feature of this part of the curriculum is that it is not generated by the school administration to reduce the frequency and severity of conflict in the playground, as a discipline exercise. It is integral specifically to the development of more effective and mutually beneficial relationships first between and among students and only secondarily between students and faculty or administration. In other words, it is not imposed as a means to generate improved discipline statistics for the school.
In this more complicated portion of the curriculum, each student would be assigned a teacher/coach who could be available, in formally assigned time periods, for private consultation, about the issues raised by the relationship-building exercises. In these sessions, the coach would serve as active listener, without providing answers to the questions being asked, or the issues being rasied. This restraint would require special training prior to the commencement of the program to avoid simplifying the situations, and to avoid taking control of the potential options available to the student, in any particular situation.
There might even be occasions when two students who had experienced a pairing activity might seek the intervention of the coach, and in that event, perhaps the coach assigned to each student would be present.
It takes considerable time and much focused energy to develop healthy relationships, and none of this activity should be begun without a full appreciation of the mutilple implications, time requirements and costs involved in making the program successful.
(Part 3 to follow.)