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Helping kids put responsibility into action

This is an excerpt from Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility through Physical Activity 4th Edition With HKPropel Access by Don R. Hellison,Paul M. Wright,Thomas J. Martinek & David S. Walsh.

AWARENESS TALK

Relational time formally opens the program, although a shoot-around, icebreaker, or other fun activity might set a positive tone before holding a brief awareness talk. The kids can stand or sit, whatever works best, as they are reminded that this program is based on taking responsibility. Gradually, the levels of responsibility can be presented, although with older kids (and in some cases with all kids), just informing them of their responsibilities without using the concept of levels works better. In most situations, this needs to be done very gradually, starting with respect or respect and effort, and eventually adding self-direction and helping, and even later including transfer outside the gym. The key modifier is gradually, a guideline often ignored. At times, the leader can ask for examples of the levels and how they were used outside the program (e.g., home, school).

The awareness talk must be brief. A couple of quality minutes of talk are worth far more than blabbering on and on. Program leaders who are long-winded, a characteristic common among rookies, often obscure their message in a torrent of words. Early in Don’s career, he got a wake-up call from one of his students, who wrote, “You talk too much” on an anonymous evaluation form. When students start rolling their eyes or are not paying attention, the awareness talk is over! In professional preparation, Don has suggested invoking the 10-word rule, meaning you’ve got 10 words to explain the levels. Of course, it may take more than 10 words, but the rule makes the point about brevity. One suggestion is to have a mental script of what to say or ask in the talk. If part of the awareness talk is posing questions to the kids, it is always a good idea to set a boundary on the response time given to the kids.

Another good rule of thumb for the awareness talk (and relational time and the group meeting) is to monitor the questions-to-answers ratio. Both rookies and veteran program leaders too often tell rather than ask. Telling is important sometimes, but without genuine questions (versus answers thinly disguised as questions), such interactions are disempowering.

Following the initial talk, the awareness talk is an opportunity to remind kids about their responsibilities that day. The most important part of the awareness talk, however, is to have students volunteer to tell everyone what the levels (or responsibilities) are in their own words, or more simply, what this program is about. If allowed to improvise, a participant might offer something like “We all gotta get along” or “Don’t act the fool.” A response to these kinds of comments might be “Good idea for when we start the activity, which is right now!” (Less is more! And getting to the activity quickly is important.) As this example shows, students need not describe the levels or mimic the program leader, but whatever they say should indicate a grasp of what TPSR is about in at least a general way. Kids do come up with some doozies. One fourth grader in Tom’s program, who rarely spoke, said, “This club is about making everybody get along with each other—it’s not being ghetto!” An eighth grader in an impoverished urban area provided a surprising account of the program experience by saying, “It’s about having a good conscience!” Who knows what kids will think? Some comments totally miss the point but are relevant to the youngster. This often happens with younger kids. Tom recalls an experience when he asked third graders, “Who can tell me what a goal is?” (Level III). Of course, a bunch of hands went up. The response from one kid was “It’s a thing you throw a basketball at.” None of the other kids laughed but nodded affirmatively—they all agreed! For Tom, it was back to the drawing board.

Increasing awareness is the first strategy used to put the levels into practice. It’s important to recognize that awareness talks are not guaranteed to promote action. Rather, they are a starting point to bring attention to the importance of being responsible. They provide a rationale for taking responsibility when done briefly and meaningfully. These simple suggestions came from Don’s experience:

• Post the levels on the gym wall for easy reference. This is an all-too-familiar wall chart, but it does help.
• Relate their responsibilities to current experiences in the program.
• Follow up, follow up, follow up.
• Develop one-liners (or two-liners) to explain the essence of the levels. Here are some examples of awareness talk one-liners that Don came up with:
  • “The only person you really get to change is yourself” (Levels II and III).
  • “If one person is out of balance, so too is the community” (borrowed from Boyes-Watson, 2001, p. 19; Levels I and IV).
  • “If people can get to you with their talk, they can control you” (Level I).
  • “To get better, you have to pay the price” (Level II).
  • “You’re about to spend 40 (or whatever) minutes of your life in here; what are you going to do (or what did you do) with that time?” (Levels II and III).
  • “It’s your body and your life” (Levels II and III).
  • “You can choose what your friends are doing or make up your own mind” (Level III).
  • “Good idea, but can you say it more positively?” (Level IV).
  • “Let’s see if we can help everybody walk out of here today feeling that they had a positive experience” (Level IV).
  • To kids whose lives revolve around basketball and dreams of the NBA: “When the air goes out of the ball, what are you going to do?” (Level V).
  • “How could you use the levels in your classrooms? At home? On the playground?” (Level V).

Bill White, a Portland, Oregon, high school teacher in the early 1970s, was the first professional to try to implement TPSR Level V awareness in his program with a piece of paper taped to the wall. On the paper, he had drawn a line with a zero at one end and a 70 at the other, representing ages in the life span. He drew an X on the line to represent the approximate age of his students (about 14), and on the bottom, Bill had printed: “It’s your trip.” Bill often referred to this drawing in his awareness talks to remind his students that they had not gone far in their life trip and that the levels might serve as handy guides from this point onward.

One way to deepen students’ awareness of Level I is to ask them to help devise “respect rules” for the class. How do they want to be treated? How should everyone be treated? Does name-calling matter? Should everyone on a team have to be involved during a game? Should mean faces be allowed during a conflict? How would you like to be treated? Students can brainstorm about these issues and perhaps come up with some respect rules they can all agree on. The point is to have them think about respect and give their input. To reduce the hassle of separate respect rules for different classes, Lickona (1991) suggests having one set of respect rules for all programs developed from students’ input in each of the classes.

Nick Compagnone (1995) extended the awareness talk into the lesson by using finger signals. Extending this approach, one could use two fingers to signal being off task, three fingers to remind students to use their independent time more wisely, and four fingers to remind them to be more positive when helping someone.

Stefan Ward (Pinkerton, 2021) has created the “ouch rule” to raise the level of awareness of how students treat each other. If a student is treated disrespectfully by another (e.g., making fun of the student), the student yells, “Ouch!” This provides a starting point for a discussion with the offending student about respecting the feelings of and being positive with others.

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