Birds, Bees, & Benchmarks: National Sexuality Education Standards - Annual Conference Preview

By Kurt Conklin, MPH, MCHES (SIECUS) and Nora Gelperin, M.Ed (Answer)

While the nation was busy enduring months of election-year primary campaign stumping and two major party conventions throughout 2012, a small announcement in Education Week this past January quietly shifted America’s sexuality education landscape.

For the first time ever, curriculum planners, teachers, local and state school board members, and parents have a set of uniform, national sexuality education standards to measure the content of their schools’ programs: The National Sexuality Education Standards. The goal of the Standards is “to provide clear, consistent, and straightforward guidance on the essential minimum, core content for sexuality education that is age-appropriate for students in grades K-12.”

The Standards are the result of a two-year effort spearheaded by five national organizations: The American Association of Health Education, The American School Health Association, The National Education Association Health Information Network, The Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education and The Future of Sex Education (FoSE) Initiative. (FoSE includes three national sexuality education organizations, including two of our own: Answer, SIECUS, and Advocates for Youth.)

The National Sexuality Education Standards join a growing body of national standards for other academic subjects, such as math, reading and health, which only benefit our national education system. The Standards are based on research-driven evidence and developmental- and age-appropriate norms. Yet we’ve heard some school stakeholders express concern that the Standards could generate controversy.

We’ve heard some educators, parents, and politicians argue that school sexuality education programs should teach only abstinence until marriage, and remain silent about topics such as contraception, sexual orientation, and relationships outside of marriage. In their view, the sole purpose of school-based sexuality education is marriage promotion, not intellectual growth or skills development.
As a mom (Nora) and an uncle (Kurt), we respectfully disagree. The education and health professionals who helped to develop the Standards took a comprehensive view based on their real-life experiences with parents, students, and school personnel from myriad walks of life in diverse communities around the U.S. Given the median age of first marriage as 26.9 for U.S. females and 28.9 for U.S. males, and the fact that 63% of U.S. 12^th-graders have already had sexual intercourse, school-age youth need more information than ever to make informed decisions about healthy relationships that have the potential to involve sexual activity. Sound sexuality education includes information on why (and how) young people can benefit from postponing sexual involvement until they are mature and ready, and the Standards account for this—without neglecting many other skills that parents say their children want and need.

The new National Sexuality Education Standards can help you respond to students’ informational needs with age- and developmentally-appropriate instruction that is relevant to young people’s lives. The Standards are voluntary and no school district should be expected to swallow them whole. You can make the most of them by inviting your school stakeholders to explore them and discuss them in community meetings where parents, teachers, curriculum planners, and the students themselves can ask hard questions and seek common ground to make the Standards work for everyone. Implementation can begin with elements that find the widest buy-in. The more difficult and potentially controversial topics can be placed on the sidelines for further study and adopted at a later date.

The Standards are a major step forward in standardizing, normalizing, and improving sexuality education throughout the nation. If widely implemented, our youths’ well-being, health and academic achievement can dramatically improve. Programs modeled after the Standards could lower the nation’s unacceptably high rate of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (especially in states hostile to sexuality education, where those rates are highest). Emphasis, of course, is on the “if”—improvement is achievable if curriculum planners, staff development specialists, teachers, parents and school board members make the most of this new resource.

In an election year when the course of history may well be changed at the polls, we hope the course of history in your local school districts will change for the better when you take the National Sexuality Education Standards and make them yours. Are you ready?

Attend this session at the Learning Forward 2012 Annual Conference in Boston

G15 – Birds, Bees, & Benchmarks: National Sexuality Education Standards

Tuesday December 14, 9am-12pm.

Facilitation Skills to Maximize Group Effectiveness - Annual Conference Preview

This year the Learning Forward Conference in Boston will feature a session entitled “Facilitation Skills for Group Effectiveness,” co-presented by Carolyn McKanders from Houston, Texas, and Michael Dolcemascolo from Skaneateles, New York. Carolyn and Michael have been invited back to Learning Forward after their presentation in Anaheim, CA last year, and they’ve been invited to next year’s 2013 Learning Forward conference  in Texas as well. Michael and Carolyn’s work is based in the Adaptive Schools Seminars, described below.

Session PC 102 Saturday, December 1, 2012

Robert Garmston and Bruce Wellman are the co-developers of the Adaptive Schools Seminars, based in their text The Adpative School: Developing Collaborative Groups, 2009.

Adaptive Schools consulting, coaching and seminars provide skills development in dialogue, discussion, exceptional meeting management, advocacy, inquiry and other skills sets of collaboration. The seminars provide concepts, models and research for building capacities for organizational development, professional development, conflict resolution, data-based decision making, and working with intractable or wicked problems. Of four distributed leadership hats (facilitating, presenting, coaching and consulting) the Adaptive Schools seminars' primary focus is on the hat or function of facilitating group work.  Learn more about seminars on Adaptive Schools models for improving schools by visiting our website, www.adaptiveschools.com.

Four Hats of Shared Leadership

In an adaptive organization, leadership is shared; all the players wear all the hats. All participants have the knowledge and skills to manage themselves and manage and lead others. Leadership is distributed in meetings, in examining student work, in staff development activities, in action research and in projects. Recognizing the hats and knowing when and how to change them is shared knowledge within the organization, because when values, roles and work relationships are clear, decisions about appropriate behavior are easy.
The Four Hats are:

·      Facilitating

·      Presenting

·      Coaching (Adaptive Schools uses the Cognitive Coaching^SM  model developed by Arthur Costa  and Robert Garmston)

  ·      Consulting

How Do We Know They’re Getting Better? - Annual Conference Preview

The Chicago teachers’ strike is over, but we hear questions about teacher evaluation across the country.

For example, how can we effectively assess teachers’ performance? The thought of having one’s teaching weighted so heavily on students’ one-time snap-shot evaluation using high-stakes, or Scantron-type tests for which they were not designed is unsatisfactory.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urges that we craft “multiple measures” for teacher assessment and these should include how we currently assess students’ performances in any subject:

Teacher observations, students’ journals and postings on paper and in the cloud--Google Docs, Groups, Plus, wikis, Twitter--project reports, performance tests, self-reflections and the like.

These direct, long-term, reliable measures become more important when we consider not only the subjects we teach, but our school mission statements as well:

“We hold high academic standards for all students and expect each will become a responsible citizen of our American democracy. We want all students to dream, achieve and contribute to a global society.”

One school district (Greenwich, CT)  paints a portrait of the graduate that calls for her to be able, assuming content knowledge, “to pose and pursue substantive questions” and then engage in the problem solving, critical thinking and ethical, collaborative behaviors required.

To become responsible, active contributors to our society we need students to become good inquirers who pose problems and think critically and creatively.  It is not sufficient to understand Newton’s Three Laws of Motion and determine theme in Charlotte’s Web.  We need students to be able to ask good questions, identify/solve problems and analyze information critically.  Process is content.

But how do we assess these all important intellectual processes?  How Do We Know They’re Getting Better? reflects recent research on assessment of 21st century skills, K-8.

John Barell

www.morecuriousminds.com

Learning Forward Session Tuesday 12/4 @ 3-5, I26