Two-Legged Conversations at Fremont’s American High School

22 December 2022

Fremont CA. December 2022 – Why would teachers want to help students learn about themselves as part of coming to terms with a global challenge? English teacher John Creger was looking to culminate the final fall semester of his classroom career with a learning experience his Gen Z sophomores would remember. So he invited them to help create a fall finale (gentler term for a final) that would guide them to a) research the most up-to-date studies on climate predictions and b) collaborate with classmates to create two-legged conversations — conversations that can deepen both students’ academic skills and their understanding of who they are as individuals and as a group. Before such a conversation, teams agree to these goals:

• come prepared with questions from research, 
• make contributions to the conversation that engage teammates to carry it forward, 
• interact with and listen to classmates with compassion and respect, with the help of guidelines for cultivating deeper conversations. 

To fulfill the guidelines’ deepest listening goals, a team of dialoguers would need to “listen to others, and to the conversation itself, with enough respect and restraint to demonstrate at points that they can reproduce for their dialogue team not only teammates’ comments but the spirit in which they were made.” 

Listening this intently to one another helps students learn to pay deeper attention to themselves than most of us experience on the traditional academic leg in school. The yearlong goal of the experimental developmental leg of the course is for students to solidify their senses of identity by discovering what they value. This leg of the course culminates with the Personal Creed Project presentation, a rite of passage when each student stands before their class community and shares the findings of extended reflections:

• these are the forces, experiences and people that have shaped me to this point
• these are the values my reflections on these influences teach me to stand for 
• these are the qualities I’ll need to develop in order to live by these values
• this is the difference I want to make in others’ lives

The Climate Change Summit incentivized students to devote themselves to a deepened conversation on an issue they are passionate about, a stepping stone in a continuing series of conversations on the developmental leg of the course, culminating in the Personal Creed presentations. The district publicity officer published this article on the Climate Change Summit, which is also the subject of John’s forthcoming article in English Journal.