The School is Yours

It so happened that this academic year, almost half of our students were older teens, and eight of them are graduating this year. By the way, we often get asked what are our criteria in this regard, since our students are divided into groups or classes based on their proficiency rather than age. Well, this is actually one of the criteria: if we see that a kid has nothing else to learn within the scope of the middle school curriculum, they stay with us until the final exams and graduate from the academy. Alternatively, the kid or his parents let us know they will be entering high school next year (and thanks to the standards of education we provide, our graduates can expect to be accepted into some of the best high schools in Europe and the US), so they graduate too. For instance, we have a student who could have entered high school a few years back, but they decided to stick around for a while, so this year they will be moving on to the tenth grade. However, even if they wanted to stay with us longer still, they won’t be able to: we’re a middle school, after all, and we have given them everything we could.

Now, during our last in-person session, that ‘Magnificent Eight’ of ours, who were with us for a second, third, or even fourth year (if you count the pilot period), all had faces like “We are too old for all this, the counselor program sucks!” Having no desire whatsoever to see these expressions all the session long, we went ahead and said: “Take it away, the school is yours, you’re in control for a day.”

Some of us were pretty skeptical about it, saying that within two hours we’ll be hearing something like: “No way, we’re done, we don’t want this anymore”; some went as far as to say the kids are going to fail right away. But it wasn’t even close to that! They went through one full day, and they did a great job. They began by waking all the younger kids up for breakfast (and they went back over and over to get the ones who wouldn’t wake up out of bed, just like counselors usually do). Then the ‘new management’ held the morning meeting where they put on a whole act, telling everyone with straight faces that they had toppled the old government and were in power now. To show they mean business, they even had our senior counselor Ivan Ushtei dragged before the audience, his head bowed submissively and his hands tied with duct tape (no worries though, no one was hurt).

Since it happened during a school day, the members of the ‘new management’ still had to attend classes, but the rest of their time they spent performing their counselor duties: the kids held sporting activities, as well as an event they made up themselves which was a sort of a complex game. Besides, it was actually a bathing day, so they were checking if the students cleaned up their rooms, had a shower, got clean clothes, and sent up their dirty laundry to be washed.

It was the day before the weekend, so the evening was all about planning for tomorrow together with the younger kids. After that, they gathered everyone for dinner, handed out the students’ phones, took them away again, and then held two ‘candle night’ events, one for the younger kids, and a separate one for the older ones. A candle night is held like a Q&A session, with counselors asking questions and kids responding, but this time our new counselors wrote all the questions themselves, and, off the record, some said their questions were at times more interesting than usual. After the candle nights, everyone went to bed, except for the kids who were in charge that day – as a reward, they were allowed to stay up until midnight. They were also granted the right to keep their phones for the whole day – but, as it turned out, they left them in their pockets! The kids told us: “We thought keeping our phones for the whole day was just great, what fun we’d have!”, but it turned out they simply did not have time for it!

After the younger kids went to bed, we all gathered in the castle’s library for a debrief and shared our thoughts. Our ‘counselors for a day’ were exhausted, of course, but all eight of them said it had been awesome, and seven of them insisted they wanted another go.

In short, it all went great. Our idea was to let them feel the responsibility and, at the same time, give them a bit more freedom, some new rights, bring the school back to them, as it were. These students will be leaving us very soon, and we wanted to show them what our work was like from the other side and give them some new impressions. In the end, everyone was happy: when we interviewed the younger kids, we asked them about the highlights of this in-person session, many of them mentioned the self-management day, saying it was more lively, fun, and cool.

The adults were also impressed in a good way. We backed the kids up in terms of safety (we cannot put some kids in charge of the safety of the others, after all), but otherwise they did a great job all by themselves.
When we published a video of the morning meeting in our private Facebook group, one of our parents wrote in a comment: “Brilliant way to cover civic education for teens! We get a glimpse of future leaders there.” Frankly, we had no such deep educational intentions with this, but I’m still fine with that take: we’re great professionals, that much is definitely true:)

We are certainly planning to repeat this experiment, taking into account what we’ve already seen. Maybe, it won’t be just one day this time, but several days, including a school day and a free day, we’ll see. We were pleasantly surprised at how much the kids cared for each other for the whole day, how involved they were, what a responsible approach they took with this – they did not see it as some brief diversion, but rather a real job, they were all focused, and that helped produce such a great result.