Supporting Students with Webs of Support - Podcast Map
A principal I work with asked me the other day about Webs of Support.
I’ve done a lot of work on this over the years.
It started with Coordination of Care meetings in my Title I elementary school and was part of the Trauma Resilient Schools processes that I created in each of the schools I was a principal at later.
Here’s the gist:
- Get 5 Anchors for students
- Provide supports in connection with teachers, parents, outside anchors, and anyone else who cares about the child.
- Do this again for each child who needs support
Students thrive when they have at least 5 positive adults mentoring them.
There are many facets to this idea, and I have done dozens of podcast about this topic.
So let’s start with the first one where Amy McDonald describes the ideas of Webs of Support as she teaches it.
Let me give you a little background here. Amy was doing these school-wide activities where she taught this to students.
When I say school-wide, what I mean is small Alaskan schools. When I asked her to do this with my school in Fairbanks, it was the biggest school she had ever done it with by a factor of 5!
This process is called “Phlight Club” and you can listen to our interview here:
Amy talks more about webs of support here:
Phlight Club teaches students about these webs of support, using the acronym from the colors of the rainbow ROYGBIV:
- Red – The Rule of Five: The foundation for a personal village for each youth by five caring adults (or more) called Anchors, having high expectations and providing opportunities, teaching skills, and celebrating relative best in appropriate ways.
- Orange – Tangible Strings: Measurable supports provided through the Anchors that shape the home, school, and community environment of each youth.
- Yellow – Intangible Strings: Important, yet difficult to measure, beliefs, values, and behaviors that are being taught to and caught by the youth.
- Green – Resiliency/Growing the Balloon: These DNA based characteristics and talents that increase the likelihood that the youth will remain connected to any web that they are given. How are you smart rather than how smart are you? Grit optimism, how am I smart, gender, wonder gene.
- Blue – Scissor Cuts/Problem Reduction: Decreasing or eliminating the conditions, actions, and attitudes that erode the supports being created by the adult anchors.
- Indigo – Caring for the Carers: Supporting those who anchor the web so they do not drop out of their lives even when circumstances in their own lives change.
- Violet – Social Norms: The climate and culture of the social environment (home, school, and/or community) that have been accepted or agreed upon by a critical number of adults.
What I immediately grasped about Amy’s approach with how to remember these webs of support is that each color represents a different thread that becomes that web of support. The foundation is these five adult mentors. But there’s so much more!
But, if you have the five adults, then you are on to something! That key piece is so foundational. And these five adults include parents, but the parents/guardians are not part of the five. They are anchors, but kids need five beyond their parents.
Our approach in Fairbanks was to spend the first three days of school building teamwork, relationships, and connection, all before students ever got their class schedules!
Putting this kind of intention forward gave students and adults the persmission to build connections and not get into coursework so fast. Everyone needs time to build relationships and when kids weren’t scheduled in classes yet, they had permission to build relationships with anyone at the school, which is exactly what we were going for.
Then, when they have teachers with whom they already have relationships that is great, but it is even more powerful when they have relationships with teachers they don’t have, because those non-assigned teachers become additional anchors for the students.
You can listen to our first days of school experiences here:
How to get to the five anchors
There’s this strategy to support kids where well-meaning teachers put a chart on the wall with all the students in the school and they indicate who they are an anchor for.
It’s a great idea in theory, but it misses a big point. The kids choose who their anchors are. Adults don’t do that.
Eric Makelky, an incredible principal in Wyoming describes how his school was so off on this. They originally thought they had an anchor at school for every student, but when it came down to it, they were woefully underrepresented!
Eric took the bold step to ask kids to identify their anchor adults, and saw while the teachers thought they were anchors, the kids didn’t see it that way.
Only about 20% of the kids had an anchor at the school, when the teachers thought they had anchors for 100% of students.
Naturally, as they focused and worked on this, they saw that students’ anchors increased to almost 100%, but never quite got there. This is understandable and a worthy point to recognize a key fact:
Some kids just won’t connect to any adults in the school, and that’s ok!
Here’s my interview with Eric about this phenomenon:
It’s a lot easier to know how to support when every kid can identify an anchor they have in the school.
What Eric also adds there is that the teachers need support as well, which agrees with Amy’s idea of “Caring for the Carers.”
Learn more about taking care of the adults in this episode:
Community Building Circles
One of the powerful strategies we implement is circles. These circles give students and teachers an opportunity to learn more about supporting each other in the ways they need it.
Rather than messing around with different ideas of what should and should not happen we use circles to build trust and support so we know how to help each other.
Listen to more about community circles here:
Coordination of Care
The next piece is what I actually learned and implemented first, but is too advanced for most schools to start with.
This is called a coordination of care process. It involves gathering a team and determining the supports needed for different students (and adults) based on what they individually need.
You can see my description for the Coordination of Care meeting here:
The coordination of care meeting exists to meet the social-emotional and academic needs of students at the school. It is intended to work with the needs of the school and support students who are struggling with various issues that impact their learning.
The team consists of the principal, mental health clinician, counselor, and psychologist. Additionally, other members are invited to attend as needed (Title I-C and VII aides, behavior special education teacher, and general Ed teachers). These additional support personnel may stay to discuss only their own students and then be dismissed.
The goal of the team is to facilitate the needs of students so they can be successful in school. This fits our RTI model by supporting the work of the intervention team by handling deeper issues with a focus on mental health supports.
We have seen reduction in Office discipline referrals, and we would likely see reductions in special education referrals. We have seen reductions in risky behavior at the middle school and an increase in willingness of students to seek help from the team at KMS.
The reason why you can’t start here is that it is too difficult when so many are struggling. Our initial Coordination of Care meetings had lists of students too long to even come close to getting to each of them. The purpose is to define support and interventions and task one person with spearheading them. This process takes time!
Here’s an image of our docs & Files in Basecamp:
The agenda for this meeting consists of going through each student identified as needing support and reviewing, updating, or creating a plan for their success.
It isn’t timely to have everyone involved in that student as part of the meeting, so they are invited at a time when their insight is needed.
The meeting and the subjects of the meeting are not a secret, in fact, it is even appropriate for a student to be in attendance when they are being discussed.
Ongoing support
These webs of support do not end with coordination of care, nor do they end with the end of the school day, quarter or enrollment at your school.
Every student needs these webs of support, regardless of where they are at.
That means your culture, vision, mission and all that you do in your school needs to add up to support these aspects of kids’ lives. It’s imperative that they have these webs of support to support them.
How I help
In my work with schools, my process is simple and effective. It has three simple parts: needs assessment, implementation, and evaluation. My engagements with schools usually last 2 or more years to make sure there is adequate time to make real changes that continue on regardless of changes in staffing and students.
Needs Assessment
In the needs assessment I visit with you and your leadership team to see where you see holes already, and I do some assessments to see what holes exist. I also research to see what systems of support you already have in place.
Getting all this information into one place is exceptionally helpful. Most schools are doing more than they think, but they are scattered all over the place. This process helps them see what is already there and greatly focuses on not duplicating efforts.
At the end of the needs assessment, you get a simple report with information about what simple actions will have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time.
Implementation
Before we put anything up on the walls, we make sure we are acting how we say we are going to act. If what you say is not implemented, putting the poster up is nothing more than gaslighting and propaganda!
I’ll help you create a plan for implementing the recommendations in your school and work with you to make them happen.
We will focus on small, easy-to-implement changes that align with your district vision and aren’t burdensome to those that implement them.
In one of my schools we implemented 36 new initiatives in 3 years. When I say that, people say that seems like a lot and they fear that people would be over-initiatized! But that wasn’t the case.
Because initiatives were simple, small, and focused on overcoming specific challenges, it never felt onerous.
For more information about this implementation, you can listen to this podcast:
Evaluation
As the changes are implemented, we will continue to check in and provide support and help to give the support your students need.
These three things (needs assessment, implementation, and evaluation) operate on a cycle, where we are constantly assessing, implementing, and evaluating how things are going.
It’s continuous improvement at its finest.
Let’s work together
If you’d like this for your school, please get in touch.
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