Each month, The Wellington Initiative highlights an educator through our Engaging Educator series. Presented in an interview format led by Rob Brisk, Chief Engagement Officer of The Wellington Initiative, these features share how educators use the Wellington Engagement Index in their setting and the difference their work is making in creating engaging classrooms and communities.
From my first contact with Millbrook's Assistant Head for Academics, Jarratt Clarke, I've been struck by the sense of wonder and curiosity that permeates the place. Millbrook states in its mission a commitment to every student being "known and needed." Jarratt pointed us to the Dean of Student Engagement and Well-being, who has become one of the foremost leaders in using The Engagement Index, with a particular focus on creating an understanding of each and every student in the school. As JJ points out in our interview, no successful program can move forward without the support of the leader. He was talking about his Head of School, Jonathan Downs. We, however, are talking about JJ Morrissey.
Rob: JJ, what led you to administrative roles in schools?
JJ: I started to really love working with students on life skills and life building and things outside of the classroom, and thinking broader. I really loved that. I had an impact all over the school. It doesn't fit for me just to do one thing. Being a history teacher is awesome. I loved to teach, but I wanted to dig my teeth into everything that a school had to offer and try to bring a school into the future. The best way I knew how to do that was through division leadership. I still teach, [Rob: Engagement data shows that JJ is one of the most engaging teachers in his school, no surprise], and I love being in the classroom as much as my other duties allow.
Rob: So, your job title, Dean of Engagement and Student Well-Being, is an unusual one. How did that come about?
JJ: I have a very supportive head of school, John Downs. I'd spent four years in the dean's office. It's a very difficult position, perhaps the hardest position in schools. I was frustrated because we were collecting all this data that could help us do something different, that could help us be proactive in supporting our students if we just thought about it. I really wanted to figure out how to do that. I knew that relationships, connections, and engagement are at the core of a successful student experience and academic success. So, I offered up this role. I was influenced by Thayer Academy's assistant head of student engagement and well-being. I spoke to the person in that role and got some good ideas. And your Wellington work was central to pitching this role. The idea of using it was central to the creation and then ultimately the approval of this new role.
Rob: How did you come upon the Wellington Engagement Index?
JJ: The Index came from out of the blue. Our Assistant Head for Academics, Jarrett Clark, brought it to us. I wasn't teaching at that time, so I was starting to think, okay, this is really cool. This program is really dynamic. We're asking teachers to view it from their classroom perspective, but how can we open our eyes to see what students are feeling? So that was floating in the back of my head. We used the tool two times a year, and then we did it more. And I just started to play with the data a little bit on the back end, just to see ways we could use it from a different perspective, rather than from a sort of professional development opportunity or reflective opportunity for a teacher. What can it tell us about the students? What is the student trying to tell us about all of their classes, about their total experience? So, I just flipped it a little bit and looked at it from the student experience rather than from the teacher experience.
Rob: That sounds like a little thing, but it's actually an enormous change of perspective.
JJ: Yes. Wellington alone just provides so much information about students and their perspectives. The student tells you about all 5 or 6 of their classes. Their engagement across all of their classes is right there for you. It is an enormous data dump. The analysis you can do from that alone is fantastic.
Rob: And then you had an Eureka Moment?
JJ: Yes, it's funny. There's a constellation of things that came together. I started to think about the bigger picture. I put this in the context of the health and wellness track, about the energy in schools now to take care of children's health and well-being. I was at a school where the mission is that students should be known and needed. That's one of our taglines. And then I read a book called "The Good Life" by Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz. They are the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. That's an 88-year longitudinal study for what makes for a good life, not what makes us sick, but what makes us well. The one finding that rises above everything else is how important relationships are, quality, quantity, and community. And so, the stars started to align. I saw that Wellington Data is in some ways about relationships. It's relational. One day, I was going for a jog, and it just clicked. Starting with the Wellington data, we could build a big dashboard for every student. This visual came to me that we could put all this data right now, the Wellington, our data from "connect the dots," and data from our behavioral program. We can put them all together because right now they live in different departments, different passwords, different administrators, and they're not talking to each other. But if all of this data talks to each other, what we're really measuring is relationships. What we're really measuring is quality, quantity of relationships, and engagements. "The Good Life" is telling us that's the key to a good life and academic success. My best ideas come at the end of my runs every time. And then a few months later, we had it built.
Rob: Would you take us on a tour of your dashboard?
JJ: We have 330 students. Every student has their own dashboard. We just pull all the data into this one spot. There are four things we're measuring. We turn the Wellington Engagement Index into a pie chart. Through The Wellington Initiative, we've created a custom grid that we think correlates well with the student life experience. The x-axis shows the degree to which students feel they are needed in the community. The y-axis is the degree to which they feel known or unknown. The flexibility of your tool is really fantastic. The ability to design specific new grids is awesome. We're not just locked into what is created by someone else. So, we added a grid of student life that measures everything outside of academics. So how are they feeling about community life, residential life, afternoon programming, and advisory? Do they feel known and needed? We have different names for those grids. If they are known and needed, we call that hooked.
Rob: And that's what you are aiming for.
JJ: Yes. They're hooked. If they feel like they're needed, they have a purpose, but they're not well known, we call that overlooked. Maybe they're the captain of a team, but they don't actually feel well-known in our community. When they feel known but not needed, they feel purposeless. We call that notable. If they're not known and unneeded, we call that invisible. That's been a very powerful marker for us. When a student can tell us they feel invisible, that's concerning, and it helps us target that student to help them develop purpose. We can tailor our intervention to that specific area. We don't want any student ever saying, "I feel invisible."
Rob: What are the other elements in the dashboard?
JJ: There are two other elements. In the upper right corner, we have a thing we call "connect the dots." We've been doing this for about five years. We send out two forms, one to the adults on campus with a list of all the students. One to the students with a list of all the adults. And we just say to both groups, select as many of the other group that you feel a close connection to. We leave it vague because I want each student to define what that means for them. They get to define what it means to be in a close relationship.
We get a list of connections; we call them dots. And we can visualize it in a bar graph. If seven adults selected their names, their graph would go to seven. And if they gave eight adults a dot, their bar graph would go to eight. So, you would have this visualization of connections across campus. You can see exactly who those adults are.
And a new piece, we can now figure out how many adults a student dotted have dotted them back. We call it reciprocity. How many adults are reciprocal dots? There's definitely a correlation between high-performing academic students and the quality of adult relationships. Those students who have our highest percentages of reciprocity are almost all going to be high performers. Many are top-performing athletes.
The last data we pull is behavior. We have an infraction system. Most schools do tardies and absences, phones out. Whatever it is, if you cross over the expectations, we put an infraction in the system, and then we can pull those into the dashboard. Behavior is a huge marker of wellness. You either are in class or you're not. If you're not in class enough times, that tells me there's something going on.
Rob: You found infractions correlate well with other things you're looking for?
JJ: Yes. The lower the engagement, the higher your infractions.
Rob: Talk to me a little bit about how this has changed the school.
JJ: It's started conversations about relationships. And it started conversations about the importance of individual connections. I like to think of it like a phase change in science. Think of water in a pot. It starts with one molecule boiling, right? And then the chain reaction occurs, and the next thing you know, the whole pot's boiling. After a data pull, I meet with every advisor in the school and talk through the dashboards, walk them through for each of their advisees. We go through 330 conversations in three weeks. It's the discipline of talking about every student. And that's part of the phase change. Just doing that has an impact, helping adults realize that it's about the individual in connection. It's about the individual relationship that's going to make the big change.
Rob: Faculty members welcome the information?
JJ: Yes, advising is a lonely business. This makes it a team effort. Advisors are happy to have some information to help them better understand their advisees. The faculty has been really supportive. As soon as I send out times for them to come to discuss, the sign-up sheets are full with people wanting to learn more, just talk about their advisee, which they never get to do generally, unless the advisee is in trouble. There are a few skeptics, but they're really valuable when you build things like this. And schools are full of them because they're academics. So, there are a few who have asked good questions and push back. "That's correlation. Is it causation?" They keep you on your toes.
Rob: What do your parents know about this work?
JJ: We share that we collect data for a dashboard. We don't show it to our parents, though. We do use "connect the dots" information when a parent is worried about their child's connections at school with adults.
Rob: Do you have in mind the next steps for this work?
JJ: Yes, this was year zero. The whole thing evolved throughout the year. Last summer, it was just two boxes. Now it's four. I think there's a lot of room in the future for institutional research and longitudinal studies. We're thinking about cohorts, the cohort experience, boarders from particular countries, for instance. Also, we are working on a total engagement score, taking all of the raw data and creating a central score for each student. A number that we put against a scale. We could go down a rabbit hole here, but essentially, we have a scale which, on one end, has what we call "failing to thrive." Those are students who are scoring really low.
I'm looking forward to next October when we pull our first data dump, when we get our failing to thrive students, and we can start working through how to improve their experience at Millbrook School, because I think there's going to be massive implications for retention, for academic success, and just through building better relationships and connections. The program allows us to target the individual and tailor the response.
Rob: Last words, JJ?
JJ: What has crystallized for me is the importance of relationships and connections. The Wellington Engagement Index program is a spark for starting that process. Don't just say you do it. Measure it. If you're not doing right, fix it. It just brings fidelity to this program.
Ultimately, our mission is lives of meaning and consequence. And to get kids there, you need to build a community where they feel safe enough to push themselves to step outside of their comfort zone, to challenge themselves. And you do that by making them feel psychologically safe and feeling a sense of belonging. And that's all about relationships between adults and students. It's about making them feel someone sees them and values them. I think there's a big revolution coming, the relationship revolution. Schools are going to start to see the value at the molecular level. Wellington and our dashboard allow us to bring fidelity to that relationship.
Rob: Thanks so much for sharing with us, JJ. We are inspired by your work and look forward to hearing more.