Who are your Champions?

"Champion"

Noun

1.) A person who has surpassed all rivals in a sporting contest or other competition.

2.) A person who vigorously supports or defends a person or cause.

Origin:

Middle English (denoting a fighting man): from Old French, from medieval Latin campio(n-) ‘fighter’, from Latin campus

Oxford English Dictionary

A teacher – especially a teacher of boys - could on some days (You know the ones - Sports Days, Speech Days, Concert Days, Assembly Days, and against-the-odds-comeback-in-the-footy-for-a-narrow-win-against-ye-old-arch-rival-type-of-days!) be forgiven for wincing upon hearing the word ‘champion’. Within the withering constraints of popular masculine phraseology, its utterance at once speaks for all things triumphant, yet it remains a stubbornly unnuanced descriptor. ‘He’s a champion’, ‘they’re the champions’, ‘what a champion effort, mate!’, and so it goes on… Indeed, being tagged as the champion doesn’t often invite much reflection on what a champion is, or why a champion may be so vital to a school eco-system (beyond the bland aims of establishing a social hierarchy and galvanising motherly pride!).

In responding to the dictionary definition of ‘Champion’, let’s for argument’s sake say we have two of them, and that they do different things (though they will inevitably cross over). We know how to identify the Champion who is the winner. He is the slayer of enemies and the exaltation of our hopes and dreams. He is leader and conqueror, the embodiment of hard-won victory. At his most expansive he is a Churchill, or an Ali. At his most potent he is perhaps a Schumacher, or a Phelps.

And then there comes that other definition of the champion, the one that we know already is so critical to the healthy functioning of schools. We see in that champion the Advocate, the elucidator of hidden talents, the masterful sorcerer who may dare to pull together the hitherto unseen threads of a student’s potential. They are the star teachers.

But of course, teachers have heard it said before that “children need champions”, and, they know well it’s a phrase written in to their job descriptions. Rita Pierson’s impassioned TED Talk, Every kid needs a champion, has notched up 2.5 million views on YouTube alone, with lecturers in teacher training courses around the globe deploying it as a primer for their courses. Indeed, it would be a rare educator who enters the profession without identifying in some way with that calling.

However, does the act of championing have to rest on the shoulders of teachers alone? Should it be shared? Can it be captured, distilled to its essence and filtered-down, percolating through the dastardly filter of childhood egocentricity with all the potency of a morning staffroom brew?  

Character Education: A great school’s students advocate for their fellow men.

If a good school is to become a great one, then its visible achievers must also be its visible supporters. Schools cannot achieve such greatness unless they create the conditions where their most naturally empowered – their Champions –  exhibit the skills and passions of personal advocacy that we would want to see in our best teachers. In essence, a great school’s champions must also be its Champions.

The inevitable retort to this hypothesis is that we ought to be teaching every boy how to advocate for his fellow man, that character education is for all, and not the preserve of a school’s high achievers. That is entirely true – and we must. However, one needn’t brandish a degree in sociology to qualify the belief that a nod from a 1st XV man goes a mile further than a cheer from the bloke at the back of the grandstand. Equally true, is that the ability to champion something or someone implies the advocate enjoying a position of power which his subject is not possessed of.

So yes, we must develop our character education, both formal and casual, from a set of common principles, and teach it fairly to all. However, if we are to view the training of character as an authentic part of an education, then we must do what good teachers do, and differentiate its instruction. Differentiation of course, is not merely a 21st century phenomenon, but has been all the rage since the 1600’s and the rise of the one room school house!

To some degree we do this already, with the election of prefects, captains, and monitors, and the subsequent training they may undertake. But we must also go beyond that and seek to encompass more students. After all, we know that social leadership often manifests in students who fall outside the realm of sanctioned positions of responsibility.

So, might we start by taking an investigative look at all the students who in some way are winning in our schools? And then, might we next turn our determined attention to how we may mould those Champions in to Champions?

…Through Observation

In the first instance, our students need to be taught how to discover the positive qualities in others. Teach your boys to keep watch across their entire peer group. Show them the joy of discovering goodness in places they may not have thought to look.

…Through Action

 Next, understand that observation without action leads to impotency. Teachers must show boys how to respond with recognition when they make observations.

Language and the masculine condition – the core of the problem

In understanding the role of the Champion as advocate, understand that language is so important for effective leadership. Any Housemaster worth his salt knows the importance of teaching his boys how to speak to one another. But – and this is the key - do we really spend enough time teaching boys how to speak of one another?

I argue that we do not. Further, the growing casualization of our interpersonal conversations, a lack of quality role-models, the unmitigated disaster of ‘techno-surrogacy’, and the Marxist destruction of global masculine collegialities have all conspired to exacerbate the "language crisis."

Certainly, as a keen observer of school culture and history, I have the gnawing sense that speaking of one another, commending another man to one’s peers, is a social-linguistic skill best exemplified in a bygone educational era. It is also a hypothesis confirmed personally, through knowing the work of my father and grandfather, who were boarding housemasters in South Africa and Sri Lanka, respectively. To watch my grandfather expound on the qualities of his students, old boys and colleagues at Trinity College in Kandy, Sri Lanka, was to watch a masterclass in the art of speaking of other men.

I have observed in my own work, that boys today are not particularly well skilled in commending the deeper qualities of their fellow man. Even boys who easily speak well of others in public are seldom able to communicate more than a superficial analysis of a peer’s character. Critically, I do not believe this is because boys cannot make a deep and profound character analysis themselves. Nor do I believe that the aforementioned ‘childhood egocentricity’ is as big a stumbling block as some would have us believe. Rather, I believe it is because boys are generally not possessed of the suite of communicative skills and confidences which would allow them to expound the true depth of their appreciation for another. It does not help the situation that in the media age, boys’ imitative speech capacities are often modeled on the post-game enunciations of our talented-but-not-so-eloquent sports stars!

Teachers and community leaders need to address this by demonstrating the power of language in championing others. Actively show boys the kinds of phrases they may employ in ‘talking up’ others in group conversation. In explicit character education settings, you might run a drill where boys work in triadic conversations (entirely relevant in real-world settings) taking turns at making an old fashioned ‘commendations’ to each other within a conversational setting.

Written communication has been the bedrock of liberal arts education for millennia, and its role cannot be ignored here. Email - the dirge of organisational life – is for better or worse the despatch box of our time, and it must be weaponised as a tool in bringing quieter voices to recognition. I myself will always cherish the select contributions of a colleague who made a difference to my own career through expert advocacy via email. In turn, I converse regularly with my boys about using communication to strengthen our own learning community and advance the cause of others.

Understanding Culture: Creating the conditions for a community of Champions.

We can’t simply drop boys in to an understanding of these things though. Advocacy and the art of Championing are self-sacrificing pursuits. A man, and indeed, a community must be properly formed and strengthened before they are able to move leadership in to this domain. This is not merely an observation from the school yard, but a recurring truism in organisational behaviour theory which we must consider in forming character education.

In 1997, Dave Logan, Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business, and his partners John King and Halee Fischer-Wright, founded CultureSync, a management consulting firm focussed on strategy, culture and high performance. Out of a landmark, 10-year study involving two-dozen organisations and 24,000 employees, they formulated a framework for organizational flourishing, and published their findings as the best-selling ‘Tribal Leadership’. Tribal Leadership’s primary finding was that organisations (read; schools), had varying levels of readiness amongst their people to move from ‘poor’ to ‘average’ to ‘good’ to ‘great’ cultures, and that each stage needed to be worked through in sequence (ie. Cultural change takes time and trying to leapfrog to the top doesn’t work!). Their other critical discovery was that above any other factor, it was the deployment of language by leaders within communities that manoeuvred organisations from one stage to the next – eventually reaching what we might term the home of Champions.

‘Tribal Leadership’ is a manifesto worth investigating in and of itself, and could spawn a dozen separate articles, however, its principles as applied to this problem might look a little like this;

Leaders should use language to empower and advocate for everyone, at every level of the community. Teachers in turn should advocate for students, on a more specific, targeted level. Finally, teachers and teacher-leaders must also show students, through the power of language, how to further advocate for their fellow students.

I abhor the corporate-kitsch flow-chart, however if I had drawn one to depict this paradigm, you can imagine how it would show advocacy flowing in largest supply to where it is most needed!

In conclusion - Why schools need both Champions

To discount the raw importance of the first definition of a champion is to badly misunderstand boys. Winners are a useful species and they should well remain so. It bemuses me in the music education world that we are experiencing a trend towards the halfway house of ranked-but-not-competitive performance, and despite the format’s benefits, I wonder if there aren’t real downsides as well (save that for another article perhaps!). Boys need to first chase and then exceed a defined standard, and even those who resent losing will benefit from the clarity and truthfulness that any competitive assessment provides.

We need our Champions not just because we aspire to be great like them, but because their authority – both implied and absolute - casts an orderliness which we do poorly without. We run afoul though, when we allow a culture to flourish which doesn’t demand the right kind of leadership from those who are benefitting most. This needn’t be a punitive exercise burdened on those doing well. Rather, making Champions in to Champions is a philosophy which recognises that there are those in our student communities uniquely positioned to help us strengthen those communities.

Benjamin Crocker (May, 2018)

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Ben Crocker is Head of Bands at Sydney's The King's School. He has worked at a range of government, catholic and independent schools in Queensland and New South Wales, and as a professional conductor and clinician throughout Australia. Ben led Sydney's St Marys Band to three consecutive 'A' Grade State Championships between 2012-2014, and has guest conducted bands in the UK and Thailand as a resident presenter at Shrewsbury School (Bangkok). His current research (MMus - University of Sydney) is investigating socio-musical leadership and interpersonal dynamics within Elite British Brass Bands.