Teaching Series Day 1: Campus celebs, tech acceleration, and middle school dances
Em and I are co-teaching a class this week. Today was the first day.
Hello from Cambridge, Mass! I’m here this week and next to co-teach a class for May Term1 with my colleague and the Center for Digital Thriving director, Emily Weinstein (hereafter referred to as Em).
We’ve created an awesome course that builds upon former versions Em, Carrie James, and Amber Kamilah co-created over the years. This class lasts only a week, and each day follows a specific theme. Today’s theme was “Friendship Dynamics.” We learned about the complexities of how friendships playout over tech, and examined hteh influence of developmental factors on those relationships.
To reflect on our experience today, Em and I talked through the Project Zero thinking routine Notice, Wonder, Connect:
Step one: What do you notice?
Step two: What do you wonder about?
Step three: What connections are you making?
We decided to record our conversation over a Loom. Give it a watch if you have 15 minutes to spare (or 7.5 on 2x speed!). In the video, we reflect on our guest panel featuring a freshman, sophomore, and junior from three different colleges. We discuss various topics, including “campus celebs” and the rapid evolution of technology. The junior even mentioned “feeling old” upon hearing how the freshman was segmenting their Instagram posts. We end by reflecting on how this 2011 This American Life episode about Middle School demonstrates that some aspects of life as a teen stay the same, despite the evolution of tech.
See you tomorrow!
p.s. In the video, I promised to tell you why we had chocolate chip cookies in class. It was because it was unfair to mention Lawrence Steinberg’s chocolate chip metaphor2 without them.
p.p.s. I would never leave you Lewis-less.
Harvard Graduate School of Education hosts week-long intensive classes the week before graduation called “May Term.” We’re teaching one! It’s called “Social Media and Youth Well-Being: Learning and Teaching for Digital Thriving.”
In his book, Age of Opportunity, Steinberg says being a teen is like having someone put a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie right in front of your nose and asking you not to eat it, whereas being an adult is like doing so with cotton in your nose. Teens are developmentally more sensitive to rewards. They actually feel things more vividly and acutely than we do.