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The Affinities Program:  A Call for Change  Jenifer Fox, 2008

Funded by Best Buy, this program is currently being piloted in two public schools with very high drop out rates. One is in Sharon Hills, PA and the other in Beeville, TX.  The Program:

How we develop student strengths and affinities is a variable too frequently left to chance in schools. Most schools provide students with a myriad of experiences and then hope that one of them will inspire an individual to such a degree that the spark of an interest will somehow flame into a passion. Although this is the hope of all teachers for their students, experience demonstrates that not enough students actually leave high school with a real interest in learning, let alone a passion for anything.

In December of 2006, The New Commission on the Skills of the American Work Force issued a challenge to the United States educational system in their publication Tough Choices or Tough Times (TCTT). Among other things, this report calls for a radical change in our educational system in order to prepare our citizens to compete in the global economy. The report is clear in outlining the qualities that will be needed to succeed in the workforce of the future. Foremost, the report cites the abilities to be creative and innovative. Because creative, “out of the box” solutions come from synthesizing and combining disparate ideas, creative teams will be necessary in every field in the workplace of the future. These teams will need to assemble, disassemble and reassemble in a short period of time, requiring each person to be adaptable, cooperative and innovative. The TCTT Report describes the work place of the future as one where workers will be “constantly organizing and reorganizing in a never-ending array of teams, like a turning kaleidoscope, some of whose members are regular employees of the firm and many who are brought in from the four corners of the world for particular projects.”

The Role of Schools

Students must leave school with a self-assured understanding of their strengths and how they can bring these strengths to work in their professional and personal lives. People who experience repeated success will be the ones who know their strengths and creatively bring those strengths to the teams they join. This curriculum is rooted in the belief that the best way to guide students toward finding meaningful work is to develop their strengths and to help them understand how they learn. If schools expect to develop innovative thinkers who can consistently perform in a highly fluid, furiously

paced future, then it is imperative that they focus on helping students identify, and practice their areas of strength before they join the workforce.

With the Affinties Program, Students identify their natural strengths and practice bringing them to their relationships, their learning and their activities. In doing so, they are guided to envision where they will be able to make their most significant contribution in life.

Creating Meaning in the Conceptual Age

Meaningful relationships and meaningful work are the two cornerstones on which rest most other measurements of a meaningful life. Ultimately, they are what determine happiness. While preparing students for participation in the global economy is a real concern for educators, an equal concern is preparing them for a life which offers not only success but significance. Without an inherent sense of meaning, ones’ daily activities are simply empty tasks. Schools need to play a critical role not only in infusing meaning into tasks, but in guiding students to do the same for themselves.

In his book A Whole New Mind, business author and lecturer Daniel Pink posits that we ahave moved from the “Information Age” to the “Conceptual Age.” Given the global “hyper-accessibility” of information, he argues, our future will be driven by those who can create meaning from the vast stores of information. In this context, schools must embrace the responsibility to help students distinguish meaning from emptiness. Teaching “what” without “why” has always been insufficient but in a conceptual age it is particularly ineffective. Schools cannot promise to deliver students to the next level and drop them off hoping they land somewhere on their feet. Future, direction, purpose, and meaning are not compartmentalized assignments delegated to the Guidance Office. They are the central work of any school. Identifying student strengths is not the fluff of the curriculum of the past. Rather, it is the fuel of the success of the future. Either people become strong by their activities or they become depleted by them.

For too long, schools have been places of depletion. That is what the Affinities Program attempts to change. The Affinities Program is a Conceptual Age program.

Whole School Focus

The Affinities Program is designed to infuse the entire school with a strengths focus. Teachers, students,parents and the greater community all participate.. While the goals of the program are serious, the school which commits to it will find it surprisingly simple to implement. In order to be transformative, the goals of the Affinities Program must weave

into the fabric of the school culture until the school becomes a School of Strength.

To become a School of Strength, any school must begin with the assumption that within each community member, student and teacher alike, there is strength and talent and that ultimately, discovering those things will be far more meaningful than a focus on any individual’s weaknesses. Engaging strengths consistently will take practice and creativity. There is an intentional focus on creativity in the Affinities Program, especially around the activities that require students to determine how to bring their strengths to teamwork.

Identifying Strengths as Systems of Knowledge

There are so many ways that people can refer to their strengths that the concept of a strength can be a confusing one. The Affinities Program delineates three types of strengths that students will identify: Relationship Strengths, Learning Strengths and Activity Strengths. All three of these strengths are marked by feeling energized when using the strength, a strong desire to use the strength and a sense that the strength

describes “the real me.” There are many programs and tools out there which identify and focus on each of these areas in isolation from one another. The Affinities Program unifies these resources into a program which helps students bring their best selves to their relationships, their jobs and their personal lives. There are many ways that people can identify their strengths. The Affinities Program is developed with the goal of helping students to become experts in their areas of strength; experts at knowing what their strengths are and in knowing how, when and where to apply them to their relationships and activities. People are considered experts in things when they first reason qualitatively to understand causal relations before moving to quantitative formulas. The classes taught in the Affinities Program engage students in several tasks that provide them with qualitative understandings of their strengths.

This practice forces them to wrestle with the qualities that are behind the names of their strengths. Students must employ deeper cognitive analysis to fully grasp what the strength is and what it feels like to engage that knowledge in an activity. If teachers name strengths for the student, with less student engagement, students will be less likely to

move from the naming to activity phase that will allow them to repeatedly use their strengths in their daily lives. In order to understand and to repeat strong behaviors, students first need to examine closely the conceptions that underpin their behaviors.

Intuitive problem solvers are those who can fill in sketchy representations with just the right pieces of information. They have rich sets of schemata indexed by large numbers of patterns. The key to moving from knowing the strength to acting on it is in the patterning

step. People need to see their strengths in repeated patterns and carried out in multiple places to develop intuition about them. In order to do this, they need constant and varied representations of them.

The classes that carry out these lessons provide students with patterns which are both representational and experiential. The classes are therefore rich in the use of memories, dreams, and models: verbal models, visual models and role models. All of these activities combine to give students the kind of systems knowledge they will need to put their strengths to a variety of uses.

The Affinities Program

as Preparation for theWorkplace

Increasingly, success in the workplace depends on performance criteria that are more mental and less physical than they used to be. For example, a journalist may be required to come up with ten new ideas for stories, software developers need to arrive at four new concepts for developing interfaces, teams are charged with creating plans to troubleshoot problems. This shift applies across the board in businesses. In the past, an auto mechanic could learn the job by observing the behavior of other

people at work. Today, cars run on computers and learning through observation is not as useful as technicaltraining. In an age when most jobs require intuitive decision-making, where more mental activities replace physical ones, traditional instruction and assessment is ineffective (i.e. the teacher demonstrates how to do something and the student who repeats the performance best receives a high grade). In the 21st century workplace, a new premium is placed on creative problem solving, teamwork and collaboration. The Affinities Program helps students discover their strengths through reasoning and envisioning. In discovering their strengths this way, they are in effect “killing two birds with one stone.” Students not only prepare their minds for effective ways of thinking about other problems, tasks and activities, they also discover the best qualities they can

bring to those problem solving challenges.

Multiple Learning Modalities in an Innovative Media Rich Format

The Affinities Program is an active one, designed to involve the styles of a wide range of learners. Each lesson is designed to culminate in a synthesizing activity as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy. Games, film, concept mapping, mental models, projects, and creative, hands-on activities are all part of the classes that contribute to building the concepts introduced in the lessons. All of these modes are essential in developing strengths.

The Affinities Program is not about information, but transformation.

It strives to impact a child’s choices and actions. Creativity and imagination are precious resources for penetrating their language and culture. Students feel must feel needed, valued, and connected. Their school experience must be relevant to their daily lives.

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