Written by Melissa Mayes, DSST: College View Campus Director of College Success
May 27, 11:30 p.m. – I sit up in bed, overcome with ideas for a whole-day identity-exploration summit with ninth graders. I spent the next hour jotting down notes and an outline for the day on my phone. This may have been a pivotal moment where some brewing ideas came together in my mind, but the vision for doing something different started much earlier.
It started several years ago, when I walked in to teach my first Freshman College Seminar class. The minute I introduced myself as the Director of College Success and explained why I was there, I saw several students’ eyes go blank. During work time, these same students were completely disengaged – heads down, off-topic conversations with their deskmates, blatant use of computers to do anything but the lesson, and even one student throwing his handout on the floor and storming out, saying, “I don’t do that college stuff!”
During follow-up conversations with these students, I kept hearing some variation of “No offense, miss, college isn’t for me.”
How could they possibly know that already, when we hadn’t even had a chance to explore it? My team was seeing the same thing. Before we even had the chance to share post-secondary education with this handful of students, they had already tuned us out.
I recognized the issue as “premature identity foreclosure,” a concept I learned in the book by my graduate advisor, Mandy Savitz-Romer, called Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success.
“Some youth rule out the possibility of going to college because it allows them to avoid the stress that accompanies exploration and experimentation, but they also miss the benefits that come from that exploration…,” she wrote in her book. “Foreclosure can occur when youth decline to experiment with the kinds of opportunities that provide positive reinforcement, receive misinformation, or experience success with an alternative without fully exploring other options.”
I wanted to move my students away from this mindset, so I worked with our Culture Team and then Home Office College Success Data Manager Gabe Gadoy to design and administer a survey given to all freshmen at our New Student Academy that would measure the levels of college-going identity development, identifying the 9th graders most at-risk of foreclosure
From there, the team and I created the Future Leaders program, which includes near-peer mentoring, a field trip to the Daniel’s Fund “Dream Accelerator” and career surveys to help these students reopen their identity exploration.
That was two years ago.
Now, cut to July of last year: I was talking to my coach about our plans to shift Prep Academy college seminars from once a month to a 2- or 3-day back-to-back blitz model, and brainstorming the correct timing for those when my coach made an offhand comment, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just take all freshmen for a week-long academy at the beginning of the year?” I immediately latched onto the idea and began daydreaming about what an offsite, retreat-style seminar could look like. The vision? A space where students could spend time reflecting and having conversations about the influences that shaped their plans for the future.
Throughout last year, I brought it up periodically in my coaching meetings, and what started as an offhand wish began to take shape. We made adjustments. A week was unrealistic, but what about a day?
All of these thoughts coalesced on that middle-of-the-night brain dump in late May. The next day, I reached out to our 9th Grade Dean, and our newly announced School Director, Shannon King. They were as excited as I was, and I got the go-ahead to start looking at locations and dates before summer break.
While I originally envisioned a retreat space near Southwest Denver with both indoor and outdoor space, my initial inquiries into retreat spaces within an hour of DSST: College View to accommodate 175+ students were well out of our price range. Then someone suggested a state park. I was skeptical. How would we engage students in deep conversations in the hottest August on record in Denver?
But she pushed me, and the more we looked into it, the more I saw an opportunity to engage kinesthetic learners and bridge the “nature gap” for students of color, who have historically had inequitable access to green spaces. We narrowed it down to Staunton State Park, only 40 minutes from CV, and with space to accommodate large groups in its picnic areas and amphitheater. And the unexpected bonus? They had an archery range. Our P.E. teacher teaches archery, and what better frame for goal-setting than a literal experience of aiming, balance and follow-through?
Coming back from break, I knew we needed to nail down a date and begin communicating to students. Ahead of the first day of school, Shannon and I worked to find an ideal date that was early enough in the semester to be effective, but also to minimize the loss of valuable in-class time. We settled on the second Wednesday of school. We locked in the reservation, reserved DPS buses, and sent Save-the-Dates.
I framed the day in three parts, using a tree metaphor. Station 1 would be about “Roots,” students exploring how their culture, experiences, role models and families shaped their goals for the future. Station 2 would be the “trunk,” where they would focus on who they were now. What values, beliefs and mindsets make them who they are. Finally, the third station would be “Branches,” a time for goal-setting, both academic and social. During this session, the PE coach would demonstrate the principles of archery, let some students try it, and then they would set goals for the year based on a GPA demonstration from our college seminar curriculum and a presentation from our Athletic Director on the importance of joining clubs and sports. We would end with lunch all together at the group picnic area.
That was the plan. Ambitious, but doable. For the most part, it worked. We built Advisory connections through intentional work outside the usual day and asked students to reflect deeply on who they are and where they want to go.
Everyone had a great overall day, and advisors shared some of the following quotes:
So yes, I think we’ll do it again. There is definitely room for improvement, but I am hopeful that we can make this a College View tradition that gets better every year. Now my next question is: how can we build on the successes we experienced that day to keep the conversation going throughout ninth grade?