Park Tudor Blogs

When feelings are running high in our country and in our community, and I can see it is weighing on my students, we have a Pass the Fisch session. The ground rules are simple: no one has to speak, and everything that is spoken in the room stays in the room with the understanding that they can follow up these sessions with our counselors. For particularly sensitive sessions, I post the four agreements of a courageous conversation outlined by Glenn Singleton from his work entitled Courageous Conversations about Race on my board:

1. Stay engaged.
2. Experience discomfort.
3. Speak your truth.
4. Expect and accept nonclosure.  

I tell my students to put their books away and circle up on the floor, and we grab the fish before I share some opening remarks to frame the conversation. And then I wait. Students speak at will, and they take turns speaking before throwing the fish to the next student who signals a desire to speak. Sometimes the session runs for ten minutes, and at other times it runs the period and students linger for a couple of minutes after the bell rings to allow the student holding the fish to finish.

Students benefit from sharing their feelings about issues much closer to home, too. They tentatively share what they want to say, and I model silent empathetic listening by leaning in and giving them my undivided attention; they know they are seen and heard.

The evening that a former Park Tudor student lost his father to a prolonged medical condition a number of years ago, he emailed me and asked for an emergency Pass the Fisch session the next morning. He asked that [retired US counselor] Mrs. Grinkmeyer join us and that she bring our school dog, Peyton, too. Mrs. Grinkmeyer arrived with our cherished school dog and a couple of boxes of Kleenex and dropped to the floor to be there with his class to honor his father and share his grief with his Park Tudor family. This young man came to school for the sole purpose of having all of us gather for this one session first period, and then he went home to be with his family. It was one of the most touching 45 minutes of my career. Our outstanding counseling staff have followed up a number of times to provide our students with the professional support necessary to help them as students ask for that help.

While this practice honors students’ wellness and well-being, it also helps prepare them to fully engage in their academic learning. In the late 1990s, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) took off as educators sought out curriculum to develop strategies to be more intentional in helping students grapple with their feelings in a supportive environment. Glenn Whitman says in Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education,

Students need to love their limbic system and recognize the impact stress, fear, and fatigue have on their higher-order thinking and memory parts of the brain” (27).

Before students can be mentally sharp in engaging in our course curriculum, they need to process their thoughts and feelings.

Many former students realize the value of this mechanism in hindsight once they have left the classroom. During the 2016 presidential election, former students, ranging in age from 19 to 42, called for a Pass the Fisch. Many who had never stepped foot on the Park Tudor campus found their way to my classroom on a weeknight, and their ages and life situations fell away as they shared their feelings and listened to one another for almost two hours. Both our present students and our graduates know all of us are here for them and that this is a safe place to help them grapple with major decisions in their lives.

Park Tudor class of 2018 graduate Katie Ito recently sent me the following message about what these sessions meant to her:

Pass the Fisch will always equal safety in my mind. It was the very place I learned to be vulnerable. It was the sacred ground for the cultivation of my boldness amidst the imperfection.”