Week Six: Feeling at Home!

Yet another amazing week in the books! 

With it being Spring Break for most schools around Arizona, the week was a little slower with less presentations. Nevertheless, I attended four presentations: two on substance abuse, one on healthy relationships, and another on body image.

As always it was such a pleasure to join Shane in his presentations on substance abuse (if you’ll remember I had the opportunity to hear his presentation 5 times during the presentations in Scottsdale I talked about a few weeks back).

There weren't many big surprises with the presentations this week. Though with the extra office time I was able to analyze even more surveys so that I can truly start analyzing these results.

A couple of especially cool things about the week: The office had our regular Tuesday staff meetings where each person reports on what’s been happening in their specific area. This week I had the opportunity to talk about how my research has been going and some of the conclusions that the research is leading to. It was amazing to share with the rest of the staff, and-- with a birthday in the office, my supervisors baby crawling around, and a lot more glittering (and now spray painting!) to prep for the Gala—Tuesday was an awesome day.

On another note, next week is Spring Break!!! (Which isn’t nearly as exciting when you don’t go to school anymore) But… it is this time. I’m very excited and blessed to be attending the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington DC next week. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a lobbying group that advocates pro-Israel policies to Congress and Executive Branch of the United States. Every year in Washington, DC they hold an event called Policy Conference (PC), which attracts over fifteen thousand pro-Israel advocates from across the world. PC is the largest gathering of America’s pro-Israel community. Through demonstrations of groundbreaking Israeli innovations, keynote speeches by American and Israeli leaders, inspiring moments on stage, and intimate educational sessions, Policy Conference delegates such as me experience the full scale of pro-Israel activism in three powerful days. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to see keynote speakers such as Vice President Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (via satellite), Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and the leading presidential candidates. This amazing opportunity plus some snow in DC is sure to make for an amazing experience and the perfect way to spend any week. 

See you soon!

Shir

Results?? Part One of Many

Hello all!

It is the end of week five and we are officially at the half way point! This week was another busy week but for sure much more calm! I attended five presentations: three student and two adult, all which had a specific interesting aspect to them. However, this week on the blog I won't be talking about my week's presentations. The past few weeks I've been talking about what I've been doing to collect data and what that has looked like. This week we are going to start talking about what all of these observations and surveys are adding up too!

Oh don't get to excited...

I'm not going to be giving up all the results that easy...

Good try though...

No today we are going to talk about one question on the survey which asks: "I feel like I can relate to this topic: Yes, No Opinion, No"

First I have to give some background on how I analyze the surveys. Since the surveys are simply on a sheet of paper (not a scantron or any computer system because... well... we are a non profit (though we are looking into changing this for the future, an exciting development!)), I have to analyze the surveys by hand. Yes, you guessed it, this means counting by hand how many people said yes to each question and how many people said no opinion or no. I then take a percentage of the total of surveys completed for the presentation (Key word completed) and report that in the results.

For this first question, "I feel like I can relate to this topic", so far the results have been pretty consistent with how successful the presentation seemed to be just from the primary data (check back to the introduction blog posts for an explanation on the primary data). However, after analyzing this question for the set of high school presentations-- at the very wealthy/well off high school and  other wise successful presentation I spoke about last week-- the results were for this question were inconsistent with the rest of the results. In fact, on average between the 7 presentations, the average percent of students who answered yes was .20009 which is extremely low considering how successful the presentations were.

The question is why???

There a couple reasons that could explain this
1) The presentation was about substance abuse. Answering yes to the question may seem to high schoolers as if they are admitting to using substances.
2) The substance abuse presentations involve very hard and intense substances. High schoolers may think, "well I never considering using a hard drug like that so no, I don't relate."

It's certainly interesting. Keep reading for even more results!

On another note I enjoyed helping prepare for the Gala coming up in April with some crafting!

I'm quite the master glitter-er if I may say so myself!!

Until next time!!

Shir

The Power of Authority

And thus week four comes to an end!

Hello all!

It has certainly been a busy week! This week I attended 10 presentations (I wasn't lying when I said busy!). Ranging from a high school in Arizona's most wealthy zip code to a Title 1 elementary school in Phoenix, the week provided a wide range of presentations and certainly a lot to think about. In this post I am going to focus on one factor in particular that really surfaced this past week. For the time being, I will still be leaving specific school names out of these blog posts but I will nevertheless give us much detail as I can to make this as interesting as possible.

On Thursday I attended 6 presentations back to back at a High School in Arizona's wealthiest zip code. This particular zip code ranks number 8 in highest graduation rate and faces few of the problems most other schools face. In the past presentations I've attended of schools that are on the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, the administrators very apparently seem less grateful for the presentations. Thus, they are less invested in the presentation and don't make as much of an effort to ensure that the presentation goes well. However, this particular high school did not fall into the trap of ingratitude. Rather, perhaps more than in any other school, the administration was very invested in making sure the students behaved during the presentation.

During 4 of the 6 presentations an administrator/official made it a point to introduce both the presenter and I and firmly, though kindly, told students to put their phones away and put their backpacks on the floor.  Saying, "I wouldn't ask you to put your phones away and devote your attention to this unless I truly thought it was an important topic", the administrator perfectly set the tone. And the results were immediately apparent. In fact, only during the two presentations in which the administrator was not present did the students get rowdy, a huge feat considering we are asking of freshman in high school to pay attention and be respectful for a whole hour.

I think this says a lot to the power of the authority in schools. When the authority took the time to stand up and say that this is important to them and to recognize that they are asking a lot but are asking it for a good reason, the students responded positively. It's a huge factor in ensuring that students are receptive to the presentation. And more over, it allowed the presenter to focus solely on the presentation and the story, rather than worrying about keeping the students (and in some truly frustrating cases the teachers!) from being rowdy.

Stay tuned for more news!

Until next time,
Shir