Social-Emotional Recess
Bringing school of wonder To public schools
Throughout this past spring, New School graduate students, Max Helfand and Maria Paula Otero, joined School of Wonder as education and design researchers to launch a pilot program called Flip the Switch.
Max Helfand at the After School program
Maria Otero at the After School program
With the goal of adapting School of Wonder’s alternative education model and methods to a public education classroom setting, Flip the Switch helped bring social-emotional learning into a Bronx-based 5th grade classroom. Here is the origin story of how Max and Maria joined the School of Wonder community and how their work will evolve from here!
As students at the New School Parsons School of Design MFA program in Transdisciplinary Design, Max Helfand and Maria Otero decided in the fall of 2022 to team up to make their thesis project together that would be completed upon graduating in May 2023. As design researchers particularly interested in the intersection between public education and the role of play, emotional well-being, and creativity in students’ learning experiences, Max and Maria first came across School of Wonder through a casual Google search. Not shortly after reading through the website in January, they decided to send an email out of the blue to Marta, whose email was listed on the website. They mentioned their research and interests, explaining to Marta how exciting it would be to team up on a project where they could design a way to measure the impact of the School of Wonder programming. Marta responded immediately and enthusiastically. Max and Maria would join School of Wonder at the next After School Wednesday session.
Throughout the winter and early spring, Max and Maria attended After School Wednesdays and the Mid-Winter Camp held in February. They helped design missions for the Wonder Kids, experiences that combined constructive, improvisational, and imaginative forms play, empowering them to embody the School of Wonder tenets of creativity, community, well-being, stewardship, and sovereignty. So quickly, the Wonder Kids and Wonder Leaders felt the incredible presence of having these two magicians in the mix. As they created alongside us, a conversation began between them and Marta about what it could look like to have the methods of School of Wonder find home in a classroom setting, especially if that could include bridging the resources School of Wonder has with an underresourced public school.
In their graduate program, Max and Maria have researched how the increasingly standardized structure of public education has restrained children’s innate propensity for discovery and play. As standardization in public schools increased, three categories fall unnurtured as a result: creativity, imagination, and self-expression. Max and Maria site in their graduating thesis:
The traditional school day, defined by a one-size-fits-all approach and a lack of physical activity, is hardly optimized for student’s intellectual and social-emotional development. In an era of mass standardization, schools must incorporate more personalization and physical activity into the school day to adequately support students’ social-emotional and academic growth.
From what Max and Maria had observed so far, School of Wonder felt like the perfect program to introduce social-emotional learning into classrooms. In exploring what it could look like to take the School of Wonder methodology and use it to support teachers working in standardized schools, Max and Maria connected with Nicole, a 5th grade teacher at the South Bronx Classical Charter IV. They brought her into the conversation they had been having and learned that she was also eager to find ways to help her students ignite their creativity, well-being, and connectedness to one another while in the depths of a school year structured by strict test prep routines and practices.
Using the tenets and methodology of School of Wonder and Nicole’s guidance regarding design structure, Max, Maria, Marta, and several other School of Wonder educators came together over a series of meetings to design the pilot that would become Flip the Switch. The basic format would follow the following constraints that Nicole presented as a result of her current classroom setup:
Each activity could last no longer than 14 minutes, including time spent transitioning into and out of activities.
Because of the school’s limited space, all activities would need to happen inside the classroom.
They would need to manage noise levels so that the activities wouldn't disrupt neighboring classes.
Together with Marta, they created Flip the Switch:
“a collection of seven immersive activities that Nicole could use to disrupt the school day routine and create space for social-emotional learning in class. The activities we designed to explore how different parts of the body can be used to calibrate emotions and increase self-awareness. The seven switches strive to help students feel grounded, increase confidence, release energy, express emotions, find their authentic voice, envision success and practice gratitude.” — Social-Emotional Recess, Max Helfand and Maria Otero
The pilot began in April and lasted over four weeks, two sessions a week adding to a total of eight sessions (one session for evaluation). When Max and Maria met with Nicole following the pilot, they were excited to hear what she shared. Most notably, she mentioned feeling so grateful that the program required such little work from her, the teacher. She left feeling amazed by how a whole program could run in her classroom with minimal extra planning and how she could trust how effective it would be:
“At the end of the day I was like today was such a great day, the kids were so happy when we did this, and it was zero lift on my behalf. I'm actually doing something really cool for my kids that I love.” - Nicole
She also reflected on an effect the program had specifically on the class cohesion. During one of the seven activities called the Heart Switch, the students gathered in a circled and expressed appreciation to one another “popcorn” style by throwing a ball of yarn to another person in the room and then saying something they appreciate about the person. Nicole noted that after this specific session, the students felt a sense of community and respect between one another that hadn’t been there before. One student reflected:
“I like the heart switch because whenever I’m feeling alone or depressed I can hold the string and I’ll see every one of my friends.” - Student
As School of Wonder aims to foster this same sense of community and self-regulation in the live programming in Prospect Park, it felt exciting to receive feedback that implementing the methods into classrooms was working in some very special ways.
In a conversation with Max following the conclusion of the Flip the Switch pilot, he shared that School of Wonder received funding to design and administer a second pilot of the program, which this time will take place at PS499 in Queens this June. This second pilot will update the design
for the pilot with a focus on including more physical activities and discovery-based experiences that will continue encouraging the students to explore more from a place of autonomy and curiosity. It will also improve the evaluation component of the program, allowing for a more robust and holistic understanding of the pilot’s impact on the student’s overall well-being. Max will remain as an outside education and design consultant for School of Wonder through the summer.
In this same conversation, Max reflected on his experience with School of Wonder so far. He expressed his gratitude for having the opportunity to execute such important research, especially in schools that lack the resources to provide outdoor space for students to wonder and explore during the school day. He also reflected specifically on working at School of Wonder’s live programming in Prospect Park:
“It has felt restorative to reconnect with my own wonder,” Max says, “as well as the opportunity to learn from the kids and remind myself who really is the expert of wonders. It’s the kids, they are the experts in wonder and imagination. I have felt grateful to exercise that muscle again alongside them.”
From School of Wonder to Max and Maria: we want to say thank you and hope this serves as a celebration of the wonder you brought to our programming that will live on in the future endeavors of School of Wonder.
Max (he/him) is from Los Angeles and Maria (she/her) is from Cali, Colombia. They graduated this May 2023 with their MFA in Transdiscinplinary Design. Their final thesis project can be read here. If you’d like more information about our after school program, you can read more or register here!
