We’ve all felt a certain anxiety during Wednesday morning’s All-School Meetings (ASM) as we watch various faculty members patrol the Chapel aisles, snatching illicit phones from student hands and storing them away for the dreaded 24-hour period. While no student likes to have his or her phone taken away, the very fact that such a punishment is necessary highlights a far deeper problem: few students actually give ASM speakers their full attention. The most engaging ASMs are invariably those that Andover students can relate to, either as individuals or as students of an influential and cosmopolitan institution. Thus, the most effective way to keep students interested in ASM is to increase the level of community participation and ensure that students can relate to speakers. Students are interested in what fellow members of their community have to say on social issues because we trust them to understand a topic’s global relevance, but also its relation to our everyday lives. At a Wellness Week workshop called TEDxPA this year, I watched as students independently led presentations on nutrition, disordered eating and sexual assault. The combination of valuable information and personal anecdotes these students used made it easy to understand even the topics we could not relate to directly. Their innate knowledge of Andover’s culture enabled them to describe each topics’ significance in the context of our community. Despite lasting over an hour and fifteen minutes, these talks held our attention so closely that no one in my workshop checked their phone even once. It would have been enormously beneficial for the entire school to hear what these students had to say, rather than just the 40 of us who had signed up for that workshop. Their talks were not only educational, but also served as a model of how student participation can make even challenging or sensitive topics seem more accessible. In the future, instead of introducing social issues to the student body as concepts too distant or complex for us to confront, I believe that members of the Andover community should supplement each ASM speakers’ presentation by discussing their personal experiences or the ways in which Andover students can engage with the topic at hand. This approach would hold our attention and enable us to get the most out of the ASMs that, despite being extremely valuable in content, often fail to capture the attention of an audience that can forget about each topic as soon as they walk out the door. Another, more simple way of incorporating more student-based projects and participation was demonstrated during Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair’s social media talk a few weeks ago, when a group of my peers read out a list of troubling online interactions that had been witnessed and submitted by other Andover students. Knowing that these words had already had a direct impact on my own community prompted me to be a little more attentive to Dr. Steiner-Adair’s presentation. Similarly, when music from students is featured in the opening of the meeting, I often find that my appreciation for the various passions and skills in our community becomes deeper. Student talent or student-made productions relating to the topic of the speaker on that particular wday would appeal to us both socially and artistically, and would help grab the interest of the audience by allowing us to establish a connection with the speaker and the Andover community beforehand. Although ASMs are already informative and inspiring, many speakers have no connection with the average Andover student, and as a result, cannot retain the audience’s interest despite the relevance of their topic. In order to fix this lack of attention, we should incorporate more student presentations and participations into the lineup of professional speakers, thereby enabling Andover students to relate on a personal level, as well as to understand the potential role our student body plays in resolving the social issues that ASMs so often focus on. The All School Meeting needs to connect with all aspects of the school: not just denote a standard weekly gathering in the Chapel.
