“Someone Help Me”

Tis the season for high school graduations. It is such a special time for graduates, their adults, and for the staff who have dedicated their time and talent to ensuring the success of all learners.

It is hard to describe what a magnificent feeling it is to sit on the stage and look out into the sea of faces. When there seem to be few things “sacred” anymore, graduations are a beautiful reminder of how ceremonies can unite us all and fuel gratitude and hope for the future.

There is one story from graduation this year that has stuck with me. When one of our graduates, a student with special needs, approached the steps to leave the stage after receiving her diploma, she did not see the adult at first who was there to help her down the steps. She said very clearly before taking her first step, “Someone help me.” An administrator swooped in alongside the adult who was there for her, and the rest of us seated on the stage found ourselves ready to spring into action too. We were all in sync in that moment. Call it instinct. Call it what you want to call it, but we were one person on one singular mission.

And that connection. That beautiful gift of connection and community was fostered by one young lady who knew to advocate for herself. There have been moments over the past year when I too have been in need of help. I’ve not asked. I’ve not advocated. My pride has kept me from asking others for what I’ve needed. While I know that is an area for personal growth, what I had not considered what the fact that asking for help is not just about supporting a person. When an individual asks for help, it can inspire the us-ness of the people around who simultaneously spring into action.

I recently learned about a concept psychologists call neural synchronization which essentially refers to the correlation of a group of people’s brain activity in response to the same stimulus. When a guitar player plays alone, the brain shows a certain level of activity. When a guitar player plays with a band, their brain activity lights up and that brain activity occurs in sync with the other members of the band. Perhaps this is why so many of us enjoy listening to live music, going to the theater, or sitting in sports arenas. There is something about these experiences that is transformational. Human connection flourishes when we share moments with others. It turns out our brains respond in similar ways during meaningful conversations and storytelling too. These moments make us feel super human. Like we can do more, be more, become more because we are not one person but many people working together.

This has me wondering about whether we have created an enough opportunities for shared experiences in school. We tend to be very all this and none of that as educators. Growing up, I can remember being excited to talk about an episode of a tv show with my friends the next day because I knew we all would have seen it for the first time that night. Or when I see friends from college, we can all lament or rejoice in the shared experiences we had with certain professors or while working on specific projects. Instantly, our sense of community is bolstered with the neural synchronization that accompanies nostalgia.

Choice in school is important, valuable, and engaging. But all choice with no connective tissue between classmates may be robbing us of the electricity that comes with being “in it” with each other. There are many ways to foster neural synchronization in choice-driven environments through collaborative learning experiences, tasks, and rich dialogue.

There are a lot of people out there who are a lot smarter than me who will have all kinds of creative ways to nurture this. I’m simply asking us to pay attention. I’m asking us to pay attention to how we feel when we leave a live performance or a ceremony. There is a reason why we feel so alive, hopeful, inspired, and capable. There is nothing like a sense of belonging that stems from being “in it” with others.

Let’s find opportunities this summer to put away our phones and enjoy the magic of being in the moment with others.

And perhaps let’s be a bit better about asking for help next school year. It’s not only a gift we will give to ourselves. It’s the gift of neural synchronization for those around us.