7.  Writing a Document.     

Case Study #1: Anders High School

Imagine you are the Assistant to the Superintendent of Schools for the district that includes Anders High School.  Your boss tells you to use the information below to draft a document that will solve the problem.  Having glanced through the notes, he tells you that the solutions are likely to involve recommendations addressed to three audiences: 

• Department chairs of relevant academic disciplines (bio & math)
• Homeroom teachers or monitors
• The president of the PTA

Illustrate you skill at audience analysis by inferring specific actions that each group might take and by tacitly recognizing lines of authority.  For example, the principal cannot "order" the PTA president to do anything.  

Assignment:  

• Write a document that reports the problem and recommends how to solve it.  
• We will solve this problem by relying on collaborative writing.  
  We need four teams to produce four components of our final document:
  1. Document design & assembly:
     • decimal outline
     • statement of problem
     •  introduction (background, context)
     • documentation for assessment a year later
  2. Teachers:
     • recommendations to dept. heads &/or teachers
     • explanations 
  3. Parents:
     • recommendations to PTA
     • explanations 
  4. Home Room Monitors:
     • recommendations to home room monitors
     • explanations 

Constraints: 

	Use the decimal outline system.
	Remember that recommendations are like military orders.  You use an imperative mood ("you will") to specify:  Who,  What they are to do, and  When (a deadline).   If you wish to tell people how to implement recommendations or  Why the recommendations were made, you can do so under the headline of "Discussion."

Likely inferences: 

	"Social and cultural aspects of smoking" probably means peer pressure and advertising strategies involving Joe Camel, Marlborough cigarette ads on Nascar racers, Virginia Slims images for girls, Hollywood actors who look cool blowing smoke, etc.
	High school students are not likely to appreciate being called "children."
	The last paragraph envisions group counseling techniques that rely on a neutral facilitator to initiate discussion to involve everyone.  The group counseling process is designed to suspend the social roles constructed by student cliques, allowing students (or challenging them) to explore new perspectives. A facilitator may be provocative, for example, commenting that "women who smoke are sluts," knowing that several of the students' mothers smoke.  The intent is to provoke even the most silent and reluctant member of the group to talk.  Obviously, homeroom teachers are not trained to facilitate group counseling sessions.  Because you are concerned about audience needs, you must respond to the likely concerns of home room monitors whose first questions is going to be: "WHAT ME!!  I am not a baby sitter, not a counselor!  How am I suppose to do this?"

Smokers in Anders High School

Andrews High school was the scene on April 24 for a meeting between the school officials and the health-education consultant expert.  

Social and cultural aspects of smoking were discussed in order to reduce peer group pressure to smoke and to expose smoking for what it is, an unsafe and deadly habit.

In order to do this, it was suggested that PTA and parent groups can hold seminars.  It is also necessary that the child get an elementary understanding of the probability of statistics in school, that say he is more likely to die of lung cancer if he smokes than if he doesn’t.  The Amarillo American Cancer Society has statistics on this.

Parents are important people to a great majority of teenagers.  Parents are the role models for their children.  There is a relationship between parents who smoke and a child’s smoking.  

Work should be done with reference groups of youth, those to which they belong, since a persons attitudes and behavior are strongly influenced by the groups that offer reference perspectives to him.  This is something like what we use to see in the TV show Happy Days where Richie and the other high school kids sought to imitate anything The Fonz would do.  So if The Fonz smoked cigarettes, every one else would rush to light up exactly the brand of cigarettes that the Fonz unrolled from his tee-shirt sleeve.  Class room instruction and parental models cannot impact this peer group pressure.  What can is group counciling.  Homeroom teachers can set up such sessions in which no one has predefined roles to play out.  The facilitator should see that everyone is involved and take pains to not allow clique leaders to set an agenda.  The school consular knows how to conduct group sessions and can train home room teachers.  In-service teacher training days could also be used.  There are instructional videos in the library on this.

The above recommendations should be implemented as soon as possible.

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