Opinion: The Power of Students Teaching Students

When we first met Jared we knew he was a bit lost. On paper the 12-year-old boy did not stand apart from his classmates at Breakthrough New York: he had good grades, strong teacher recommendations, and came from a low-income family in the South Bronx that prized education and achievement over all else.

But as he arrived for his first day of our rigorous 5-week summer program, his emotions splattered out into the hallways, classrooms and cafeteria like an abstract painting. Jared (not his real name) was sullen and serious one moment, hyperactive and clownish the next, and inconsolably angry following a redirection from a teacher. He was falling behind on his homework, missing time in class because of misbehavior, all the while alienating his peers with erratic attempts to form friendships.

At Breakthrough New York, we support Jared and roughly 275 others each year with backgrounds similar to his on their journey to a college-prep high school and eventually a four-year college. So we know what 12 looks like, and it often resembles Jared’s volatile emotions and confusion. That’s exactly why we think middle school is a critical time in a child’s life. It’s a moment when the kids are impressionable and still open to guidance.

The key ingredients to success?  The willingness to work hard, to persevere, is one.  Our students spend more than 200 hours per year with us in rigorous academic programming during the summers and after-school in 7^th, 8^th and 9^th grade, and then receive continued monthly support throughout high school. Last year, 100 percent of our 8^th graders gained access to college-prep high schools, and 100 percent of our graduating seniors went on to a four-year college.

But we think there’s another factor at play, unique to our program: the young role models that Jared and the rest our students have at Breakthrough. Unique among similar college-access programs in New York City, Breakthrough New York uses a students-teaching-student model whereby all of our middle schoolers are taught and tutored by outstanding college and high school students.

In his first summer with us, we paired Jared with one of our very best. Reginald Hutchins, then a sophomore at Morehouse College, came from a background similar to Jared’s, albeit having grown up in Atlanta. Reginald and Jared formed an instant bond, with Reginald checking in on Jared’s progress in between classes, during snack time and lunch, and at the end of the day during advisory class.

Reginald worked with each of his students in advisory class to build self-esteem and pride in who they are, where they came from, and where they would be in the future. He asked Jared and his other advisees to keep a business card-sized cutout in their wallets of the three adjectives they wanted people to think of when they met them.  “Remember these,” he told them, “and come back to them when you don’t know who are you.”

Almost two years later, Jared still considers Reginald “my older brother that I never had.” They speak on the phone and over Facebook often, and when it came time for Jared to write his application essays for the prestigious high schools to which he was applying, he wrote about Reginald. “Describe a person you admire or who has influenced you a great deal,” one of the prompts asked.

Jared wrote movingly of how he identified closely with Reginald’s struggles – other Black peers teasing him for “acting too white”; having ambitious goals of leadership and scholarship that seemed difficult to square with current circumstances; and finally the lack a young figure in his life who could demonstrate what it meant to be African-American, proud, and high-achieving all at once. Until, of course, he met Reginald.

Why are role models so important to students such as Jared? Certainly many of his struggles were specific to his family and circumstances. But if think you can find a 12-year-old without angst, you’re living on a different planet.

In our experience, working with pre-teens and teens, the predominant similarity across social class, ethnicity and gender is the paradoxical longing to be accepted among a peer group while also forming a unique identity. Adolescents want to discover who they are, but they also want their friends to love who they are. When they can look up to older adolescents for cues, advice, and inspiration, 12 year-olds feel comforted that they are not alone – that it really does get better, and easier, over time.