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Better Decisions -  Better Lives Newsletter
Spring Summer 2009

Dear Friends of Decision Quality,

Decision Quality (DQ) is what the summer months are all about at DEF. We've scheduled numerous public and onsite educator workshops, and we're delighted at the positive feedback we've received from those who have attended the sessions to date. Of special significance is the successful debut of our newest teaching module, Improving Advisory and Counseling with Decision Quality, which we presented at Stanford University in mid-June and will repeat in Philadelphia in August.

Closer to home, our enhanced website is nearing completion. We think you'll like its new features, especially the online accessibility of curricula and teaching aids. We'll be making a public announcement when the new site officially launches.

We're pleased to share with you some of our recent activities in this newsletter. You'll notice that it has a new name, Better Decisions - Better Lives. We believe this fundamental concept needs to be reinforced at every opportunity.

Over the past few months, we've had the pleasure of seeing a number of you at various conferences, workshops, and special youth programs—many made possible by your generous donations of time, talent, and treasure. We're grateful for your ongoing support and enthusiasm for our mission—to improve the lives of young people by empowering them with effective decision skills.

Best wishes for a safe and healthy summer.

Sincerely

Carl S. Spetzler

Chairman

Welcome to Our Three New Board Members

DEF is delighted that three nationally-known educators—Nancy Golden, Thomas Goodman, and Jean Orvis—have joined its board of directors. Each brings years of experience and first-hand knowledge of the broader education community which will help enrich our programs and accelerate our outreach to teachers, administrators, and youth counselors.

Nancy Golden is superintendent of the Springfield, Oregon, School District and has been instrumental in DEF's partnership with A3 (Academy of Arts and Academics) in Springfield. Before joining Springfield Public Schools, she was director of the administrative licensure program at the University of Oregon, where she specialized in collaborative leadership, creativity, instructional strategies, facilitation, and personnel evaluation. Nancy has presented internationally and published on numerous topics including Teaching and Reaching At-Risk Youth, Toolkit for High Performance Teams and Educational Leadership Improvement Tool. In addition, she provided curriculum design consulting to the authors of Creative Decisionmaking: A Curriculum Materials Guide for Secondary School Educators.

Tom Goodman has an extensive background in education, having served as a teacher, superintendent, educational consultant, curriculum developer, and legislative advocate. Currently, he is superintendent of EMS/Opportunities for Learning/Options for Youth, organizations of nine charter schools serving 27,000 at- risk youth in California. He holds California lifetime credentials in general administration, general elementary teaching, and general secondary teaching and is a member of the American Association of School Administrators, the Association of California School Administrators, Southern California Superintendents' Association, Music Educators National Conference, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the Large City School Superintendents Association.

Jean Orvis is the founder and director of the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, an urban college preparatory school serving students in grades 6- 12—and the site of a recent DEF presentation to graduating seniors. She serves as vice-chair of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Commission on Accreditation, where she has participated in the creation of the standards and criteria that govern independent school accreditation practices throughout the United States, Canada, and many international schools. Within the Commission, she chairs the Committee on Schools of the Future. She is also a member and past president of the Board of Governors of the Pacific Northwest Association of Independent Schools (PNAIS) and serves on the Accreditation Committee and Standards Sub- Committee.

DEF Directors Praise Decision Science Projects at Omaha Magnet Schools

At its April quarterly meeting, DEF directors heard a presentation describing creative ways in which magnet school educators in the Omaha Public School District are integrating decision science into their programs.

DEF Program Director Jennifer Meyer described how two schools--Morton Magnet Middle School (Grades 5-8) and Benson High School Magnet (Grades 9-12)—emphasize the application of decision science to resolve community problems, using project-based learning. To illustrate, Jennifer highlighted some of Morton's current small-group decision initiatives, including issues such as:

• How can we engage with the Children's Respite Care Center?

• How do we work with the elderly?

• How can we help deaf students?

• What can we do to assist the homeless?

With respect to the Benson coursework, Jennifer described how students practice skills such as framing decisions on a variety of topics, including global warming, where questions asked include:

• How can the Benson community increase the number of people riding the bus?

• How can we help reduce litter in the Benson community

• How can we convince other Benson students to increase the number of plants and trees in the Benson area?

Jennifer also indicated that decision science is integrated into a number of mainstream classes throughout the Benson curriculum, including English, US history, economics, geography, chemistry, and algebra.

The directors were pleased to hear how the students in Omaha are applying decision science in real-life settings. They're looking forward to more updates as these innovative programs develop and progress.

School News

The list of DEF projects with partner schools and youth programs is growing every month. In Seattle, Carl and Chris Spetzler, along with SDG volunteer Steve Tani, recently completed an all-day workshop at the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, where they introduced members of the senior class to the Decision Chain, the Four Steps of Decision Quality, and the Decision Scoring Form. After initial presentations, the students worked on a "summer options" case study in which they looked at decisions about summer plans. The students presented their results using the medium of a poster contest, and the winner was decided by popular vote.

At Castilleja School in Palo Alto, John Frazier has been participating in several special projects, including Senior Leadership Week, where DEF partnered with a history teacher to develop curriculum for studying stakeholder values during and after a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. Castilleja was especially interested in examining how the values of stakeholders shift from the immediate crisis mode following a catastrophe to the long-term management of wide-scale disasters.

Boys' Latin of Philadelphia Charter School has just completed a school-wide project that used decision skills to tackle a critical race-related health issue: "Why are black men in America 1.5 times more likely to develop prostate cancer and two to three times more likely to die of the disease than white men?" As they worked on the project, the boys practiced elements of quality decision making-framing, values clarification, generating creative alternatives, gathering useful information, applying sound reasoning, and committing to follow through with a research paper, article, and group presentations.

At the end of May, DEF presented an onsite fundamentals training for teachers at the Oak Grove Center for Education Treatment and the Arts, a nonprofit residential and educational treatment center with two locations in Southern California (Murrieta and Perris). Oak Grove's mission is to support young people who have a variety of psychological, social, emotional, behavioral, medical, and neurological problems that hinder their ability to perform in a mainstream school setting. The Oak Grove administrators and teachers were enthusiastic about DEF's materials and are currently exploring ways to incorporate decision education into their existing day and residential programs. In addition, the director of the center's educational programs attended the summer courses at Stanford.

In early August, DEF will offer an onsite fundamentals training for teachers at Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, Calif. Established to train and prepare students historically under-represented in higher education to succeed in college, Eastside reports that 100 percent of its current graduates have enrolled in a four-year college. The school's successes were recently profiled in The San Jose Mercury News.

Additional DEF onsite summer trainings are planned at Bridges Academy, a college preparatory school in Los Angeles dedicated to educating "twice-exceptional" students-gifted and highly gifted students with learning differences. Bridges is considering implementing decision education into its curriculum and programs in 2010. We'll also be doing onsite trainings at The Haverford School (our first partner school and a strong supporter of DEF for more than four years), Morton Magnet Middle School and Benson High School Magnet in Omaha, and returning to Boys' Latin (see their story above).

 
Summer Workshop Report from Stanford

June marked the debut of our third course designed especially for educators--Improving Advisory and Counseling with Decision Quality, a 2 ½-day program presented by DEF and the Stanford Center for Professional Development. At the workshop, about 35 educators learned how to integrate decision skills into advisory and counseling relationships and programs in order to achieve established goals.

The course offered a variety of hands-on activities including role plays, scenarios, interactive discussions with DEF faculty and guest speakers, and small group projects using decision education curriculum resources developed specifically for advisory. Participants received a full, take-home set of lesson plans and materials to use with their students and were offered the opportunity to receive additional implementation support from DEF.

Before participating in the advisory/counseling course, the attendees also spent 2 ½ days studying Decision Quality for Educators, a prerequisite for the advisory/counseling session.

In addition to DEF instructors John Frazier, Jennifer Meyer, Cinnie Slack, and Carl Spetzler, the advisory session featured two widely-known experts in counseling and decision making-Dr. Ellen Porter-Honnet, director of the Stanley H. King Counseling Institute, and Clint Korver, decision consultant, professor of ethics, and author of Ethics for the Real World.

 
A Big Win for DEF: The Annie Duke Celebrity Poker Tournament

On Saturday, March 28, DEF board member and World Series of Poker champion Annie Duke joined four of her WSOP colleagues—Howard Lederer, Eric Brooks (also a DEF board member), Andy Bloch, and Erik Seidel—in hosting a fundraiser poker tournament to benefit DEF's Teacher Scholarship Fund.

Word spread of this first time-ever event that would bring together five poker champions plus leading tournament director, Matt Savage, and soon, two additional WSOP champs, Perry Friedman and Rafe Furst—members of a group calling itself The TiltBoys—had signed up to play. By the time we kicked off the evening at Dinah's Garden Hotel in Palo Alto, we had 38 seat sponsors and 144 players and spectators.

Guests enjoyed a cocktail buffet provided by Trader Vic's and competed to win a variety of great prizes including designer jewelry by Yvel, a Hawaiian vacation, a private plane ride over San Diego Bay to Catalina Island, a custom photo portrait, a pair of notebook computers, private poker lessons with Annie, a dinner at famous Bay area restaurants and more.

At the end of the evening, many wanted to know if the event, which raised over $100,000 for DEF, was going to be repeated next year and if so, when, so they could mark their calendars.

Magnet Schools of America 2009 Conference

On April 26-29, John Frazier, Paul Skov, and Betty Skov hosted a DEF booth at the 27th National Conference on Magnet Schools in Charlotte, N.C. At a breakout session on Tuesday morning, John presented Improving the Advisory/Counseling Setting with Decision Skills Training, where he shared some of the main concepts of the DEF summer advisory module with an audience that included magnet school teachers, administrators, and counselors. Attendees received a packet containing sample curriculum and DEF's Decision Quality: The Fundamentals of Making Good Decisions.

 
Annie Duke Goes to Haverford

On April 7, DEF Board Member Annie Duke visited The Haverford School, where she spoke with students and parents about decision making and the importance of solid decision skills.

Annie began the day with a talk to the Upper School boys, telling them that she makes her living by taking advantage of poor decision makers. (Visit The Haverford School site at http://www.haverford.org/podium/default.aspx? t=204?d=453687 to listen to her remarks.)

To illustrate obstacles to good decision making in a context to which the boys could relate, she used overconfidence and stereotyping as factors that would hinder securing useful information.

After the morning presentation, Annie and fellow DEF Board Member Eric Brooks had lunch with some of the senior boys enrolled in the "Chance and Choices" and "Decision Analysis" courses. Many of the boys indicated that Annie's talk was one of the best ones they had heard all year.

In an evening presentation to about 90 Haverford parents and interested friends, Annie focused on the implications of giving children ultimatums, linking this to the concept of going "all in" in poker. Like the earlier presentations, the adult session ended with a lively Q&A.

 
Local Community Events

Over the past few months, we've had several opportunities to meet members of local organizations. In January, DEF was invited to participate in a Tri- City Chamber of Commerce Mixer, where we hosted an information table and spoke with business owners from Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Los Altos. One of the Palo Alto members whom we met at the event invited us to present to the Palo Alto Kiwanis Club, which we did in March. For an audience of approximately 50 Kiwanis members, John Frazier and Betty Skov gave an overview of DEF and talked about the upcoming Stanford program. In a spirited Q&A session that followed the formal presentation, attendees expressed interest in following DEF's progress and suggested potential synergies within the community among nonprofits with similar goals.

In February, staff members Laurie Mandel, Diana Pickett, Paul and Betty Skov, plus DEF Board Secretary Patty Harris and her family, attended a career fair hosted by the Northern California Girl Scouts at the Chabot Space and Science Center located at Chabot Community College in Oakland. At our table, we showed the Himalayan video, distributed literature, and spoke with a wide variety of girls, parents, teachers, counselors, and Girl Scout leaders, who were eager to hear more about DEF. Many indicated that they were taking our information back to their girls' schools.

In the Works at DEF: Parent Workshop

Parents. Teachers. Peers. All play a major role in influencing a young person's decisions and behavior. For decision skills to truly "take hold," they need to be reinforced—and practiced--as much as possible within each of these groups. To date, DEF's primary point of contact has been with teachers and students. We're currently developing a workshop for parents of teens and pre-teens, which will introduce the fundamentals of decision quality and provide tools and techniques for constructively and effectively transitioning decision power to young people. This fall, we will offer a pilot parent workshop in the Palo Alto area.

Philadelphia Summer Institute

DEF is pleased to announce that it is expanding its public workshop offerings to include a summer institute for educators in the greater Philadelphia area. The Haverford School will host the five-day event, which will feature Decision Quality for Educators (DQE) during the first 2 ½ days and Improving Advisory and Counseling with Decision Quality during the second half of the week. Program Director Cinnie Slack reports that approximately 30 educators are already signed up for each session. "It's great to be able to serve teachers where they live and work," says Cinnie. "And the Philadelphia area is especially important for us, since we already have several strong partners there, with the potential of creating a DEF 'Center of Excellence,' where local teachers can support their colleagues through sharing best practices and classroom ideas."

Better Decisions - Better Lives is produced twice yearly by The Decision Education Foundation. If you would like to contribute to this newsletter, or if you have comments/corrections, please contact our editor, Betty Skov, at 650.475.4473 (betty@decisioneducation.org)

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