This winter, Falmouth High School students took part in a social-emotional learning program that aims to change lives. It’s called Challenge Day, and it’s a day-long workshop put on by a company that takes the program all over the world.
Falmouth High School’s Challenge Day was in a gymnasium. Nearly 100 students signed up, some with the encouragement of their teachers.
The workshop went all day, but much of it was confidential. That’s because some of the activities encourage students to open up to one another about deeply personal experiences.
One such activity was what students called the “step over the line challenge.” The exercise starts with a big line of masking tape along the floor. Then a Challenge Day staff member reads a list of statements. Students step over the line if they relate to any of those statements.
From talking with students after the workshop, it’s clear that the exercise was a meaningful experience for a lot of them.
“That was really impactful for me to see how many people have gone through the same things,” sophomore Kinleigh said. “All the hardships people have been through…they're not alone.”
Several students brought up the fact that the step over the line challenge allowed kids to share with the group without having to use words. Kinleigh said she thought people wouldn’t have shared so openly during the activity if they had to actually talk about what they’d been through.
Challenge Day claims it can change students’ lives by building connections across differences. Falmouth High School Adjustment Counselor Katie Fauth was one of the people who helped bring this workshop to the school.
“You can't learn and access curriculum and state standards unless your social emotional needs are met,” Fauth said. “Until we as a country, state, town figure out how to make this more the norm, kids aren't going to learn to retain information.”
Toward the end of the workshop, the students were sitting in groups, each with four kids and one adult. These small groups were called family groups. The idea is that you don't know anyone in your family group very well at the beginning of the session, though that changes by the end.
That was the case for sophomore Jonas.
“We all got to learn [about] each other, even though we didn't know each other,” he said. “It just made me [think], you don't gotta be scared and hold things in. You can let things out.”
It may come as a surprise that nearly 100 teenagers signed up for a workshop about feelings. But it turned out, a lot of them didn’t really know what they were signing up for.
“Originally, I thought I was going to be, like, physical activities,” sophomore Shakeila said.
Even though the day was different than she expected, Shakeila still said she was glad to be there.
“I actually really enjoyed it,” she said. “I feel more close to the people around me, and now I can be more aware of the things that I say around them and how it can affect them.”
Falmouth High health and physical education teacher Caitlin Dugre, who helped organize the event, described how she presented Challenge Day to her classes in a way that would get them interested.
“I said, ‘Listen, Challenge Day is all about building community and having us get to know each other really well,” Dugre said. “And though I couldn't give them a ton of detail, I said, ‘I can guarantee you this can be a life-changing experience.’”
And several of the students said that was true, that it was a life-changing experience.
For the last activity in the workshop, the kids broke into pairs. Each person had to take a turn telling their partner what they liked about themselves, while the other partner was supposed to be cheering them on.
And the students delivered. They were getting out of their seats, jumping up and down, singing the praises of classmates who they barely knew when they got to school that morning.
“We had a big chunk of what I call wallflowers and students that we have worried about what appears to be a lack of connection for them here at the high school,” Dugre said. “We also had our go-to student leader hoorah crew. We had it all.”
According to the Challenge Day website, a day-long workshop cost $5,000 for the 2023-2024 school year. Falmouth High’s Challenge Day was paid for by the nonprofit William’s Be Yourself Challenge, Fauth said. The organization was started by the Shaws, a family with roots in Falmouth.
