Behind the scenes: How did Honor Council prepare for a virtual honor week?

Like in previous years, the upper school Honor Council began preparations for this year’s Honor Week early in the fall semester. Starting in late August, council representatives spent their weekly meetings brainstorming ideas, drawing inspiration and incorporating feedback from past Honor Weeks.

“Things online definitely proved more difficult and really weird specifically in the context of Honor Week, because normally the focus of Honor Week is to have discussions about honor and to really reflect about how we can embrace honor in our community and what we see that has to do with honor around us,” junior Honor Council representative Rohan Thakur said. “In remote learning, it proved more difficult to have these casual conversations.”

To adapt to a remote environment, the Honor Council shifted the week’s activities to those that are both more accessible and engaging in an online format, incorporating two videos, fostering discussions during class meetings, creating environment-related challenges and holding an online plagiarism workshop in addition to sending out an anonymous online survey and its results. 

Despite a decrease in casual conversation about honor around campus, Honor Council representative Austina Xu (10) both appreciated the level of engagement and quality of student discussion during scheduled events like the plagiarism workshop, hosted jointly by HELM. 

“[Because we had time to prepare this year], this was the first time for people to have organized conversations solely dedicated to honor that were pre-planned and pre-arranged,” Austina said. “It’s the first time we get to properly assess how people are viewing honor, how people are incorporating it and reminding people how to utilize it in such a different medium.”

With the current circumstances came both benefits and drawbacks: even though some advisories experienced technical issues with signing the Honor Code digitally, Austina also noted that prevalent Schoology updates more effectively publicized the week’s events. Ultimately, one of Honor Council’s main goals for the week entailed provoking thoughtful reflection about whether individuals’ actions are contributing to the supportive and uplifting nature of the Harker community. 

“The main takeaway [from the week] would be, don’t forget these [tenets]. They’re easy to gloss over, but they are important. They are the fundamental building blocks of our society,” senior Honor Council representative Shray Alag said. “Without trusting each other or trusting your teacher or your teacher trusting you, we really can’t function as a school.”