Making Our Values Visible

Hello Everyone,

 

I hope you are having a wonderful week. We are heading into Winterim and then will be in the final leg of the school year, which always flies by. At this time of year, we are already beginning to plan for next year. Students have been or soon will be making course selections in Upper and Middle School, and candidates for open positions are coming to campus.

 

Last week, I was speaking to a candidate about what sets Dawson apart. He mentioned that in his time on campus, he had noticed that students and teachers had strong connections – much more so than in other schools he had worked. And he noted that there was a happy energy underlying the students and the campus in general. I was glad to see that this energy was noticeable to others since it’s something we work thoughtfully and deliberately to promote.

 

Last week, I attended the National Association of Independent Schools annual conference, for which over 5,000 educators from independent school across the country gather to talk and learn from one another. There were impressive keynote speakers – Sir Ken Robinson and Brene Brown among them – and hundreds of presentations from school leaders about best practices. There were sessions about innovation, assessments, professional development, and every topic imaginable.

 

This year, I, along with a former colleague, had the chance to present at the conference on a topic that is near and dear to my heart. We talked about making your school’s values visible. Through an interactive presentation that invited participants to share with each other and with us using a polling mechanism, we talked about ways to cultivate values in school and, when students make poor decisions, how to use those values to guide conversations.

 

Each year, this process begins with the faculty. At the very first meeting of the year, when our K-8 faculty gather together, we develop a set of norms for the year based on the four core values of the school: respect, compassion, integrity, and courage. While the norms are similar from year to year, I feel strongly that the process of creating them each year is important to creating buy-in from the group. Also, rather than my simply telling them the norms I’d like us all to follow, we come up with them as a group. Once we have our set of norms, I put them in the header of every agenda that gets sent out over the course of the year as a reminder, and we refer back to them frequently. Our norms for the 2016-2017 year are as follows:

Similarly, the beginning of the year in the Middle School involves a similar process.  We have our four core values, which aren’t going to change, but it’s simply not effective to just tell the kids the values and move on. And so, the first advisory of the year involves students discussing the four values and talking about how we can incorporate these values into our daily lives. They may note that it takes courage to stand up to a friend when you disagree or that it’s compassionate to reach out to new students to make them feel welcome. They brainstorm a list of how they can demonstrate these values, and from those brainstorming sessions, we create a Middle School Constitution. The Preamble to the Constitution is always the same, except for the year. It reads, “We, the 2016-2017 Dawson Middle School, in order to form a more perfect community, establish RESPECT, ensure INTEGRITY, foster COURAGE, provide for COMPASSION, promote for ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution.”  Underneath the Preamble are four articles: one for each core value. And underneath those are the examples that students came up with. So, even though the Preamble and values are the same each year, the Constitution is different based on the students’ contributions.

 

Throughout the year, we come back to these values time and again in advisory, during community time, in classes, and in activities such as theater and sports. There are multiple opportunities for teachers to guide students to live by these values, and we try to create venues for this to occur organically. Of course, these are middle school students whose brains are still developing, and so they will make bad decisions along their journey towards adulthood. When that happens, we use the values to guide our conversations and their reflections on their actions. In helping students understand that the impact of their actions is likely more far-reaching than they realized, and in helping them see how some actions go against the values of the school, we can guide them to be thoughtful in their efforts to restore relationships and in making decisions in the future.

 

At the conference, we began our session talking about our own kids and what we have found to work best with them and with our students. When we approach them with a list of don’ts (don’t run in the hall, don’t chew gum, don’t cheat), they often shut down; however, if we focus on the do’s (be kind, treat each other with respect, do the right thing), we set them up to focus on the big picture and to aim to live by the core values each day.