Roots Habits of Success Standards map out the expectations of students outside of content mastery. Teachers use this sheet to review student progress on all standards and then review it directly with the student in progress monitoring. Roots anticipates that students will take a more direct role in self-assessing their development as they age.
This worksheet from Roots gives an example of how they integrate Habits of Success into their classroom practices.
Roots teacher, Megan Miles, shares how growth on Habits of Success skills is monitored throughout the year.
Transcript: Megan Miles: About three – four times a year, the other coach and I sit down and we have what we call our habits of success. And so that’s about – 20 different factors that we rank the kids on. So, like on a scale of one through four. And so, we can track their progress over the year. I mean, a lot of that is anecdotal and it’s what we’re seeing but we’re also checking in with the teachers and getting a pretty good sense. I was like, very nervous about that anecdotal setup at first, but what I noticed especially is I’m doing one-on-ones is, I always ask kids what they want their goals to be. And then, we actually have the habits of success data worksheet that we pull up so kids can see sort of where they are for each of these – when you break them down to like, our power habits, it’s about ten that the kids are looking through and seeing – and those sort of things like, – I follow directions the first time. I try even when it’s hard. I care about other people in my community. Those kinds of values that we want to stress with them. And honestly, nine times out of ten, the thing that they tell me that they want to work on is the thing that they have like, the lowest score on. The thing that they feel really good about is something they have the highest scores on. So, it’s actually interestingly been pretty aligned in this – like, as we’re going through and talking to the kids about them.
Roots teacher, Megan Miles, shares how ClassDojo is used to collect data on student behaviors in order to inform support provided to students.
Transcript: Megan Miles: right now what we do, and we’re trying to find a system – and most traditional behavior systems are based on this model where like you have the same kids all the time so you can track what they’re doing a little bit easier. So, we’ve been using ClassDojo, which all the teachers have on their phone. And we have different like, Dojos up for like showing our values, Dojos down for talking when you’re supposed to be silent. Or like, running when you’re not supposed to be running. Whatever that is. And so, we will give the kids Dojo down – a lot of it works more as like, an information system where at the end of the day, too, we can pull kids. So I can track kids throughout the day. I know exactly like, what they’re getting the dojos for, when they’re getting them, who’s giving them to them, so I can get a better sense of like, what’s triggering their behavior, and we also print out the reports every day at the end of the day, and those go home with the parents. So that way, like, parents are getting not only like, oh, your kid had a red day, or a green day, or whatever it was. But it’s like, your kid had like, 12 Dojos up, and they had them for this, this, this, this, and this; and they had 6 Dojos down, and it was for these three different things. So that way, parents can have conversations with their kids, too. They can also, which is one thing that’s really cool about Dojo is they can access the app in real-time. So I have – not every parent is using it, but it also have some parents like, honestly, I’ve had dads like, text me and be like, “All right, I need to talk to my daughter. I’m watching her Dojo. I know she has four dojos down. That is not acceptable. Can you have her call me?” And I was like, sure thing. And like, have those conversations in real-time with the kids, which is really cool.
Roots teacher, Megan Miles, is a Habits of Success teacher. She shares more about her role and what she does with students throughout the day.
Transcript: Megan Miles: part of our model is based on the idea that in addition to sort of the traditional academic skills that kids need to learn in order to be successful, they also need a lot of social and emotional skills in order to truly be successful. And what they found in a lot of studies are, kids might be able to learn the academics. But if they’re not learning these social and emotional skills, even if they make it to college or whatever it is, they don’t have the skills to cope when they’re out in the world. So, part of what we try to do here is teach them these coping skills, social and emotional skills from the very beginning. And so what that looks like is, I teach a class every morning called morning circle, and we go through a lot of these different skills. We also work with them one-on-one. So you’ll probably see me and the other coaches and habits of success team pulling kids all day when we notice like, behavior issues, and I try to sit them down, coach them through like, working through their problems. We’ve tried that a lot of different ways just recently. We made a worksheet called I Can Solve It, which is really great. It’s been helping kids a lot. So when they come to me with a problem, a lot of times they can say, let’s go get a worksheet and let’s talk about your tools to solve this. And so, we – we’re using a curriculum called “Dovetail” this year which goes through –it’s got 12 tools that kids are learning, like the breathing tool is a really good one. The garbage can tool, where if they have a little problem, they can take it out of their head and throw it away. So, and honestly, I never thought that one would work. That’s like, the very best one. I don’t know, four, five, and six year-olds are really good at just like, throwing little things out. So, it helps them move on with their day. And instead of getting angry or hitting or yelling or whatever it is, we’re trying to teach them like, use your words to solve this problem. What can you say? Use an I statement. Take some time, whatever it is that they need. Advocating for themselves is another big skill that we’re trying to teach them right now.
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