Tag: Socially Connected

Sophia Thomas, teacher, explains how class competitions are used to motivate students.

Transcript: Sophia Thomas: I can set competitions for however long I choose. I started out with two week competitions. Then I switched to three week competitions. On a daily basis to earn points for your team, whenever you complete an assignment, on your dashboard you have to indicate complete. You have to put the score in, whatever score you’re self-reporting. This is how much I got. You’ve got to put that in. You’ve also got to select the date. Every time you do that in one day you add a point to your team. That extends to homework too.

Roots teacher, Megan Miles, talks about the value of one-on-one student conferencing

Transcript: Megan Miles: One thing that we do that I really love is that we have one-on-ones. So that’s what one of the coaches was doing this morning. I don’t know if you saw her. But every other day, we get to – we have an hour that we pull kids, and we actually have a meeting with them with like, how are you doing? Like, what – let’s go through each of your classes and talk about them. Let’s set goals for you. And so, that way, we absolutely meet every single kid, and then we’re also really in charge of just, I set all of the kids’ grove schedules, for example. So I’m talking to the teachers about what their academic priorities for each one of my kids – and then organizing their schedule based on that.

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.