I met with the chairs of my district's Wellness Committee yesterday, and ever since I have been thinking about what I can do as a school leader to support a healthy school community. Unfortunately, I have come to the stark realization that I am part of the problem. I'll grab my scarlet H, plaster it on my chest, and get real about my own wellness hypocrisy. See, I am the person who had to hedge an excuse for a box of decadent cake balls from the local Bosnian bakery sitting on my desk when a reporter came to talk to me about healthy school meals. I am the person who brought sinfully sweet gourmet cupcakes to celebrate a colleague's birthday last week. I enjoyed every crumb and didn’t even think about tagging a "sometimes food" disclaimer. I am the person who lived two blocks from work for six years…and drove there every day, all the while advocating for physical education and health literacy. Like all seismic cultural shifts, creating a distinct and shared culture of wellness in our district relies on individual people making individual decisions day in and day out to act in accordance with our professed beliefs. Once our "walk" matches our "talk" we have successfully shifted the culture. So today—and every day after—I will take deliberate steps to match my walk with my talk. Now that I've donned my scarlet H, you can all hold me accountable as I strive to model a life of wellness. I also urge each of you to think about the decisions you can make today to model a healthy lifestyle for your colleagues and your students.Share your "wellness hypocrisy." What deliberate steps are you taking to walk your talk this year?
Bridgette Wagoner, director of Educational Services for Waverly-Shell Rock Schools and former interim director of the Whole Child Award-winning Price Laboratory School, reflects on the process of creating a shared culture of wellness in her district while taking an honest look at her own wellness in "My Wellness Hypocrisy" on her blog Creating a Passion for Learning.
As August comes to a close and we conclude our focus on school staff wellness, Wagoner's reflections are a refreshing reminder that our own health and well-being contributes to our community's culture of wellness. Our struggles and victories are part of the process of creating a more healthy, balanced approach to living, learning, teaching, and leading.
A piece I wrote for the Washington Post last week got a fair bit of feedback. It was a summary of thoughts around a comment made at the recent Bullying Prevention Summit in Washington, D.C., and concerned a phrase used by one of the presenters, who described classrooms as a "community of 30." As I wrote in the article, the concept is not too remarkable...except when you consider the implications.
"Community of 30" is the idea that the school—and, more so, the classroom—is a place where students learn cognitively as well as socially and emotionally. Children are there to learn not only how to read, write, add, and subtract, but also how to work together as a group, a team, and a community.
We already have the structures and settings to guide this. Children test out behaviors in the home, typically a safe and finite environment to grow and practice social interactions. Interactions take place between a regulated number of people—immediate family, then extended family, friends, and neighbors—and around a fairly fixed set of issues.
In my thinking, if schools and classrooms are geared to be places where we not only learn skills and content, but also places where we learn to socialize, cooperate, collaborate, and work as a community, then surely we should be making a more overt effort to do this. Basically, if socialization is key to student growth and if we have environments designed to foster its growth, and if a lack of socialization skills can have detrimental effects on another key aspect of the school environment—cognitive development—then why don't we do a better job of articulating this?
At least, as Dr. Rodkin stated, it should be necessary for every teacher to understand what "this society of children is like at your very own school."
What do you think? Read the article and feel free to post a comment.
Post submitted by James S. Roberts, Ed.D., superintendent, Batesville (Ind.) Community School Corporation
For the past four years, the Batesville Community School Corporation (BCSC) has partnered with the American Cancer Society to conduct a 10-week Active for Life fitness challenge. Through this challenge, all staff members are encouraged to engage in some sort of physical activity for 30 minutes per day for at least five days per week.
To add motivation, a building competition is held within BCSC pitting all four school buildings and the Administration Building against one another! Records are kept detailing each employee’s activity and the building’s relationship to the goal set. The winning building is the one that has the highest ratio of participation rate to rate of goal accomplishment.
Batesville Middle School was a first-time winner during the 2009–10 school year, following back-to-back wins by Batesville Primary School in 2006–07 and 2007–08 and a win by Batesville Intermediate School in 2008–09. A traveling trophy is awarded to the winning building. Each individual meeting his or her goal, regardless of building, is presented with a commemorative T-shirt.
This year, we will expand our physical activity challenge to encompass most of the nine months of the school year and culminate with participation in the Indianapolis Mini Marathon held in May. The Mini Marathon annually has nearly 35,000 participants and is affiliated with the world-famous Indianapolis 500.
In September, project manager Andy Allen, associate principal at Batesville High School, will start setting up training teams and registering individuals for the Mini Marathon. Staff members will have the opportunity to run or walk the full 13.1 miles OR run or walk the 5K that is also a part of the day's festivities.
We hope to involve the greater community in this effort in a variety of ways, as invitations to join us have been extended to area businesses and students and their families will be asked to participate. Additionally, we hope to get the Batesville High School band and cheerleaders engaged by stationing them along the course to cheer on our Batesville runners and walkers. As our organizational efforts hit high gear with this ambitious challenge, I will be sure to update you on our progress.
What kind of events would you like to create in your school and community that would promote school staff wellness and a positive school climate?
Post submitted by Ronda Rumig, educator, Halton District School Board, Oakville, Ontario, Canada.
Over the last two years, I have been privileged to work with a group of colleagues at Iroquois Ridge High School (a Healthy School Communities site) who all agreed that staff wellness was an important aspect of a healthy school community. We focused our efforts in a couple of areas: physical/emotional wellness and relationship building.
We increased opportunities for staff to come together in a variety of ways through exercise, social activities, and healthy eating. Some of our initiatives took place during staff development time and others during lunch or after school. Here are some of the activities that were most memorable to me.
- Exercise Activities: Staff were given the first hour of a professional development (PD) day to take part in one of many activities, including archery, yoga, table tennis, indoor soccer, an outdoor walk, and badminton. Our aim was to provide many different levels of activity and to include many different interests.
- Photo Scavenger Hunt: Staff were divided into teams and asked to bring in one digital camera per team. Each team was given 60 minutes to complete the scavenger hunt, which required them to visit different areas within the school and our immediate community outside of the school and take pictures at each stop. Teams were given points for a variety of categories, such as team with the most points, first team to finish, and most creative group photo.
- Team Games: We opened one PD day with a team game session. Staff were divided into teams and completed a circuit of games. The games included activities such as scooterboard races, riddle-solving, keeping several beach balls in the air, and using newspapers and limited amounts of tape to build the tallest free-standing building.
- Healthy Snacks: We provided staff with healthy snacks in the staffroom during exam days when they would be spending many hours grading. This is a one way to provide staff with not only healthy nutrition, but also some time to unwind and socialize with other staff members.
- Staff-Led Walks: We provided staff with a personal pedometer and invited them to take part in several walks offered throughout the day for a few weeks. We counted our steps and logged them toward a community initiative where trees would be planted for every 10,000 steps taken.
- Recipe Fridays: For several months, staff shared healthy recipes every Friday in an attempt to introduce each other to new and healthy ingredients.
- Bracelet Making: One PD day we joined our efforts as a staff to make several hemp bracelets to be sold to raise money for the school we were building in Haiti. This was an excellent opportunity to build relationships and do something to help our global community.
A school and community that do not address bullying cannot ensure that each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. Bullying affects each critical dimension of a whole child approach to education because it compromises students' physical and emotional health and safety; affects their relationships with peers and adults in the school; creates barriers that prevent them from engaging in learning and connecting to the school and broader community; and affects their academic performance. When bullying goes unaddressed, it can create a negative school culture and organizational patterns that shape students' learning and development.
Join us Tuesday, September 7, on the Whole Child Podcast to learn how we can address bullying locally and nationally so that all students learn in a positive school climate that ensures they are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. You'll hear from these experts:
- Kevin Jennings, assistant deputy secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education, who will talk about what works in addressing bullying in schools and how the department plans to help schools and communities combat bullying and create healthy, safe, and supportive school climates.
- Penny Bisignano, Olweus Coordinator for the state of Iowa, will share her work supporting over thirty Olweus consultants and trainers across the state to deliver this comprehensive, school-wide program to reduce bullying among children, improve the social climate of classrooms, and reduce related antisocial behaviors, such as vandalism and truancy.
- Rachel Cole, high school guidance counselor at Malcolm Price Laboratory School (PLS) in Cedar Falls, Iowa (winner of the first-ever Vision in Action: The ASCD Whole Child Award), who will share how and why PLS created a bullying prevention program—Be a Buddy, Not a Bully!—for its elementary students. The program has since been adopted by schools worldwide.
California is ahead of the curve in mapping the health and well-being of its students statewide. The Lucile Packard Foundation's website Kidsdata catalogues all relevant health, wellness, risk, and resilience data available on students and stores it in a searchable website.
You can compare counties, and even school districts, by
- Connectedness, as well as caring relationships.
- High expectations.
- Meaningful participation.
- Safety.
- Physical health, fitness, obesity, or levels of activity.
- Mental health.
- Resilience.
- Risk-taking behaviors.
Post submitted by Sara J. Schmidt, mother, educator, and volunteer blogger for IDEA: The Institution for Democratic Education in America.
When I was studying to be a teacher, I had a discussion about my priorities with my grandmother. I told her about how I wanted my room to be a haven for the junior high kids I would be teaching. I wanted them to feel at home, where they could learn with open minds and open hearts. I wanted them to feel free to ask questions, experiment, play with words, and be creative. Rather than giving standardized tests, I would give relevant, oral and written assignments to challenge them and really glean what they had learned—not what they hadn’t.
To my surprise and disappointment, my hero looked me square in the eye and said that was nonsense, that all children need strict discipline and to just learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. I realized that my beloved grandmother, who encouraged me beyond anyone else, was simply speaking from her own time. After all, she’d had to drop out of school by the 8th grade to help raise her own siblings.
But not much has changed in the way of education since my grandmother’s time. Sure, we have iPods and computers, and typing classes are more mandatory than home economics—but the system itself has remained unchanged. Originally put into place to prepare children for the workhouse, American public schools continue to operate largely under this same modus operandi—though often masked with plenty of brightly colored bulletin boards and craft projects, and the occasional field trip to a local farm.
The fact remains that we continue to treat children as if they are going into the workhouse and not into the 21st century. Instead of focusing on test scores, we need to focus on the child. Worksheets, videos, and hours of homework intended to make children memorize answers to regurgitate on a multiple choice test do not encourage critical thinking, problem solving, self-direction, creativity, leadership, or even intelligence itself; all they do is teach one to play the game the system presents. Those who learn get by until college; those who do not—particularly the one in three kids who do not graduate—fall through the cracks.
What will teach children these skills? A whole child approach. By keeping our children healthy and safe, we can ensure that they have an environment conducive to learning. Could you learn with the threat of bullying, corporal punishment, humiliation, or harm looming over your shoulder? No. In fact, adults sue companies with working environments such as this. Why do we expect less for our children?
Engaging, supporting, and challenging children is integral to their development into creative leaders and intelligent problem solvers. Every child should have a support system that exists within his or her school, community, and family. He or she should feel engaged, with direct input on his or her education and direct support on his or her unique talents, interests, and abilities. He or she should feel safe enough to experiment, fail, and try again; and to question, invent, and solve.
Rather than making a one-size-fits-all shoe that students are pummeled into until their individuality and gifts are stripped—leaving a one-size-fits-all child who feels unvalued, ill-prepared, and not whole—an open array of educational options should be offered across the board.
This isn’t just in the best interest of the children—although that is a key and very necessary reason to adopt a whole child philosophy, as well as why parents in particular should support it. This is in the best interest of the nation. Rapidly developing technologies, new diseases and their remedies, the global economy and all of its challenges—all of these issues and more face the future leaders and thinkers of our country. In order to properly equip them to handle all of these issues—issues that will affect us and future generations—we must address children fully, wholly, as people, and not as memorized facts and figures or test scores.
Test scores do not solve problems.
Please write to your state board of education with me today and implore them to integrate a whole child approach into our education system as soon as possible. This may be the most important decision affecting America’s youth that they will ever face.
Post submitted by Mike Anderson, author of the forthcoming book The Well-Balanced Teacher: How to Work Smarter and Stay Sane Inside the Classroom and Out, and guest on this month's Whole Child Podcast
The school year is about to start! It's an exciting time of year, but it's also pretty hectic. There's the physical space to set up, lessons and units to prepare, students and families to get to know, and meetings to attend. All too often, we teachers find ourselves swamped with work right at the beginning of the year, and in a desperate attempt to start the year positively, we immediately move into overdrive, trying to do too much in too little time.
Before we know it, it's the middle of the year, we're still not caught up (we never really do, right?), and we've fallen into unhealthy patterns as we've tried to meet the impossible demands of our profession. I remember one year I got into the habit of stopping at Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's on the way to school every morning as I tried to get to school quickly to get extra work done. Six months and 25 pounds later, I had a hard habit to break!
We will all develop habits and patterns of behavior as a new school year begins. If we're proactive and thoughtful, we can get ourselves "stuck" in patterns of healthy behavior before bad habits emerge. Here are a few to consider:
The school year is about to start! It's an exciting time of year, but it's also pretty hectic. There's the physical space to set up, lessons and units to prepare, students and families to get to know, and meetings to attend. All too often, we teachers find ourselves swamped with work right at the beginning of the year, and in a desperate attempt to start the year positively, we immediately move into overdrive, trying to do too much in too little time.
Before we know it, it's the middle of the year, we're still not caught up (we never really do, right?), and we've fallen into unhealthy patterns as we've tried to meet the impossible demands of our profession. I remember one year I got into the habit of stopping at Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's on the way to school every morning as I tried to get to school quickly to get extra work done. Six months and 25 pounds later, I had a hard habit to break!
We will all develop habits and patterns of behavior as a new school year begins. If we're proactive and thoughtful, we can get ourselves "stuck" in patterns of healthy behavior before bad habits emerge. Here are a few to consider:
- Make exercise a part of your getting-to-school routine in the morning. Bring your school clothes to the gym or the pool, work out, and then shower and head right to school.
- Plan healthy snacks to eat at school every day. Make Sunday evening your time to prepare and pack good snacks for the week.
- Pick one day a week to connect with positive colleagues. Maybe it's Wednesday mornings for breakfast at a local diner. It could be Friday afternoon for happy hour. It might be Tuesday mornings at school for a fun book group. Set something up, invite positive colleagues, and then stick to it!
- Pick a day a week to do some journaling. A few minutes to write down reflections from the week can help you detect patterns and trends in your students and your teaching that can help improve your practice.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said some phrases and words that could have come directly from ASCD's Whole Child Initiative talking points while headlining the Bullying Prevention Summit yesterday in Washington, D.C. The phrasing bodes well as we look to ensure our students are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.
Key phrases around positive climate included:
- "a positive school climate is foundational" and
- "schools need to develop a culture of respect" and a "culture of trust"
The Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs (IWGYP), a collaborative of 12 federal agencies, is hosting a series of listening sessions around the country to gather input to inform the development of an overarching strategic plan for federal youth policy. On Tuesday, August 24, 2010, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., a session in Chicago, Ill., will focus on youth employment and transitions.
Use this session to share your ideas on how to improve youth outcomes, including ways to enhance the coordination, effectiveness, and efficiency of youth programs and policies. IWGYP wants to hear from state and local stakeholders, including
- Youth and families
- Practitioners
- Researchers
- Policymakers
- State and local affiliates of youth-serving organizations
