Skip to main content

#bekindbeincredible

#bekindbeincredible

When you get a group of talented, enthusiastic, and passionate educators together to talk about school-wide positive behavior support in the summer, great and exciting things are bound to happen. And that is exactly what occurred the other day, a few weeks before the start of the 2018-2019 school year.

I am fortunate enough to work along side these talented, enthusiastic, and passionate educators as principal, and when we sat down to discuss our goals for the year and how we would accomplish those goals, #bekindbeincredible was born.

Family Feud to Double Dare

As our school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) team began to plan our theme and what our kickoff assembly would be, we focused on the five pillars we have always focused on (being safe, here, accountable, responsible, and prepared), plus being kind. We discussed some ideas but wanted to ensure that we kept our ideas relevant for our learners. So we first came up with The Incredibles against another "family" in a Family Feud kickoff assembly. However as we thought about keeping our ideas relevant for our learners, we discussed the idea of Double Dare, since it made it a comeback this summer; long overdue I might add. This immediately clicked and we were quickly able to brainstorm the kickoff assembly. Now we had, The Incredibles, Double Dare, slime, and me, the principal, getting slimmed at the end. But we also had something far bigger.

Be Kind 

This was a focus for us last year throughout our building, but we still wanted to emphasize and build upon it this year. We want everyone in the building to be kind to one another in and out of school. As we build upon the idea of being kind this year, we can do that by reaching out beyond our classrooms via Google Hangouts and Flipgrid. By reaching out to other schools and classrooms, being kind becomes instantly relevant to our students. We all need to stop thinking about just our classroom, and begin thinking about our school, our district, our state, our country, our world, because being kind doesn't just stop after our learners walk out of their classrooms. It is something that continues with them wherever they may go.

Be Incredible

As we were brainstorming for our kickoff assembly, the idea of #bekindbeincredible came about. At first, it was just a clever way to incorporate both kindness and The Incredibles to help make a catchy phrase for our learners to remember. However, the more we thought about it, being incredible goes beyond just the movie and catchy phrase. We want to encourage all in our building to be incredible and do incredible things both in and out of school. We want our learners to have a growth mindset and take risks. We want our learners to learn, un-learn, re-learn and then keep going forward. We want our learners to think about real-world issues and to try to solve them. We want our learners to find meaning in their education and profession. We want our learners to believe in themselves and others. We want our learners to be incredibly kind to others. We want our learners to know that each and everyone of them is incredible. In short, we want our learners to be incredible.

 #bekindbeincredible

We will be using the #bekindbeincredible all year long when we see our learners being kind and/or being incredible. I invite you to do the same with your learners this year. Let's all share the kind and incredible things that our learners do each and every day, all year long and see how powerful of an impact our learners can have.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

K.I.S.S.

Third week into the blended learning classroom and I felt pretty good with how things were going. Still a little messy. Still some bellyflops. But overall I was happy with the progression. Then, specials happened. This cut my class time down from 70 minutes to 50 minutes. Just when there was a flow starting to occur, I was forced to try to figure out the best approach to run the stations with a shortened class. I knew the day we would have specials would mean shortened class times. So it was not a surprise to me, but somehow that day just snuck up. What I discovered in trying to figure out the best approach for that day, turned out to be the best approach for every day. I ended up simplifying the stations and rotations, which made for a much more efficient class and positive comments from my students. I took that simplified approach into the rest of the week, and things really started to take off like I had been envisioning since last year. All I had to do was just keep things si...

Why I Left the Classroom for Administration

"So there looks like there might be an opportunity for you." At the time when I heard this, I was literally in the middle of having my best teaching year. My sixth grade blended learning classroom was going better than I could ever have imagined. I was "teaching like a PIRATE," engaging and empowering my students, making learning relevant and meaningful to them, learning along side of my students every day, watching them get that love for learning back, and getting to know my students better than ever. And yet, a career opportunity came up that made me leave all of that. Why I Thought Left When I was told, "So there looks like there might be an opportunity for you," I knew it was to step in as acting elementary principal for another principal in my district who needed to take a leave of absence. I did not know how long it would be, but I knew I had to take it. Opportunities like these do not come along often, and if I wanted to take the next step in ...

Snow Day? Shovel Your Way Out

It is 5:30 AM on a weekday during the winter and the phone rings. That can only mean one thing, SNOW DAY! I have to admit, at that moment, I do not feel like the 15 year veteran, sixth grade teacher I am, but rather, I feel like one of my sixth grade students. I roll back over in bed and fall back asleep, only to get woken up by my wife as she gets up to get ready for work (seems like she is extra loud getting ready on snow days...nah, she wouldn't do that, would she?). I tell her to, "Keep it down. I'm trying to sleep. I've got a snow day." That goes over about as well as getting a snowball in the face. Living in Pennsylvania, snow days are part of the school year and one of the great perks about being a teacher, unless you end up having too many of them. Then you have to make them up in the summer. Then they quickly become an inconvenience. They can also become an inconvenience with what you had planned for class those days. Inspired by Matt Miller's Dit...