By:
Rebecca Sawady, 7th & 8th grade Math
This year, we have an exciting new period in our day. On Monday and Friday mornings, students have extended homeroom until 9:25AM! This is a time for community building, for sharing, and for playing games. For many years, students have been gathering in the morning for our upper school equivalent of morning meetings: the Circle of Power and Respect (CPR). On a typical morning, students will greet each other and share their answers to prompts that can be serious (if you could visit any country in the world, where would you go and why) or silly (if you were a vegetable, what kind would you be and why). This is ideally coupled with a game or activity, but there is never time to do this before the start of 1st period at 8:55AM. The new advisory period, allows us the time to connect on a deeper level, to have important conversations, and to have some fun.
One of the key components of our social curriculum, Developmental Designs, is to encourage students to be active participants in creating the norms and structures that they need to succeed in school. Each year, upper school students participate in a constitutional convention where class representatives present the 5 norms for our social contract.
When students struggle to behave in ways that are consistent with our social contract, our goal is to help support students as they come to understand their behavior and how it impacts other people. Students have the opportunity to take breaks when needed to help them refocus. And if students are unable to refocus on their own, we have introduced a new process for supporting them. Students are asked to Reflect on what they did and Repair whatever damage their behavior has caused. The Reflect and Repair process also includes a conference with all parties involved.