Empathy, Acceptance, and Fighting Discrimination at GPS

Georgetown Public Schools is committed to providing all students a well-rounded education. This includes the necessary academic content and the skills to manage, understand, and contribute to a complex and often difficult world. To this end, the curriculum at Georgetown has a deep focus on social-emotional connections and embeds values such as empathy, tolerance, and acceptance in its everyday curriculum. These values often do not show up in state or national standards nor are they assessed on the MCAS, which is why they are often referred to as “the hidden curriculum.” Nevertheless, it is essential that families and the community know how these issues are being address within the schools so that they may be reinforced outside of the school environment.

Below are descriptions of how empathy, acceptance, and inclusiveness are approached in schools. Creating a comprehensive list is not possible since many of these points come up as spur of the moment discussions, and educators use the “teachable moments” to address the values consistent with Georgetown mission. When developmentally appropriate, students are exposed to difficult issues and are given the opportunity to explore their root causes and consequences.

Bullying Prevention Curricula

Perley & Penn Brook

  • Bullying prevention curricula: Bully-proofing Your School – Thematic lessons include

    • Friendship

    • Making and Keeping Good Friends

    • Caring Acts

    • Kindness

    • Concept of Bullying

    • Rules of Bully-Proofing the Classroom

    • Teaching Strategies for Victims

    • Teaching Strategies for Helpers/Bystanders

    • Creating and Maintaining the Caring Majority

    • Collaboration with Parents, Family, and the Community

  • Integrated lessons are taught in Physical Education classes (carry over to sports)

  • Responsive Classroom Program, which teachers cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.

Penn Brook Georgetown Middle and High School Camp Kieve Leadership Curriculum for grades 6, 7 & 8:

  • 6th Grade: The Residential Program

  • 7th Grade: The In-School Outreach Program

  • 8th Grade: The Aspirations Program, with 9th grade follow up program.

  • 7th & 8th grade – Lions Quest Program: Skills for Adolescence, promotes good citizenship skills, core character values, and social-emtional skills and discouage the use of drugs, alcohol and violence.

  • 7th & 8th grades – Advisor-Advisee time block twice a month

  • Bullying prevention curricula: Bully-proofing Your School, taught in Wellness Classes, which are required at every grade level. Thematic lessons for the Middle School include:

    • Adolescent Development

    • Bullies, Victims, and Bystanders

    • Teasing and Sexual Harassment

    • Avoiding Victimization

    • Creating Caring Communities

Thematic lessons at the High School include:

  • Legal and personal consequences of bullying

  • Cyberbullying

  • Building a Classroom Community

  • Thinking Errors versus Straight Thinking

  • Embracing Diversity & Appreciating Differences

  • Understanding power, privilege, bias & discrimination

  • Emotional Impact of Bullying, including empathy, involved roles, consequences for individuals and groups

  • Power of the Bystanders: How to be part of the solution and not the problem

  • 6 additional bullying prevention lessons for the high school were created and added to Bully-proofing Your School during district Professional Developments through collaboration between Guidance and Health teachers.

  • Monthly staff meetings are held to assess and improve on the implementation of these lessons.

Resources and Training:

http://webhost.bridgew.edu/marc/ – MARC: Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center-Bullying and Cyberbullying Prevention

www.kieve.org

www.elizabethenglander.com http://www.bettereducator.com/program.aspx?programId=15

http://www.schoolengagement.org/index.cfm/Bully%20Proof%20Your%20School

www.bullybeware.com

http://www.responsiveclassroom.org/

Kindergarten Connections

  • Meetings as a team to discuss teaching empathy, tolerance, inclusiveness etc.

  • Address many of these issues on a daily basis in our teachable moments and interactions with children and through shared literature.

  • Ellen Bissaillion addresses all of these issues in her monthly friendship classes.

  • Amy Wahl, when she is able to come to our classes, also addresses these topics in social skills small groups and whole class lessons.

Second Grade Connections

  • Scholastic News

  • Responsive Classroom and morning meetings

  • Friendship groups run by Elizabeth C and Mike W.

  • Biography studies

  • School wide meetings

Third Grade Connections

  • Responsive classroom – We generate classroom rules at the beginning of the year, meet as a classroom community each morning to create a safe learning environment, and set clear expectations about how to treat others and behave in school.

  • CARES – we discuss and reinforce the ideas on the CARES tree.

  • Biography reading unit – This unit lends itself to discussions about segregation, discrimination, racism, tolerance, empathy and inclusiveness.

Fourth Grade Connections

  • In depth Immigration and Historical Fiction unit. These units touch on the hardships immigrants face/faced, especially when they are forced to leave their country due to war and persecution. In the Historical Fiction unit, we read Letters from Rifka where we focus on the persecution of Jews.

  • Ongoing Interactive Read Alouds during Reading. We tackle WWII, segregation, slavery, etc. Some of the books we use are The Other Side, Pink and Say, Number the Stars, The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963, Who Was Anne Frank?, The Cats in Krasinski Square, The Lotus Seed, When Jessie Came Across the Sea. Please know that all 4th grade teachers use most, but not all of these books….it varies by teacher which books we use.

Fifth Grade Connections

  • Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli – discuss racism and the Civil Rights movement as a theme in the text. We also read the picture book “Freedom Summer” by Deborah Wiles which centers on themes of racism and exclusion.

  • Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis – discussion of racism as a theme, racial discrimination during the Great Depression.

  • During our social studies unit on US Government, we discuss the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We relate it to rights that are being fought for in present day (with sensitivity to the age group we’re teaching) and briefly touch on the groups that have been discriminated against.

WELLNESS EDUCATION at GMHS

Introduction and Overview

As part of the school’s Mission Statement and Expectations for Student Learning, “students will take an active part in the learning process.” Wellness Education is an integral part of an individual’s total development. The Wellness department will include curriculum and activities that offer students the opportunity to develop sound concepts of physical growth. The curriculum is aligned with the Massachusetts Health Frameworks. Emphasis for physical development is based on continuing participation on a regularly scheduled basis. The main goal of the department is for students to fully recognize and be able to practice positive growth-promoting activities that they will carry into their adult lives.

Grade 7 Wellness

This course will provide students with the knowledge and skills that will enable them to make informed, responsible decisions about their personal health and wellness, as well as to contribute to the health and well-being of their families, school and community. A developmentally appropriate program covering various comprehensive health issues as well as team and individual fitness activities will be provided each quarter. Emphasis is placed on the following topic areas: enhancement of physical fitness, skill development, sportsmanship, personal health, tobacco use prevention, alcohol use/abuse prevention, violence prevention, interpersonal relationships, body systems, human sexuality, and disease prevention.

Grade 8 Wellness

This course will provide students with the knowledge and skills that will enable them to make informed, responsible decisions about their personal health and wellness, as well as to contribute to the health and well-being of their families, school and community. A developmentally appropriate program covering various comprehensive health issues as well as team and individual fitness activities will be provided each quarter. Emphasis is placed on the following topic areas: enhancement of physical fitness, skill development, sportsmanship, personal health, nutrition, mental health, substance use/abuse prevention, disease control and prevention, body systems, and consumer health.

WELLNESS EDUCATION – Gr 9 – 009, Gr 10 – 022, Gr 11 – 018, Gr 12- 019

This course will provide students with the knowledge and skills that will enable them to make informed, responsible decisions about their personal health and wellness, as well as to contribute to the health and well-being of their families, school and community. A developmentally appropriate program covering various comprehensive health issues as well as team and individual fitness activities will be provided each quarter. Emphasis is placed on the following topic areas: enhancement of physical fitness, skill development, good sportsmanship, appreciation of lifetime activities, personal health, disease prevention and control, nutrition, eating disorders, tobacco, alcohol and other drug use, injury prevention, violence prevention, basic first aid, mental and emotional health, consumer health, healthy relationships, community and environmental health, family life, and bullying/harassment prevention. A passing grade in 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade is required to graduate.

Middle/High School Social Studies Department

6th grade geography involves an investigation into the independence movements of Middle Eastern countries including Israel (WA.4) with the theme of Jewish migration as an optional topic for study.

More intensive study continues in the 7th grade. Specifically, students explore the history of Ancient Israel (2000 BC – 70 AD), the development of Judaism and its central tenets (as the first monotheistic religion) and the subsequent persecution of Jews – culminating in the first of a number of diasporas (“scattering”)

The Roman response to the rise of Christianity provides a second opportunity to explore Judaism (via a compare-contrast of the two monotheistic religions) and the theme of religious persecution

In addition, the 7th grade Social Studies Teachers join the 7th Grade ELA teachers on a cross curricular unit on a Holocaust themed book (currently, the Island on Bird Street- a semi-autobiographical book about a child who hides in the liquidated ghetto of Warsaw waiting for his father to return for him). Specifically, the 7th Grade Social Studies instructors teach a brief unit, (that introduces the concepts of the Holocaust, ghettos, the Nazi party and Kristallnacht) so that students have context for this text.

The 8th Grade curriculum includes a look at the rise of Islam and the patterns of interaction between the 3 major monotheistic religions.

Coverage of the scapegoating of Jews for the Bubonic Plague and the subsequent pogroms are covered in the 9th grade (due to how we split 8th Grade curriculum between World History and Civics)