Monday

Schools begin the week on Monday with a Be Good People Lesson. The skill Lessons are the core of Be Good People, and they explicitly define the what/why/how/when of a particular skill (ex. "Showing Empathy").

Tuesday-Friday

Extension Activities (ex. read aloud books, songs) and Community Building activities are used throughout the rest of each week, building on the skill of the week topic. 

There is pre-planned content in the elementary pacing guide templates, but teachers/grade level teams are encouraged to adjust the pacing guides to include their preferred activities.

This is also where teachers and grade-level teams have an opportunity to be responsive. For example, if the kindergarten team is seeing issues with pushing and shoving on the playground, they might insert content into their pacing guide to address that issue and re-teach expectations.

The "skill of the week" ensures that we're proactively building skills and addressing grade-level standards, but the pacing guide structure ensures there's still room for teachers to be responsive to short-term needs.

Lesson Flexing

Tuesday might be designated as a flex day where teachers have the option to finish their lesson if it wasn't completed on Monday. Because each lesson ends with five practice scenarios, teachers also often use these throughout the week. 

For example, a teacher might spend Monday reviewing the what/why/how of the skill and then ending by modeling the first scenario. On Tuesday, the same teacher might play the read aloud book in his pacing guide, lead a discussion about the book, and then re-open the lesson to practice the second scenario. Wednesday would proceed in the same fashion, etc.

"Tight vs. Loose"

Administrators typically treat the "skill of the week" / the Monday lesson as "tight" and the Tues.-Friday activities as "loose" (i.e., "We are going to start every single week with a skill/lesson, but the rest of the week you have flexibility to adjust your pacing guide as a grade level team.").

Be Good People lessons and activities can be taught in virtually any order. The pacing guide templates (below) are organized into "clusters" of related topics, like a unit. They follow this general topic sequence:

• 🍂 Fall: "School basics" and study skills

• ⛄ Winter: Mental health

• 🌱 Spring: Social skills and problem solving

Schools are welcome to re-order their "skill of the week" sequence. For example, early elementary teachers (K-1) sometimes prefer to "sprinkle" a general topic area (ex. emotions and calming strategies) across the school year so they can keep coming back to it vs. clustering those activities together.

⚠️ If you do modify your pacing guide sequence, be sure to adjust the links on the Table of Contents slide.

Many secondary schools have a daily advisory block; however, Be Good People instruction typically will not occur daily.

The secondary pacing guide templates (below) include an "Our Weekly Schedule" slide. It provides an example of how schools can designate each day of the week for a specific purpose (ex. Tuesday and Friday could be for rotating 1-on-1 check-ins between student and advisor). 

For the day of the week that Be Good People instruction is scheduled (e.g., Wednesday), weekly "AGENDA" slides list the sequence of activities.

The pacing guide "hub" spreadsheet has an example tab for each type of model:

• In a single-grade level model, simply have each grade level follow their matching pacing guide. 

• In a mixed-grade level model, rotate each year to a new pacing guide until you can start over because all students have graduated (e.g., 4 separate pacing guides for a 9-12 school).

Be Good People materials don't all represent the same level of rigor. Here's "the rigor continuum" (high-to-low rigor):

1. Lessons

2. Extensions

3. Advisory "Bites" (~2 slide bite-sized extensions that are designed to be embedded into a secondary pacing guide)

4. Community Building

By default, the pacing guide templates (below) alternate between #1, #2, and #4 relatively evenly.

Swapping in Bite-Sized Activities

The older students get, the more teachers tend to prefer low-rigor advisory activities. ⚠️ Grades 6-8 should keep the rigor level high, but especially in grades 9-12, consider swapping in 🟢 Advisory Bites.

When browsing Be Good People materials, look for the "🟢 Advisory Bites" heading (give it a try right now) to check out short (~2 slides), simple activities designed to be copied-and-pasted directly into your advisory pacing guide.

If you make your own "bites" and/or engage student leadership in designing activities, 💗 please pitch in by sharing your own Bite-Sized Insights with Nic. You can help build the library of activities that all schools have to choose from!

Topic Selection: Pre-Planned vs. "Build as You Go"

The pacing guide templates below are pre-populated with high-rigor content that addresses grade-level standards. 

If you prefer to "build as you go" and select activities that feel most relevant to school community needs at any given point in the school year, you can either adjust those pre-populated pacing guides and swap things out -OR- you might be better off starting with an "empty shell" template (6-8, 9-12). 

⚠️ The responsive, "build as you go" model is generally more appropriate for grades 9-12 and for high schools that are planning to heavily utilize the ~2 slide 🟢 Advisory Bites. These high schools often have a small team (including teachers) that meets monthly to select the next month of advisory topics.

Options

When middle or high schools don't have an advisory block but they still want to use Be Good People in core, they typically do one of two things — either:

• Embed Be Good People into a department (ex. social studies or health). Try to pick a course/dept. that all students will participate in, including students with disabilities. Often, a specific day of the week (ex. Friday) is allocated for Be Good People instruction.

• Embed Be Good People in a special course that all students take (ex. a Freshman Seminar course in a high school).

Pacing Guide

If you go down either one of these routes, you could certainly still use the Google Slides pacing guide templates (below).

However, in this scenario, schools often use a simple spreadsheet template.

"Rigor Continuum" Considerations

Remember, Be Good People materials don't all represent the same level of rigor. Here's "the rigor continuum" (high-to-low rigor):

1. Lessons

2. Extensions

3. Advisory "Bites" (~2 slide bite-sized extensions that are designed to be embedded into a secondary pacing guide)

4. Community Building

Often schools want a heavy dose of #3 and #4 in their advisory program. They're shorter and easier for all teachers to deliver effectively.

However, if you don't have an advisory program and you're instead embedding Be Good People in a dept./special course, focus on #1 and #2. The rigor is higher, and because you're involving a smaller number of teachers, it's easier to ensure that they're well trained and prepared to effectively deliver engaging instruction.

In order to support Tier 2, Tier 3, and SpEd interventions, Be Good People allows you to teach both on grade level skills and below grade level skills. By "on grade level" we're referring to the Minnesota benchmarks. 

For example, "Taking Turns" is a skill mapped to a K-3 benchmark. We expect typically developing students to master that skill before they reach 4th grade. However, Be Good People has versions of the "Taking Turns" lesson all the way up to 12th grade. The language, scenarios, etc. in the lesson change so that they are age appropriate, but you still have the ability to teach this below grade level skill to students who need to "close the gap" with their typically developing peers. 

Because the benchmark a lesson addresses is always listed on the materials, you can easily spot when you're teaching a below grade level skill. If, for example, you're looking at the "9-12" lesson for a skill but the listed benchmark references "4-5," that means you're teaching a below grade level skill.

The basic answer to this question is:

• You will almost certainly need to teach the student(s) more skills than the one(s) you've selected for progress monitoring.

• When you're deciding which skill(s) to progress monitor, pick the skill(s) and measurement procedure(s) that your team believes will best represent the student’s skill growth or lack thereof. 

More detailed progress monitoring guidance and examples are available via the Tier 2 Interventions and Tier 3/SpEd Interventions pages. 

If you're curious why we would need to teach more skills than we're progress monitoring, check out our page on Behavior Basics. Essentially, there's a web of basic, pre-requisite skills and complex, integrative skills. Students have unique gaps, and even though "not staying on task enough" may be the primary issue we're concerned with, we more than likely need to fill a few different skill gaps in order to move the needle on how much the student is on task.