#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 use #bekindbeincredible 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.