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Roots of Empathy specifically encourages the baby's family to bring in their language, songs, and customs. It acknowledges each student’s temperaments well.
5. Promising Practices These practices were identified by the IMPAQ team and grantees to have made a difference and to have promise as being transferable and useful to other schools implementing SEL programs. •
Ānuenue — School leadership found that increasing the amount of information shared with teachers about trauma-informed practices in their faculty meetings has helped increase empathy for students with significant behavioral issues and ensured everyone on campus feels a sense of urgency and responsibility for creating an inclusive environment.
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‘Ele‘ele - The school used grant funds to support ten p4c teachers who meet as a group after school to talk about what has been working, challenges teachers face, and possible strategies to try. The teachers also received professional development during this time.
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‘Ewa Makai — Middle School Student for a Day was a teacher/student shadowing activity. The teachers wore the uniform, carried a backpack, went from class to class, and students treated them like students. The teachers found it to be a very eye-opening exercise in empathy. Knowing that the adults cared enough to put themselves through the exercise made the students feel very heard and appreciated.
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Honolulu Waldorf — The schools’ student support committee adopted a “three-legged-stool model”, supporting academic, behavioral, and SEL in their students with a point person for each “leg” at both the lower school and the high school. This resulted in a close look at behavioral supports and the schools’ current, punitive sounding, “strike” system. They moved to a new approach called TAB, or “take a breath”. Students used a reflection page to identify their behavior, how it affected others, identify their emotions and make a plan for the next time.
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Ka‘elepulu — The school counselor delivered Choose Love lessons in the context of p4c. Students discussed the Choose Love concepts in a circle, in p4c’s proscribed, respectful manner. This approach extended the short Choose Love lessons to a full 30 minutes, allowing students ample time to explore the topics.
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Kualapu‘u — A 6th grade teacher has implemented a system of Team Points, where Getting Along Together (GAT) teams in reading, writing, and social studies earned points for doing their work and could redeem their points for snacks. The teacher tracked individual and group points, including the reasons points were awarded or taken away.
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Laupāhoehoe — The school changed their bell schedule to accommodate two periods of dedicated SEL instruction per week. All students received 50 minutes of SEL curriculum instruction twice a week. This dedicated and consistent SEL time was beneficial to both teachers and students as they practiced their SEL skills.
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St. Andrew’s — The SEL team created a bimonthly, in-house, 2-page newsletter called The RULER Review. The newsletter kept faculty and staff up to date on which RULER tools to focus on for the month, and which to start getting ready to teach. The newsletters included links to pedagogical videos, reminders of upcoming RULER events, and photos of RULER in action in classrooms.
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Volcano — The school implemented strategies to describe incidents not with labels such as “bullying”, but rather with descriptions of the actual behaviors that caused distress. This
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Pillars of Peace SEL Evaluation – Executive Summary July 2020