The Park School of Buffalo (NY), a PK–12 progressive and college preparatory school, has long prided itself on its commitment to kindness. We believe in educating the whole child and supporting our students’ social-emotional needs in addition to their academic development. At Park, kindness is both a core value and a signature program. Kindness is and always has been central to the work we do.In 2016–2017, Park set out to refresh its approach to kindness in our middle school by introducing Erase Meanness, a program designed by middle-level educator Eric Johnson. He conceived the original program in 2012 as a response to the meanness he saw in his sixth-grade class at LaSalle Elementary School in Mishawaka, Indiana. It was designed as a series of five 20-minute lessons to be delivered in a single week. Park implemented that original program with all of its middle school students in grades 5–8 and has since expanded it into four discrete, grade-level curricula to support the school’s focus on values such as empathy, respect, bravery, leadership, equity, and social justice.
Background
We encountered the Erase Meanness program for the first time in October 2016. Like all well-adjusted teachers who have mastered their work-life balance, we were sharing professional reading late at night and came across some resources for teaching kindness in schools. When a late-night scroll of articles on Facebook led us to a TED-Ed blog post about Johnson’s Erase Meanness program, it occurred to us that it was exactly what Park needed to both reinvigorate our kindness program and make it more visible in the curriculum.As classroom teachers and small group advisers who talk about kindness with students in grades 7–12 on a regular basis, we have always been conscious of the possibility that our emphasis on kindness could get stale. Park’s lower school students receive focused instruction on our four core values—respect, responsibility, honesty, and kindness—while middle and upper school students hear them as a steady refrain when we talk about our expectations. Many of our students stay with us for a decade or more, so it is possible that our talk of kindness starts to sound to some like white noise.
What struck us most immediately about Erase Meanness was its reversal of the kindness question and its emphasis on legacy. While Park’s work in this area had always emphasized acts of kindness both small and large, Johnson’s program posited a question about meanness in the world and its sources. We felt like this reversal—a focus on eradicating meanness as opposed to proliferating kindness—provided us a new pathway into the social-emotional work we had always done with our students. It was the fresh and innovative approach we were craving. The program’s central question—“How do you want to be remembered?”—pushes students to higher-order thinking about legacy and about the long-term impact of their daily choices that a focus on the micro world of kind acts just does not engage.
Our Approach
When we first implemented it in January 2017, our Erase Meanness program looked much like Johnson’s original plans and was delivered to all students in grades 5–8. Homeroom teachers were engaged as facilitators for each grade level, and Johnson’s adapted lesson plans were shared with all. We designated the last week in January as Erase Meanness Week, to align with the global Kids for Peace Great Kindness Challenge. Throughout our middle school, students were asked to think through and respond to questions about heroism, meanness, and the lasting effects of unkind behaviors. Most important, they were moving beyond an understanding of kind behaviors and starting to conceptualize what might be called an ethic of kindness, a way of moving through and engaging with a world that has kindness at its center.Nurturing that burgeoning ethic of kindness became the central focus of the next phase, which never would have come had we not received tremendous positive feedback from both students and our teacher-facilitators. Student feedback forms overwhelmingly rated the program “effective” or “highly effective,” while our facilitators thought the program was well-designed and highly relatable for their students. Based on that evidence, we knew the pilot program had been a success and that there was support for continuing our work. We also knew that because the same curriculum had been delivered to all students in grades 5–8, major changes would have to be made if we wanted to develop it into an annual program in our middle school. That was important because it was the best chance we had of continuing to foster the ethical growth we had seen in our students during that first year.
The program needed to expand, and we were committed to authoring and driving that expansion in a responsible and intentional way. At Park, faculty are charged in non-observation years with completing a professional development project of their choosing. In 2017–2018, the two of us teamed together on a joint project proposal to develop and implement discrete Erase Meanness curricula in each middle school grade.
Central to our planning was our desire to create a curriculum that was both spiraling and vertically aligned. We wanted each grade-level program to have its own conceptual focus, to build on what came before it, and to circle back to key touchstones of kindness such as respect, empathy, and understanding others’ perspectives. Further, we were committed to both laying conceptual foundations with our students and urging them to put those concepts into practice. We wanted to be sure that our students didn’t just know kindness, but that they acted with kindness. Lastly, because each week of programming would be separated by a full calendar year, we had to be realistic about student recall and find concrete and memorable ways to link each component of our Erase Meanness programming.
By design, each grade-level program concludes with students creating a visual representation of the week’s work.
- In fifth grade, when the program focuses on respect and empathy, everyone receives a “Compli-Mat” and students circulate the room, jotting compliments and positive shout-outs about their classmates.
- Sixth-graders use Drew Dudley’s “TED Talk” about everyday leadership as inspiration for remembering a “lollipop moment,” which Dudley defines as a time when one person’s small act makes a significant difference in someone else’s life. Students then share those moments on a bulletin board as a visual reminder of small acts of impactful leadership.
- In seventh grade, adapted from Johnson’s original Erase Meanness program, students reflect on the question of how they want to be remembered and then confront a litany of mean behaviors on a whiteboard by erasing them and replacing them with kind ones.
- Eighth-graders, whose program focuses on being agents of goodness in the world, work through DoSomething.org to complete social justice projects of their own choosing. In every case, students are engaged in active learning and are compelled to move from ideation to action.
Introducing all of this into our middle school did not come without sacrifices from our faculty. As is the case with any new program, implementing Erase Meanness meant taking time away from other vital work. Advisory, club, and seminar periods have to be sacrificed every year, and we anticipated some pushback from people who would not want to give up that time. But by engaging our teacher-facilitators as program allies and marketing the program to other middle school stakeholders and the wider faculty, we were able to establish a groundswell of support for this extension of our kindness programming.
Key Takeaways
Establishing a kindness curriculum can make the social-emotional education that is at the core of so many independent schools much more visible and intentional. Here are some insights we’ve learned from building such a program at our school.Be connected in order to connect. Our program began with a nightly scroll on Facebook. Social-networking sites provide access to a wealth of free professional development ideas, programs, and trainings. Join Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, and start following educators. Our favorite follows include Edutopia, Teaching Tolerance, Cult of Pedagogy, and Mind/Shift.
Know your professional development community. Online PD can only take you so far. Before we rolled out our more comprehensive program, a conference with local universities and youth advocacy groups helped us crystallize some of our ideas about kindness and its relationship to bravery. Establishing contacts within your local PD community will help you take advantage of conferences, seminars, and trainings that will inform your work.
Don’t be afraid to disrupt. Building and instituting new programming is always going to come with complications. To do good work, we need to be innovative and adaptable. If your new idea brings added value, the disruption will be worth it.
Start small but think big. Piloting new programs on a small scale is a great way to be a thoughtful changemaker because it will allow you to identify roadblocks to success in the early days. When you roll out the project on a larger scale, you will have solutions already built into your program. That way, you can scale things responsibly.
Get your colleagues on board. Our program focused on grades 5–8, but we presented a summary of our plans and activities to all faculty and staff, including lower and upper school teachers. Make everyone aware of your program’s message, including parents, alumni, and board members.
Offer resources to all faculty members. Facilitators won’t be the only ones in need of guidance. Other teachers will want to know how they can incorporate more kindness work into their curricula. Be ready to offer them resources as well.
Welcome feedback from facilitators, and be ready to adapt. Programming isn’t static. No matter how well planned, lessons can always be improved. Provide an open process for facilitators and other stakeholders to provide feedback about the program’s design. They are the ones living the program with their students. Make sure to use their expertise.