All public schools are required to have some kind character focus to support students social emotional needs and academic growth. Last year, at the recommendation of multiple teachers and administrators attending conferences, the whole Kettle Falls School District began using the Character Strong curriculum. For the elementary school, the curriculum has many strengths in how it scaffolds the three categories of character: Be Kind, Be Strong, and Be Well, with 9 specific character traits. There is one trait for each month of school, broken into the three categories: Be Kind—Respect, Empathy, and Cooperation, Be Strong—Responsibility, Perseverance, and Courage, and Be Well—Gratitude, Honesty, and Creativity. Several major contributors to why our district chose this curriculum includes that it has lessons for PreK - 12th grade (which means all our schools align to build on each others work) and it provides a vast array of engaging meaningful resources.
Ever since the elementary school administration and staff began modeling our school after the Expeditionary Learning network of schools in 2004, our character work became synonymous with the word CREW. In the EL model, crew meetings are used to teach character. Each letter in CREW was given a character trait (Caring, Responsibility, Effort, Wisdom) and learning targets and curriculum were developed to match the traits and standards with support from EL. What was created lacked the wealth of resources and grade level alignment that is present in the Character Strong.
The search for character curriculum did not begin with Character Strong. For two years we tried using Franklin Covey’s concepts of The 7 habits for Highly Effective People called the Leader in Me, but it wasn’t as student friendly and lacked resources to implement. Then, we went back to our EL based CREW curriculum with the staff creating more simplified learning targets for each grade level. Still, teachers were frustrated with the limited amount of resources, and administrators were searching for a curriculum that aligned our district.
The district found what it was looking for in the Character Strong curriculum. Here at KFES, CREW has not gone away. It is fully a part of culture as our word for team, but we are using the nine Character Strong words instead of our old words. We are teaching the curriculum and embedding it into Adventure, My Crew, All School Crew, Class Crew Meetings, Crew Club, and every other part of our school days.
One might ask how Character Strong is impacting students? Character is something we use everyday either positive or negative, and it is not as simple as knowing the words that make a difference. In fact, many of our old character traits are interchangeable with the new ones. Instead, we believe the difference is in how character is taught. Character Strong lessons are engaging, creative, and have a purposefully higher element of student voice, where students are encouraged to learn and show who they are alongside growing the positive behaviors that are necessary for academic success. When one enters a classroom during a crew meeting, students have such a high level of excitement, energy, and engagement in the activities that it makes the learning easy!
