This Month's Best Practice

Each Month the Maryland Center for Character Education (MCCE) picks one of the Best Practices from a Character Education award winning school to share with you.

JULY

This month's Best Practices is from an award winning school from 2006-2007.

 

BEST CHARACTER EDUCATION PRACTICES

 

School: Dynard Elementary School

Address: 23510 Bushwood Road, Chaptico, MD 20621
Principal: Kim Summers

Phone: 301-769-4804
E-Mail: kdsummers@smcps.org

             

Title of Best Practice: Academic, Character and Attendance House Program

 

Primary Character Trait(s) Emphasized: Respect, Caring, Responsibility, Fairness, Trustworthiness, & Citizenship

 

Objective:

To help students build "Pride Inside" while improving student achievement, character and attendance.

 

Brief Description:

As a school, we want to increase student achievement and to build “Pride Inside” for the community of learners at Dynard Elementary. We believe the three areas of focus should be academics, character/behavior and attendance. Although we have a strong curriculum, character education, interventions and support programs in place for students to succeed, we wanted to add motivation for students to want to succeed. Our goal was to make this program fun, build cohesion and improve school climate. Therefore, last school year we developed a school wide House Points Program in which all students in K-5 participate (approx 420 students).

 

Academically we set goals for classes to achieve through individual achievements and assessments. Additionally, teachers felt homework completion needed improvement in order to help students to become more successful.

 

Behaviorally we integrated the existing Character Education program into the House Points Program. We continued with the focus and education on Respect, Caring, Responsibility, Trustworthiness and Fairness and set high behavioral goals for all of our students to become great citizens.

Daily attendance at Dynard was becoming an issue as we were just falling short of meeting our AYP goal. We know students need to be here and on time in order to learn; therefore we see this as an important component to our program.

Program Description:
Classes are placed in one of four house teams throughout the school year (Falcons, Knights, Lions, or Vikings). Each team has 5 different grades working together. Additionally, students have the ability to individually, as a class and as a team to earn points towards weekly and quarterly rewards.

Earning Points:
Academics:
• Homework Completion
• Math assessments (class average of 80%)
• Writing assessments (70% of the class has the highest rubric score)
• Other assessments (class average of 80%)

 

Character/Behavior:
• No referrals to the Behavior Management Center
• No Bus referrals
• Good class cafeteria behavior
• Good Bus Citizen
• Star Class of the week for Specialists (art, music, PE, media)

 

Attendance:
• 100% class attendance for the week
• 95% class attendance for the week
• No tardiness (per class) for the week
• Students with perfect monthly attendance.

Houses earn rewards weekly & quarterly:
• The house with the highest points weekly earns an extra recess of 15 minutes the following week. Time to be determined by classroom teacher.
• The house with the highest points each Quarter earns a House Celebration.

 

Data:
• Data is recorded weekly by the classroom teacher and school counselor on the class point sheets. House point sheets are collected by Monday morning of each week. Ms. Coyne will tally the results and make an announcement on Monday’s with the results.
• Weekly attendance & homework data is graphed and displayed on a bulletin board for students to review.
• Total house pointed are graphed and displayed for students to review.

 

Measurable Goals:
Academics:
• To meet/exceed AYP on MSA in all areas and groups.
• Homework completion of 94% or better.

 

Character/Behavior:
• To reduce referrals to the Behavior Management Center by 25% or more. (2006 – 63)
• To Reduce Bus Referrals by 25% (2006 -- 101)

 

Attendance:
• To meet/exceed AYP goal of 95 %

 

 

 

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The Maryland Center for Character Education
29 West Susquehanna Ave., Suite 300, Baltimore, MD 21204

Phone: 410-823-4902
Fax: 410-828-9661
E-Mail: MCCEcharacter@aol.com