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.

SEPTEMBER

This month's Best Practices is from an award winning school from 2005-2006.

 

BEST CHARACTER EDUCATION PRACTICES

 

School: Edgewood Middle School

Address: 2311 Willoughby Beach Road, Edgewood, Maryland 21040
Principal: Wayne H. Perry

Character Ed. Coordinator/Teacher: Laurie Namey

          
Phone: 410-612-1518
E-Mail: wayne.perry@hcps.org

E-Mail: laurie.namey@hcps.org

             

Title of Best Practice: Social Connections

Primary Character Trait(s) Emphasized: Respect and Tolerance

Brief Description (including such items as materials needed, persons responsible, sequence of activities, observable results, references, etc.)

Objective:

Making the character of our students our priority has made an impact in the overall culture, academic success and personal success of our school community.

 

Brief Description:

• Character Education takes a unique form at Edgewood Middle School. For the past four years, Character Education has been instilled into the educational lives of students in the class, “Social Connections.” This class, created by a teacher at EMS, infuses character education, multicultural education, and violence prevention in hopes of creating respectful, tolerant students of character.

• For two years, Social Connections was piloted as a class through the unified arts rotation. However, only 65% of the student body was able to participate in the class because of their musical studies and commitments to other programs. The school improvement team of Edgewood Middle made character education a priority in 2005 by adding a goal of 100% student participation in Social Connections and other forms of character education.

• Currently, 65% of the student body is still involved in the Social Connections class. In addition, the character educator coordinator visits all student class rooms for monthly character education lessons. Each monthly lesson is focused on a character trait that is relevant to EMS’s diverse student family.

• In addition, special attention is paid each month to specific character traits and behaviors that are necessary to the success of each student at EMS. Announcements are made each morning to remind students of these themes.

 

 

 

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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