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| Teaching Goodness in Lower School |
When entering Shipley’s Lower School building you are immediately struck with the hum of activity; book buddies helping a younger student to read the words on a page for the first time, teachers inviting students to share their ideas, musicians rehearsing for a concert, budding scientists exploring a concept. The students are writers, athletes, and artists working to break from their cocoons to turn into butterflies. But if you delve beneath the surface, a foundation built on the philosophy that fundamentally there must be respect and responsibility in order for the community to work effectively and for the metamorphosis to occur.This past summer’s reading assignment for faculty in Shipley’s Lower School was a book titled, Teaching Goodness: Engaging the Moral and Academic Promise of Young Children by Usha Balamore, Head of Gladwyne Montessori School, and Joan F. Goodman, a professor at Penn Graduate School of Education. Balamore has spent her career teaching and researching the importance of a moral education and on how to engage children in meaningful learning experiences. Now, half into the year, it is possible to see the impact that the book and Balamore’s recent visit to the faculty have had on teachers and the classroom environment they are providing for their students.
Balamore believes that moral values—respect, responsibility—“good qualities” all need to be at the foundation of the elementary school curriculum. “Lower School leaves a lasting impression on children,” Balamore said. “This is where their core identity is shaped, and their values—whether they value being good human beings.”
“I was inspired this summer when I read Balamore’s book as I was looking forward to teaching my new class,” explains Betsy Leschinsky. She teaches a PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) course for students in grades K through 5, which focuses on character development, friendship, and treating one another with respect. “I hope through this class that I am helping the students look at one another and the world around them with empathy and kindness.”
Building confidence is a large part of Balamore’s strategy: “If we want good kids, we need them to be confident.” We must set high standards and goals for them, she says. “There is a joy in accomplishing set goals, a joy in performance and in ‘being good.’” In the classroom, she says, teachers need to join in the challenges they set for the children. “We’re all in this together,” she says. Teachers, as well as children, need to set goals for themselves, and let the children know what they are. Analysis of whether the goals have been met, where students and teachers have slipped, and how they can improve, is part of a continual year-long process.
Drawing on Balamore’s suggestions, teachers are regularly working together with their students to assess how things are going. For fifth grade teacher, Wendy Eiteljorg, the book gave her the idea to start the year with a different philosophy for rules, “[At the start of school] for the first time I did not make rules with my class. Instead, I have put up the school motto ‘Courage for the Deed, Grace for the Doing’ and the statement ‘the time is always right to do what is right’ by Martin Luther King, Jr. We discussed and continue to discuss the importance of doing the right thing in all sorts of situations.”
Creating an atmosphere of trust, cultivating patience, encouraging children to learn from their mistakes, emphasizing respect and responsibility, building relationships that are caring, genuine, and personalized, are all part of the classroom experience Balamore considers paramount. Long ago the teachers of Lower School decided to take the School’s mascot, the Gator, and a create a model and expectation for life in the Lower School. It has been a creative way for these principles to be reinforced. The anagram spells out, Giving of ourselves, Accepting of others, Truthful in everything, Open to new ideas, Respectful of others, self, and the environment, Supportive of the community
And what about the traditional curriculum? It’s all part of the process. “We know that kids forget the details of what we teach them,” says Balamore. The important thing is to “create sacred memories; to embed three concepts in the heart.” These provide the hooks on which children can hang the details. As Shipley Head of Lower School, Maggie Granados says, “Teaching goodness is not just another thing to put on busy teachers’ plates. This is the plate.”
December 2005
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