CSEE is committed to helping to improve the climate for learning in schools nationwide. Occasionally we come across some great grant opportunities that we want to share with schools to help them promote a safer and more caring school climate and to infuse in children the valuable social and emotional skills necessary to grow into caring, supportive and civic-minded adults. Below is a grant opportunity that I would like to share with schools.
The Sprint Character Education Grant Program accepts applications for funding of character education programs promoting leadership, youth volunteerism, character education and school pride. Grants will fund the purchase of resource materials, supplies, teacher training and equipment that facilitates character education for K-12 students.
Examples of programs that the Sprint Character Education Grant Program will fund include:
Thanks to all of the attendees to last week's Bully Buster Cocktail Reception. The night was a great success and CSEE raised valuable support for important educational programs designed to improve school climate and reduce bullying and violence in our children's schools.
Our special guest students from Castle Hill Middle School truly made it a night to remember. Over the past couple of months, CSEE has been working closely with Castle Hill Middle School and their extremely dedicated leadership team to measure and improve their school climate through the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory (CSCI) and school-wide anti-bullying programs. One of the main projects was an anti-bullying essay/poster contest, and CSEE was pleased to congratulate the winners of the contest at the event. We shared their insightful essays with all attendees, and the crowd was truly moved!
As part of this program, students also created artwork reflecting their views on the negative effects of bullying and ways to be an upstander in school; hit play on the video below to view some student artwork and hear meaningful excerpts from the students' essays. Kudos to all the inspiring students, parents, and administration at Castle Hill - keep up the amazing work!
As a result of working with educators across the country, we at CSEE have amassed some really great classroom resources. To share the goods, we created a free Caring Classrooms toolkit containing the experiential activities and practical guidelines that are being touted by school leaders as effective tools for making the classroom a more caring and open place.
Our hope is that you'll also be able to use the resources within the kit to speak to important dimensions of school climate such as social and civic learning, physical safety and respect for diversity. At the end of the toolkit are also some of my favorite resources for school climate improvement, diversity and bullying, funding support and social emotional learning.
Click here to download the toolkit.
I'd also love to hear about your own favorite classroom rituals or experiential activities. How do you go about developing your own activities to create awareness about classroom dynamics? What outside resources, such as TeacherTube or Edutopia, do you use for inspiration?
Each year we help hundreds of schools nationwide measure and improve their climates for learning. Our programs are helping schools to reduce bullying, lower dropout rates and improve academic achievement through a positive school climate. We are working to protect our children and promote learning, but we can’t do it alone. We need your help!
Click the link below to find out about our upcoming Bully Buster fundraising event and learn about other ways you can get involved in our bully prevention programs.
Malcom Gladwell made a bit of a splash in the education community with an article in the December 15, 2008 issue of the New Yorker. In it, Gladwell compares the difficulty of finding good teachers to the difficulty NFL teams have finding good quarterbacks: the problem is that you don’t know who is good at it until you see them on the job.