For the last two weeks you've gotten lesson plans and materials to teach basic character education for Burnet. You and your class should have defined problems and solutions that teachers and students on campus face; you should have generated some basic core values and a result statement, and you should have come up with student roles and responsibilities. Your students should know the purpose of advisory as well.
 
If none of this has happened so far, perhaps you are approaching the problem of character education in your own way. Hopefully you've generated the same basic results. If not, please make it so. Walk-throughs will be happening. Our program will not accomplish very much if we do not follow it, so we will begin collecting the data that shows we are following it.
 
This week we are continuing with our theme of basic remedial character education. We will define respect and we will model respect with a social skills review.
 
This lesson plan, social skills review, and PowerPoint will feel to the students as if you are just lecturing them unless you allow the students themselves to lead the lesson plan. This may be difficult at first: kids will be goofy and it might seem like nothing gets accomplished. But this is a practice and will have good results over time. They need to be responsible for their own learning sometimes. So please facilitate one or two students as leaders who will introduce the lesson and decide how best to teach it. Some suggestions for how to do this are included in the lesson plan.

What’s My Role?

Objective: 
SWBAT develop or identify the purpose for advisory. SWBAT develop a result statement. SWBAT identify a minimum of two student roles and responsibilities at Burnet. SWBAT define the reason for this activity: to take responsibility for their actions at school.

Materials:
Copy of Burnet Middle School Advisory Roles and Responsibilities

Length of time:  Four advisory periods

Sequence: Monday: Briefly review the list of problems and solutions you defined last week.  Discuss the concept of empowerment: we are taking back our school to have the kind of school we want. Display the BMS Advisory Student Roles and Responsibilities and focus on the “purpose for advisory” box. The core values on the completed form are “personal, academic, and civic empowerment” As a class, develop your own core values using the blank form. Develop a  result statement as well.

Tuesday. Review your results statement and your core values from Monday. Discuss the “Roles and Responsibilities” box. Students develop two roles and responsibilities  for what they would need to do to build a good school community.

Wednesday: Review the two roles and responsibilities  from Tuesday. Develop two more.

Thursday: Role play the roles and responsibilities you have developed. For instance, if “respectful communication” was a one responsibility the teacher would play the role of student, and would role play a disruptive, disrespectful, abusive student. The student would play the role of the teacher, and would model respectful communication. Repeat this for as many roles and responsibilities as you have time for.

Friday: Appreciation: single out students and publicly appreciate something about them. Model this by appreciating the whole class for the work they did on their roles and responsibilities statement. Model it for the individual student by singling one student out (maybe someone who doesn’t get noticed or one with whom you’ve so far failed to develop a strong relationship). Students can choose to appreciate one another in turn.

Work product: 
Burnet Middle School Advisory Roles and Responsibilities statement. Try to go paper free: use overhead transparencies, a projection screen, the Smartboard, or a document camera for display rather than giving a paper copy to each student.

Notes: Our objective is two-fold: use advisory to educate about shared values in a student-centered way. Modify this lesson in any way that works for you but let’s reinforce a consistent message across the entire campus.