The Full Value School: A Social Emotional Learning Community

The Full Value School provides a clear roadmap for dramatically changing the culture and climate of your classroom and school.  Using highly engaging activity-based strategies, students learn the skills necessary to regulate their own behavior.  With less fruitless energy devoted to the disciplinary hamster wheel, there is more time to teach; more time to authentically engage with students; more time to strengthen the essential twenty-first century skills of collaboration and abstract reasoning skills.

The Full Value School is not a standalone program.  Teaching Full Value can be directly integrated into all academic content areas.

The tools provided to students are simple:

Learning the Six Full Value Behavioral Norms:

Be Here, Be Safe, Be Honest, Set Goals, Let Go & Move On, Care For Self & Others:

These norms provide the foundation for building the capacity to self-regulate; to develop empathy and compassion, to listen without defensiveness, to self-reflect, to show courage when in situations that require it, to become inoculated against the bullying behaviors of others.  Our book contains a series of desirable outcomes that are set in motion through the implementation of these norms.

The Full Value Commitment:

Students co-create a dynamic commitment to each other that defines how the Full Value Behavioral Norms will be used in the classroom when interacting with each other.  The Commitment provides a physical representation of the norms.  For example, Be Here might include, "showing up to class on time prepared to work, listening when spoken to, doing your share in a group project.” These are student generated behaviors, not prescribed by the teacher.  Distractors to practicing these positive behaviors are also identified by students and added to the Commitment. Distractors become opportunities for growth instead of negatives.  They are considered a process for "failing forward."

Calling Group:

This is a formal meeting process that provides students the opportunities to work through violations of the classroom Full Value Commitment or to celebrate group and individual successes.  Initially called and facilitated by the teacher, students learn to gradually take full control of this process via modeling, imitation, and practice.

Goal Setting:

Empowering students to make intelligent choices is very much a goal setting process.  Oddly, very few students are exposed to goal setting strategies as part of their formal education.  The Full Value School offers a well-defined process for goal setting including helpful templates. 

The Full Value School model does not rely on videos, hypotheticals, or paper and pencil tasks.  Hundreds of engaging activities are offered in the book to teach each Full Value.  They require minimal materials, and most can be completed within a single classroom period.  With each activity is a materials list, and suggestion for introducing and reflecting on the experience.  A full chapter of the book is devoted to integration into content areas with a lesson planning sheet provided. 

The Full Value School is a highly effective research-based model that fully aligns with the social emotional standards established by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. Everything you need to begin exploring Full Value with your students can be found in this book.