In our previous accreditation visit, one area of growth was providing spaces for students to connect with adult advocates. We subsequently restructured our master schedule in 2017-18 to include “X-Block” in MS/HS and “Morning Meeting/Closing Circle” in ES. This was a set period of time every week for students and teachers to build community in different ways. ES immediately saw positive results in small homeroom settings where students and teachers could begin and end their day together. In MS/HS, many of the X-Block activities were large group (150 students or more), and although students and teachers had more time together, we saw room for improvement in forming long-term relationships with authetic connections. We began looking into using X-Block for a formalized Advisory period, which launched in the 2019-20 school year.

Concurrently with this decision, we organized a school-wide committee to research effective SEL programs that would help teachers engage with students in meaningful ways. The adoption of the 7Mindsets SEL Program and the Xello platform resulted from this research, as well as Positive Discipline for teachers and parents. Teachers would use the X-Block time every Wednesday to facilitate conversations around growth mindset, goal-setting, acceptance and empathy for others, and finding connection points with peers using the 7Mindsets curriculum. Once our program was selected, all staff was formally trained by 7Mindsets facilitators for immediate implementation in Fall of 2019-20. Our staff has also received formal training in Positive Discipline strategies so that positive relationships between students and adults are encouraged throughout the school day. Xello is still a work in progress, and we are analyzing how we can best leverage the information in this platform to connect with students and build meaningful relationships.

To further support the adoption of this program, we created another class period dedicated to SEL in ES. In MS/HS, we created advisory groups of 10 students each that were assigned to a staff member during X-Block. Each advisory remains together throughout MS and then is “reshuffled” for HS to encourage relationship building and trust, both with adults and peers.

At this point we have collected 2 years of data since we began implementation via parent, student, and staff surveys. This data is visible on our Balanced Scorecard. Our next steps include facilitating a formalized data dialogue process that involves staff so that next steps can be determined. We also need to collect data regarding fidelity of the 7Mindsets program as this might also influence the data that we have collected via our surveys.