Mary G. Hogsett Primary School has a school-wide practice of wording the Portrait of a Danville Learner competencies in a child-friendly way, and awarding students with stickers when they demonstrate the competencies. 

First Grade Teacher Jennifer Westerfield shared what this looks like in her class, and how her classroom develops a culture around the competencies. 

Westerfield incorporates the child-friendly language into morning meetings. She encourages students to share instances of when they have demonstrated them, or how they have seen a classmate demonstrating them. She gives the students stickers when she notices them demonstrating the competencies, and the students are also acknowledged with “blue slips” during daily crew gatherings. This is a school-wide practice. 

“They just get really excited,” she said. “They love getting their stickers, and it’s so much fun for them.”

Photos: Students receive "Empowered Learner" and "Creative Problem Solver" stickers during reading time.

 

It’s helpful for her class to use literature and other learning materials to communicate how to model these competencies. For example, in first grade, students read the book “The Most Magnificent Thing.” In the book, a character sees herself as an engineer and wants to invent something. She has a difficult time of it but keeps trying. This has helped Westerfield’s students learn about character traits such as perseverance, collaborating with others to learn and improve, and taking initiative. 

“I’ve kind of leveraged that a little bit and used that to my advantage when teaching the Portrait of a Danville Learner because a lot of those character traits really reflect in the competencies,” she said. 

Her students have done a great job recognizing each other too, like during recess and in the classroom. 

“It’s been kind of fun seeing that they’re recognizing each other for thinking outside the box, and not just themselves, so it’s kind of also teaching them that empathy aspect and kind of going beyond it a little bit, which has really surprised me, especially with first grade,” she said. “... It’s just awesome because you want them to see each other, see our classroom as a community and see us as lifelong learners, and we want to encourage each other and make each other better.”

Westerfield strongly emphasizes the classroom as a community, and developing positive classroom culture. 

“We see our classroom as a community, and we see each other kind of like a family, and we see past our differences, and we see each of our differences as almost like a positive thing, a benefit,” she said. “And also, we have a really great SEL [social-emotional learning] program we use in morning meeting time that really emphasizes that word ‘community,’ and how we can work with one another.”

So far, Westerfield has awarded stickers to students for: Empowered Learner, Creative Problem Solver and Productive Collaborator. The school is working on rolling out the other Portrait competencies, and Westerfield has already started talking about the Effective Communicator competency. 

 

 

She’s also shown the students how the competencies can overlap — for example, a productive collaborator can be an effective communicator by using respectful language and being a good listener and taking the time to solve problems with classmates. 

An example of what it looks like when Westerfield awards a sticker to a student is, during small group reading time, if she sees a student not asking her to read a word for them but instead using reading strategies to”solve for a tricky word” by themselves. This would show that they are being an Empowered Learner. The student would then be recognized during class and/or during crew gathering with a blue slip.