It’s Not Just “One More Thing”

Attending to student well-being, teaching essential life skills, exploring college & career pathways–these aren’t just “more things” to heap on the plates of school leaders and teachers, these are critical topics that need to be addressed in a thoughtful way by educators. Seminole County Schools in Donalsonville, Georgia is a model example for other districts to follow in this arena. The district uses their Tribe Time (advisory periods) in a very thoughtful way, and they’re using Thrively as an integral part of their plan. 

First, they use the Thrively strength assessment to help students better know themselves and their strengths. It’s a culture shift to get students and faculty to start thinking about students in terms of their strengths 

Thrively isn’t the only tool the district uses, but Thrively helps support the other interventions and programs they have in place as well. For instance, as the district is navigating their ILP goals, they use Thrively lessons to delve into such areas as self management, responsible decision making, and setting & achieving goals. 

In conjunction with other college and career exploration efforts, students use the Thrively Interest Profiler, and they can explore hundreds of potential career pathways on the site. When students then have the opportunity to attend a career fair or seek out internships, they have a better understanding of what they want to do and what they want to get out of those experiences. 

Thrively is proud to partner with such a forward-thinking district that is working hard to meet the most important needs of their students. Special thanks to Assistant Superintendent Felicia Purdy for her leadership. 

Understand. Support. Engage. 

Thrively recently partnered with Mendon Upton Regional School District and their incredible educators to share how Thrively data can connect the dots to support their Universal Design for Learning, as well as their Multi-Tiered System of Supports. Through the lens of “understand, support, and engage”, we embarked on a journey to uncover how to ensure that ALL learners become expert learners through an assets based approach and how outcomes for ALL students can be improved by understanding the “whole child” and focusing on what is STRONG with learners.  

Digging deep into the Learner Profile for their students, MURSD educators could delve into the individual strengths, interests and aspirations of their students to further  understand, support and engage their students.  Analyzing the Hope Index, an Index built in partnership with Cathleen Beachboard, author of The School of Hope, this quarterly assessment measures agency, the determination to reach your goals, and pathways, the ability to create ways to meet your goals and overcome barriers, to give an overall Hope score. It can be used with both students and adults. 

Our partnership with MURSD sheds light on how districts leading with strengths can further support the individual learner, and connect the dots for systemic structures such as MTSS and UDL.   Thrively believes that EVERY child is a genius and deserves to THRIVE, and we are proud to partner with MURSD in their efforts to transform education.

Thrively Strengths Pilot Project in Primary Grades

Thrively in the primary grades looks and feels quite different from what we see in our middle school and highschool classrooms, and for good reason. However different it may look, the intentions and targets are the same, to know and be known by what’s strong with you, rather than what’s wrong with you! As our partner schools are launching the year with a laser-like focus on Strengths, Thrively has partnered with a small group of Learning Experience Designers at Design 39 Campus, in Poway Unified School District, to go a little bit deeper to understand what is possible in the primary grades. 

Together, D39 and Thrively co-created a series of eight, 30 minute lessons that make up a project, designed specifically for students in grades 1, 2, and 3. The project is a deep dive into Strengths, including the creation of a collective vocabulary, shared experiences, and meaningful reflections on strengths in others and ourselves, all to give life to an asset-based classroom culture and community of care. 

Today, with Ms. Janette & Mrs. Adamson’s learners, we began in the initial process of piloting the Strengths Project with the introductory lesson, What Are Strengths? In this lesson, learners worked in partnerships to read a book of their choice and focus on a character to identify qualities that make that character great. Some of the book characters and their great qualities learners identified were: Gerald from Piggy & Elephant books is Kind; Bunny from Not a Box is imaginative; Pete the Cat is an explorer; Paperboy is responsible; The Good Egg is helpful. As you might notice, we are not giving learners the Thrively Strengths vocabulary, yet. Instead we wanted to give learners the opportunity to name and label qualities on their own, allowing them the space to pull from prior knowledge, generate confidence in their abilities, and to build connections between what they know and what they will learn next. 

As the lessons continue, we will continue to try, refine, collect data, and share out  in hopes of making the primary grade Strengths Project available to all our Thrively users soon!