In 2020, Brenton Willson — head of wellbeing at Kilkenny Primary School in Adelaide — and his team set about re-evaluating their school values. But this time things were going to be different. They wanted to build a school culture that was driven by the students — something that hadn't been done before. This led to a set of behaviours that became known as the Caring Agreements.

The Caring Agreements

Brenton explains:

Our year 3 to 7s participated in a series of forums. The forums involved students coming up with 10 behaviours they wanted to be embedded at the school.

The 10 behaviours that the students came up with are known as the Caring Agreements. We felt this was a brilliant way to hand over ownership and promote a sense of belonging.

Once the Caring Agreements had been established, they had a competition. Their year 6 and 7 students formed groups of three to four and each group designed a character based on one of the Caring Agreements. They also wrote a short bio on each character, featuring its strengths. The entries were voted on by students and five winners were named. The five winning characters — which they named The Kilkenny Crew — now form their school's values, which are a key part of the school's wellbeing program (see figure 6.1).

The Kilkenny Way

Kilkenny Primary School’s wellbeing program is now known as #TheKilkennyWay.

With the five Kilkenny Crew characters and what they represent established, Brenton says the next step was the most powerful one: ‘Students, staff and parents worked synergistically to develop the key leadership points that each character is known for’.

Brenton explains how they narrowed down the process:

Hundreds of key statements and words were brainstormed during student/staff/governing council forums. Responses were collated and then fine-tuned with the support of student leaders and then taken to staff. Finally, the responses were taken to the governing council for approval. The descriptions for each agreement and for each of the characters are totally student written with no adult input. The final product underpins all classroom and yard student behaviour management, including students giving the thumbs up to behaviours we like seeing and saying, ‘that’s the Kilkenny way’. And to the behaviours we don’t want to see students put up their hand and say, ‘stop, that’s not the Kilkenny way’. The final product also underpins restorative processes, as well as behaviour plans, assembly awards and graduation awards. We have a sports day trophy for the team that demonstrates these behaviours best as well.

The Kilkenny Crew

Each of the five Kilkenny Crew characters has a different meaning. Here's how the students chose to describe them.

Pippa the Perseverer

Pippa is brave, stubborn and sometimes a little clumsy. She loves going rock climbing and represents participation: a chance to get involved in things we might never have thought about doing. Remember: the more activities we participate in, the more we will become powerful learners.

Eddie the Elephant

Eddie represents attentive listening, which is listening with your heart, eyes, ears and brain. This is important because when we are listened to attentively, we feel respected and we feel a sense of belonging. We will also learn more.

Perez the Sloth

Perez represents mutual respect. Perez shows kindness to others and helps them. He makes sure his friends are always happy and respects differences. He can be a bit shy at times, but he always tries to be supportive. He does what's right, not what's easy. He might not be the fastest, but he gets things done and has a positive attitude towards everything.

Squirt the Half-Dog, Half-Fish

Squirt will stick by you no matter what. He loves having good friends and he won't judge you for who you are. He knows that it's what's on the inside that counts. Squirt represents appreciation. Appreciation is about being kind, no matter what.

Dave the Donkey

Dave tries his best to overcome his disabilities of having one leg in a cast because he knows he can do anything if he puts his mind to it. He represents ‘Only our best will do’, which is about trying our best and never giving up. It's about accepting, standing up to new challenges and learning from our mistakes.

To bring the characters to life, the original drawings were sent off to graphic designer Rodney Love and turned into the very cool cartoon characters of the Kilkenny Crew shown in figure 6.2. (If you visit the school you will see the characters pinned up in all classrooms and around the yard.)

The school uses its characters in the following ways:

• Awards: Each week, teachers choose two students from their class who displayed the character focus of that week. At the assembly, student leaders read out why the student received the award and present the certificate award to the week's winners.
• Stickers: Teachers can reward students for excellent play and learning through Caring Agreement character stickers. This makes the caring agreements visible, and reinforces the behaviours across the school.
• Prompt of the week: Each week, the whole school explores a quote based on one of the characters. Teachers can then use discussion questions to promote a dialogue and follow-up action in every class. These are shared with the community through the school’s communication app, Dojo, so these discussions can also happen at home.
• 5-day plan: Reception teacher Jess Pietsch developed a 5-day plan using the Caring Agreements for prep/kinder/reception and year 1/2 students. The 5-day plan focuses on one of the characters each day. The plan could be used at any time, although the start of the year is ideal to set the learning/behaviour intentions going into the year. Although this example is for junior primary students, you can use your teaching skills to adapt it to any year level, including high school.

Brenton sums this up best when he says, ‘Having students name our values added an extra layer of ownership and a sense of belonging’.

A voice of reason

So why is it good to have students create your school's values? First and foremost, it gives students ownership over the values that they want to be part of and follow at their school.

Students also feel a sense of connection and responsibility to the project, as well as each other. This, in turn, helps manage behavioural issues.

In fact, Brenton reported, ‘Our staff have noticed a considerable drop in behaviour management, both in the yard and in the classroom’. Brenton goes on to say, ‘We believe this has a lot to do with allowing the students to take ownership of the behaviours that they want at our school, giving them a voice’. Student voice matters.

The New South Wales Department of Education describes the importance of student voice as:

• … having students being listened to and heard in different areas of school life.
• … creating consistent opportunities for feedback and reflection [in classrooms]
• … providing ways for students to connect their skills and interests to local community issues and organisations [in community].

I mentioned this earlier in the book, but it's worth highlighting again here. A 2018 executive summary by the Australian Research Council tells us that:

… students view opportunities for meaningful student participation when associated with having influence in school decision making and activities as supporting higher levels of wellbeing. Furthermore, the higher the level of participation, the higher the level of student wellbeing.

In fact, research from Associate Professor Paula Chan suggests that one way to improve student achievement is through supporting student ownership of learning. As students become actively engaged in their learning, they gain a better understanding of their learning targets, how to collect and document evidence of their learning, and how to evaluate and clarify additional learning needs.

And better still: having students lead initiatives can increase their sense of belonging. Sense of belonging is important because it measures a student's perception of being accepted, valued and included in their school setting by their peers and others in the school. A student's sense of belonging is influenced by a complex set of relationships with peers, teachers, families and the broader community.

A student-led approach in education is becoming more and more popular because of the growing body of evidence about its benefits. This approach provides the opportunity for students to ‘have a voice’ in their school values and their approach to wellbeing, just as Kilkenny Primary has done.

Additionally, promoting wellbeing becomes something the kids want to do instead of something they have to do.

Make the message stick

Of course, setting up values and characters is one thing, but making sure it becomes a self-sustaining cycle is another.

Students at Grange Primary School in Adelaide also developed characters — known as the ‘Grangers’ — to represent their school values. Senior leader and head of learning, engagement and wellbeing Nick Warren explained how they continue to use and refer to the characters to shape their behaviour management.

For example, Ray the Roo represents ‘show respect’. If a student in the yard litters, a teacher or a fellow student will say, ‘Are you showing respect to the school by littering?’

Eddie the Emu represents ‘best effort’, so if the teacher senses a student didn't give their best effort, they will refer to Eddie and ask, ‘Are you sure you gave your best effort?’

Here are some other ideas for making the message stick.

Get creative

Here's a great example of some students’ creative minds at play.

In 2019, I had the pleasure of working with Microsoft Education to create a Growing with Gratitude Minecraft world game. We didn't want to design a game that we assumed students would want to play. We wanted to hand over the ownership to students.

So, we recruited a group of nine students, who were invited to the Microsoft head office in Adelaide (see figure 6.3). Learning Delivery Specialist Steven Payne of Microsoft Education flew over from Perth to help guide the project. As the students entered the room at Microsoft, you could see the excitement on their faces! Steven and I outlined the key skills to include in the game, which included gratitude, kindness, empathy, positive reflection and serving others. We then gave ownership to the students to create a game they would want to play.

The students chose to create a theme-park world. In their world, they included:

• a gratitude rollercoaster ride featuring a gratitude wall activity where students reflect on something in their life that they are grateful for

  

• a vegetable patch (pumpkin) that students reflect on to appreciate the people involved in bringing food to their plate. This includes students creating their own restaurant or kitchen as part of the process
• a kindness maze where, as an act of kindness, students guide a lost sheep out of a maze as a way of practising to be helpful
• a positive reflection zone in which students reflect on the highlights of their theme-park experience.

They also included a designated zone (with instructions) where other students playing the game can design their own part of the theme park.

Providing opportunities for students to lead is a powerful way to ensure a strong wellbeing program.

I witnessed the power in giving ownership to students first hand. I overheard one of the girls telling her teacher, ‘This is the best day of my life’. The confidence and pride the students walked away with was mind blowing. They also took away the satisfaction in knowing students from potentially all over the world would play the game they designed to practise gratitude and other key wellbeing skills. Providing opportunities for students to lead is a powerful way to ensure a strong wellbeing program.

Lead by example

In chapter 2, I spoke about the importance of forming a student voice group to promote wellbeing across your school. It's about allowing students ownership when it comes to wellbeing at school.

The student voice group's (or student wellbeing club's) role is to come together once a fortnight or once a month (whatever works for you) to represent their fellow students and to create initiatives themselves in the wellbeing space. Scotch College Adelaide has named its group/club ‘The Student Action Team’.

Shawn Kasbergen, Director of Student Wellbeing at Scotch, explains: ‘A critical component in the success of our wellbeing programs has been the inclusion of Student Action Team leaders across both our junior and senior school campuses’. Each year, the team is tasked with making wellbeing principles ‘actionable’ and ‘doable’ for the student cohort. Shawn goes onto say, ‘These key structures include year-6 action teams structured around our Pillars of the Live Well program, which runs from years 5 to 9’.

The pillars include sustainable living, food technology and nutrition, physical wellbeing, wellbeing and values education, global responsibility and service learning. Students have an exciting series of events and challenges in place. Activities include the ever-popular 21-day challenges, which focus on nutrition, sleep, language, gratitude, procrastination and mental health.

As an example, the college’s 21-day gratitude challenge looks like this:

• a launch by the Student Wellbeing Action Team leader at assembly
• regular emails from the Student Action Team leader about the why and how of gratitude
• daily gratitude journaling, where students write three things each day that they are grateful for. They are encouraged to pin them up at home as a reminder of the good things and to disrupt negativity bias
• a ‘Power of Gratitude’ focus session during mentor time featuring definitions and prompts like the one from Soul Pancake (check out the resources section at the back of the book for a link to their video)
• an invitation to write a gratitude letter and to subsequently give it to a friend, teacher, parent, grandparent, coach, tutor or someone else
• gratitude boards, where students place a leaf on a gratitude tree; the leaf mentions something they are grateful for
• students are given the opportunity to write a gratitude letter to a teacher, which is then packaged up and delivered to their pigeon hole on World Teacher Day.

Encouraging and providing the opportunities for your students to lead is a tremendous way to help create a strong and robust wellbeing program across your school for the long term.

The great news is that you can also encourage your kids to lead at home. This could involve having them create family challenges, design a personal character based on a strength or a value they want to be known for or create an award for family members who demonstrate your home values. They could also be responsible for setting up a wellbeing wall: a display wall in your home that could feature a gratitude space, quote posters or wellbeing frameworks (there are more ideas in the Resource Pack for you to access).

Let's allow our students to lead!

And finally, let's not forget we need to lead by example. We'll delve into that in the next chapter.