Blog - Sound Discipline

21Mar 2023 by Mary Power

Campbell Hill Classified Staff use Data and SEL Strategies to Help with Transitions and Recess

Inspiring Stories, Problem Solving, Routines, School Partners, Self regulation, Teachers

The Campbell Hill Classified Staff Team uses discipline data to identify ways to improve systems and outcomes for students at their school.

The classified staff of Campbell Hill Elementary, in Renton, WA, works hard every day to be sure that students know they are safe, belong, and matter in the unstructured spaces like the school playground and cafeteria.

This team of educators meet monthly to align their practice, continue their learning about social emotional learning and trauma-responsive strategies, and to support building equitable classrooms and communities. One of their best tools is using patterns in discipline data – which …

14Dec 2022 by Mary Power

School Discipline Data Points to the Need for Self-Regulation Skills

Inspiring Stories, School Partners, Self regulation, Teachers

Terminal Park Elementary School in Auburn, WA is one of our Whole School partners. They have an active Data Team made up of staff who are leading the implementation of Sound Discipline work at their school. Data Teams in our partner schools gather and analyze discipline data – which is documentation of when a student is removed from the classroom or community. They look for patterns in that data and define potential problems that indicate either a systemic issue or lagging skills that need to be developed in adults or young people. The Data Team proposes a solution and works …

31Oct 2022 by Mary Power

DOOL Youth Inspire Educators to Share Power and Create Equitable Learning Environments

Designing Our Own Learning, Inspiring Stories, Race and Equity, Racial Justice, Teachers

DOOL presenters pose in front of the Space Needle after an inspiring session at the TAF Convening!

On October 8th a diverse crowd of educators filed into the Laser Dome at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. However, none of them were there to see a laser show! They had all come to experience an immersive workshop designed and facilitated by youth from Sound Discipline’s DOOL program. DOOL (Designing Our Own Learning) is in its fourth year, bringing together students and educators to share power, develop leadership skills, and reimagine our educational system. The original funding for DOOL came through a grant …

30Sep 2022 by Mary Power

Changing the World, A Classroom at a Time

In the News, Point of View, Racial Justice, School Partners

We’ve been head down, all of us, chipping away at the tough stuff in front of us for the last few years. At Sound Discipline’s board retreat last week, we stepped back and took a look around at the world that is the context for all of our work in schools:

The pandemic
Division and suspicion of “the other”
Climate impacts like wildfires, storms, and floods
Racism
Gun violence

All of this big stuff is overwhelming and bigger than any one of us. But every day, when students show up in classrooms, the moments matter. Subtle changes make profound differences. …

19Aug 2022 by Mary Power

Centered in Belonging: In-Person & Online Professional Development for Teachers

In the News, Inspiring Stories, Online Learning, School Partners, Teachers

Sound Discipline launched our hybrid professional development program for educators in August, with a pretty cool piece of tech that enables a great hybrid experience – we call it Rooty Hooty.

Our ‘Rooty Hooty’ webcam

What is Rooty Hooty?

Rooty got its name from the first workshop where it was used — Rooted Relationships: Growing Equitable Classroom Communities. It’s a Meeting Owl, aka a fancy web cam made by Owl Labs. With a swivel-head, 360-degree camera and microphone, participants can see, hear, and engage easily with one another, even in group discussion.

Making community and connection …

14Jun 2022 by Mary Power

Graduation – Sound Discipline’s Identity and Values

In the News, Resilience, School Partners, Teachers

What is the story of the 2021/2022 school year? Heads nod when I sum it up this way – this was a year like no other. The return to in-person learning as the pandemic raged on meant doing the best we could under constant stress, strain, and uncertainty. Teachers and administrators worked harder than ever. Community partners showed up in creative and responsive ways. Families leaned in to support their school communities.

Our students showed the effects of isolation and disconnection. The situation revealed what we’ve said through the years, but perhaps never really gotten to feel quite …

20Apr 2022 by Mary Power

Rooted Relationships

In the News, Online Learning, Teachers

At Sound Discipline, we are in a conversation about values, and about how to go deeper and be braver, how to show up with a vision that is big and powerful enough to meet this moment and accelerate change.

Externally, we convened five We Belong & Matter Community Conversations, culminating in our “Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline” event. Hundreds of people from within and beyond education, and from around the world, showed up to connect, learn, and draw strength from a shared reimagining of a future grounded in our shared humanity.

Internally, Sound Discipline is a year into …

07Apr 2022 by Mary Power

Orcas in the C’s at Lakeridge Elementary

Inspiring Stories, School Partners, Teachers

Lakeridge Elementary 1st grade Orcas who participate in the ‘Orcas in the Cs’ program.

For so many schools, it has been a tumultuous two years from school-on-a-screen to in-person learning. This is definitely the case for Lakeridge Elementary in the Renton (Washington) School District. For new 1st graders, school was in constant transition. Starting kindergarten on Zoom, they learned what it meant to be part of a classroom community through a screen. Later, when welcomed back into the school building as 1st graders for the first time in the fall of 2021, they began learning how to be part of …

17Mar 2022 by Mary Power

The Mindful Mentors Project in Tukwila School District

Community Partnerships, Inspiring Stories

The Mindful Mentors Project, in the Tukwila School District, brings together teens and third graders to connect as mentors and mentees, who engage together in learning about social emotional learning, mindfulness, and movement.

Partnering with the students on this project are Thrive Centered (formerly Thrive Yoga), an organization that centers embodiment and provides somatic-based SEL and restorative practices for youth K-12, Sound Discipline, Tukwila Elementary School, and Foster High School.

Foster High School Mindful Mentor Andy Huynh

In Spring of 2021, Thrive Centered, founded by Damithia Nieves, and Sound Discipline, recruited six high school students to serve as mentors. …

07Mar 2022 by Mary Power

An Interview with Tonya Wilson

In the News, Race and Equity, Racial Justice

Directly impacted by the prison system, today Tonya Wilson is the Reentry Outreach Coordinator of Freedom Project, and a board member of the Freedom Education Project of Puget Sound (FEPPS) at the University of Puget Sound. A Tacoma native, Tonya is a TEDx speaker and appeared in the documentary “Since I’ve Been Down.”

“It would be easy for someone to have looked at my mom’s life and to look at all effort expended on her behalf as wasted resources.”

– Tonya Wilson, from her 2015 TEDx Talk Cracked Sidewalks

On March 15, 2022, from 12-2pm PST, Sound Discipline is …