What it means to be a Citizen Owl

With more than 70 years of teaching experience between them, Overlake’s fifth-grade team, comprised of math teacher Patricia Noble, science teacher Katie Viacava, humanities teacher Robe Roberson, and Latin teacher Sarah Mansour, collaborated with their curriculum plans to start the school year differently. “The beginning of the year we spent the whole week on our values, we didn’t touch academics at all,” explains Viacava.

The values Viacava mentions were the result of a summer brainstorming session between the team of fifth-grade faculty to address some behavioral shortcomings they have seen in recent years. 

“We feel these skills are fundamental and we have learned from experience these past two years that kids are coming from 20 different feeder schools and they have different standards in all of them,” explains Noble. 

The values, which define what it is to be a Citizen Owl are prominently displayed in the fifth-grade classrooms: Compassion, Community, Curiosity, integrity, Respect, and Independence, and each have specific actionable attributes outlining how each value lives in school. While they are similar to Overlake’s overall school values, they are specifically designed for the youngest owls in our community. “There are many things that are written for the entire school body, but we needed to come up with terms that the fifth graders can use,” explains Roberson.

“I think if people were to look at this, they might not understand why we chose these, but it is just things we’ve seen over the years that we want to address,” explains Viacava. “So, if someone doesn’t hold the door open, we just go ‘hey Community’ really quickly and remind them of those values that we all agreed to.”

Beyond definitions hanging on each classroom wall, the fifth-grade faculty developed year-long activities and units to address each value, such as Identity, Experiences, Ingenuity, Organization, and Sharing. Each unit contains guiding questions, such as: Who am I?  How do I express myself for the unit on Identity. Later this year, when the fifth graders work on the Organization unit, the guiding questions will be: How do we organize ourselves? How is the natural world organized?

The team has also pulled in the values to each student’s report card, creating a rubric that sits in each advisor’s section of student assessments. The hope is that the students will learn how to be good humans and in turn learn how to learn. “These values won’t change no matter what era or timeframe you are in, they are foundational blocks to human development,” says Roberson.

So what do the student’s think about the focus on values? The team describes a recent activity where the class was using a paper cutter and there were scraps of paper scattered everywhere. They asked the students what this relates to in their values. “One student says, ‘well, we’re being disrespectful because someone else has to clean it up. We need to apologize because that goes to our community values. And we’re not being very independent.’ They listed off more than I had thought of,” explains Viacava. “It’s a happier place to be, that’s the feedback we’re getting from the kids.”

For reference, below are the Citizen Owl values and attributes: