During the summer of 2005, the Valley Park Middle School Character Education School Leadership Team spent three days brainstorming, planning, and developing initiatives to further enhance our current character education program. Our team consist ed of the middle school principal, a character education teacher/sponsor, a parent liaison, a counselor, and a teacher.

Following three years of parent, student, and teacher surveys, it was apparent that our program needed to give the students at VPMS more autonomy at school. Autonomy gives students more ownership within the school and ultimately leads to increased academic achievement. The character education team decided to provide this increased autonomy by implementing and piloting a middle school class meeting initiative that expanded the concept of class meetings into the core curricular classes.

Teachers have used class meetings at the elementary level for a number of years to involve students in meaningful classroom discussions, including such topics as proper use of materials, how to behave during lunch, and developing general classroom expectations. Valley Park Middle School, with the help of Cooperating School Districts (CSD), helped pilot a program during the 2005/2006 school year to determine if implementing class meetings into the middle school environment would improve overall school climate and ultimately student achievement. CSD has produced an instructional video based upon the pilot program.

The first step was to train staff members who were willing to use class meetings in their classrooms. The entire eighth grade team, including the mathematics, communication arts, science, social studies, and special education teachers, agreed to spend two days during the summer in a class meeting professional development seminar hosted at the middle school. After advertising the seminar, a number of local schools sent representatives to the training to learn the class meeting process. Class meeting experts from local elementary schools were brought in to explain the concept as we adapted it to the middle school and to each teacher’s core curriculum.

At VPMS, class meetings are being used twofold. At first, meetings were only used during an advisory period in a manner that allowed teachers and students to become engaged in meaningful conversation. Students would sit in a circle and discuss important global events, issues at school, as well as other pertinent subjects. This type of class meeting helped foster relationships not only between teachers and students, but also among students.

VPMS has now evolved the process by taking class meetings into content areas. Teachers have developed lesson plans and used class meetings as a learning activity that provides students with intrinsic motivation by giving them input into how the classroom goals will be achieved. The staff believes that giving students more input into how a lesson or subject is taught has provided more autonomy and ownership into reaching the curricular objective.

Evidence of acquired positive attitudes due to the implementation of class meetings is being monitored through student, parent, and teacher surveys. Discipline and student achievement on standardized tests will also provide an indication of the results of more student autonomy. Last year at this time, the eighth grade had 139 office referrals. Due, in part, to the implementation of class meetings, that number has decreased to 64 office referrals this year. Character education is prevalent throughout the building, and we continually monitor our programs using an adopted character education evaluation called "Taking Stock". In addition, the entire staff has been trained in the "Eleven Principles of Effective Character Education" and uses that knowledge to evaluate our programs on a monthly basis.

Class meetings have become a successful tool at VPMS, and the counselor and principal are using them faithfully when the need arrives to meet with groups of students. Not only have class meetings helped solve conflicts and prevent possible confrontations, but they have been used to promote school pride.