Date: June 30th, 2015

School Name: Forest Park Elementary

School District: SD 68 – Nanaimo-Ladysmith

Contact Name: Jacquie Poulin & Paula Kuffler

Contact Email/Phone Number:; ; 250-758-6892

Did you receive an Activity Grant or an Inquiry Grant?

Inquiry Grant

PART 1: Tell us about the learners at your school.(Gathering Evidence/Scanning)

Forest Park Elementary is a Kindergarten to Grade 7 school with a population of 368 students this year. The school has a mixed socioeconomic background with families living in poverty to middle class families. The purpose of this inquiry focused around the work of our Student Leadership team. We offer a student leadership opportunity to students in Grades 6 and 7 where they are able to ‘apply’ to join the group and then commit to working on various projects throughout the year. The group does things to promote school spirit, raise awareness of local community issues, as well as learn about larger global issues.

This year, our student leadership team had 28 dedicated and focused individuals who met once per week to work on their own leadership skills such as communication, planning, and public speaking to name a few. In addition, they planned a variety of events throughout the year.

PART 2: What did you do?(Focus and Plan, New Learning)

Our inquiry question was : Will our student leaders promoting and taking part in Random Acts of Kindness throughout the school result in a positive impact and a 'wave of kind actions' amongst other adults and students in our school?

The plan that was implemented was a bit multi-faceted, here are some of the things the team did this year:

-Initiated a ‘positive messages’ board where student leaders found positive quotes, sayings, pictures, phrases and typed them up or found them with great images and posted them on one of the main bulletin boards in the school for everyone to be able to read as they went past

-Each student committed to two or three specific ‘random acts of kindness’ they could do at school, in the community, or at home and would report back to the team how it went, how it made the leader feel, how did the recipient respond – lots of great qualitative feedback came through this dialogue each week

-Student leaders often commented that they noticed others in their class also doing ‘kind gestures’ just because it was becoming ‘normal’ – how cool is that!

-One of our local shopping malls was promoting ‘random acts of kindness’ during the last week of February where ‘post-it notes’ were provided – the student leaders took the post-it notes to every classroom, talked about what a kind word/gesture/compliment was, how it can impact others, and encouraged each student in the school to write out their ‘kind words’ and we created a ‘post-it’ bulletin board

-Before long, we started to see these post-it notes up in some amazing areas – a note on the counselor’s door saying ‘thank you’; a note in the washroom on the mirrors saying ‘you are beautiful’ – and these are still up as no one wants to take them down

Overall, we believed it had a positive impact on many individuals, both students and adults, in our building. We did not do any ‘whole school survey’, but the results from just our student leaders was very positive.

PART 3: How did it go? (Taking Action)

See above as I think we did Part 2 & 3 together here

Will sum it up again however, “It was a hit” and something we will continue to build upon each and every year!

PART 4: What are your reflections and how can you build on your efforts? (Reflect & Evaluate)

Helping others and doing kind, thoughtful deeds began to become the norm for some students once again. Although it was only a few who continued to conduct themselves in that ‘random act of kindness’ on their own on a regular basis, just seeing how many jumped in during the ‘intensive intervention’ time was rewarding. We do believe that we can continue to build on this each and every year and have the kindness bug be just a regular part of the day. The relationships that were built, strengthened, and nurtured through this process made it all worthwhile.

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*This template is adapted from the Spiral of Inquiry ()