Respect and Resilience at Roycemore

One of the core values at Roycemore is "Respect." We talk about this as the foundation from which we can have a strong community. In addition to Respect being a core value, it is also embedded in our Leader In Me/7 Habits character building program that we embrace school-wide in Habit #5, "Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood." At the core of this is empathy. Recent advisory conversations with students in both the Middle and Upper School centered around empathy, the ability to truly listen to others and make a genuine effort to understand what they are going through.

Adolescence is a key time for our young people to learn respect and empathy in a deep way and our young people benefit greatly when they see the adults around them modeling this behavior. When they can see adults assuming good intent of others in interactions that might be less than ideal; or when they witness the adults in their lives taking the time to understand the perspective of another person they are frustrated with rather than responding with rage or anger, our young people might just take a pause themselves when they are in a similar stressful situation.

This is easier than it sounds. It requires making decisions over and over again every day to pause, listen, not rush to judgement, and to be forgiving. Many of us adults still have difficulty with this. In fact, just this past week an adult driver who was leaving the Roycemore parking lot spilled over in anger at a student who was backing out of his parking spot. The student believed the lane he was backing out into was one-way, the adult did not, and proceeded to yell obscenities at the teenage driver. How unfortunate that the adult in the situation didn't pause to offer respect and empathy to a young driver.

Hopefully this young driver has enough resilience to bounce back from this incident. Perhaps he has even "sought first to understand..." that maybe the adult driver had a bad day, perhaps was carrying upset from some other interaction that spilled over to the teen driver. Certainly our hope is that in our work with our students through advisory and other guidance and healthy relationships at Roycemore, students will develop resilience to handle difficult situations like these. They will face many more difficult situations in their lives and if we can help them navigate smaller ones with grace and empathy, they will build up resilience to deal with bigger challenges when they come--and they will.

I invite you to partner with us to create an environment where we can support our students' development of empathy, respect, and resilience. I encourage you to model it in your own interactions with others. And if you have ideas about how we can enhance this even more in our school community, please speak with me. I value our partnership.