South Whittier School District hosted a professional development training called Capturing Kids’ Hearts in an effort to continue to impact students and all stakeholders in a more respectful and caring way.
These trainings took place on August 12th and August 13th. All members of the district including our district leadership consisting of Cabinet members and certificated and classified administrators and managers participated. A smaller group consisting of our district office personnel, food services and maintenance department will be trained on November 1st.
Capturing Kids’ Hearts is a training by Flippen Group, who is a leading accelerator of organizational and personal growth in schools, businesses, government, families, and individuals. They believe that building relationships and processes bring out the best in people.
“Developing positive relationships throughout our entire district is empowering for all stakeholders. This professional development opportunity is providing all of us with the tools we need to be the best version of ourselves,” Associate Superintendent of Educational Services, Martha Mestanza-Rojas, stated.
Capturing Kids’ Hearts 1 is a process that is currently working in thousands of classrooms across the country, and is now being brought to South Whittier School District, to provide the strategy and training for teachers, staff and administrators to achieve success in today’s classrooms. Their belief is “Give us a teacher who’s passionate about their subject, a teacher who cares for the welfare and success of their students, and we’ll give that teacher the tools they need to engage and challenge students, and raise them to a higher level of performance.”
This professional development training showed attendees how to create high-achieving centers of learning by strengthening students’ connectedness to others through enhancing healthy bonds with their teachers and staff and establishing collaborative agreements of acceptable behavior.
This training’s approach was an immersive participatory experience. Attendees practiced how to build meaningful and productive relationships, how to create a safe and effective environment for learning, and how to develop self-managing, high-performing classrooms using team-building skills. Lastly, they practiced how to deal with negative behavior and conflict.
Capturing Kids’ Hearts is a researched based process. This process was designed to help improve key indicator of a school’s performance including fewer discipline referrals, improved attendance, higher student achievement, lower dropout rates, and higher teacher satisfaction.
“Research is clear regarding the connection between school culture and student achievement,” Rojas shared. “We know that if teachers can create a relational connection to students, performance goes up, and behaviors greatly improve because kids want to be in school. ‘Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.’”
For more information about Capturing Kid’s Hearts: