How to build school community, one digital coin at a time

A music teacher explains how his school gets everyone involved by focusing on core values and rewarding positive behavior.
Clyde Forland
Clyde Forland
Clyde Forland is the music teacher at Oran M. Roberts Elementary School in Dallas, Texas, where he also serves as the head of the Culture Committee. He can be reached at [email protected].

At Oran M. Roberts Elementary School, 82% of our students are Hispanic and 16% are Black. These populations were hit particularly hard by the pandemic. This year, they and their parents are eager to rebuild the community they had before COVID.

As the head of the school’s Culture Committee, one of my goals is to make sure everyone is involved. Our theme for this year is based on the acronym SEAS—Successfully Educating All Scholars. The theme is reflected in ocean-themed decorations around the school, but that’s just the beginning of how the Culture Committee is inspiring students to live our school values.

Choosing core values

I like to call all of our students “scholars.” I believe it gives them a sense of pride. They know they are students, but when they hear the word “scholar,” they think, “Oh, this is serious. I’m not just a student, not just a kid. I’m a scholar.”

It may not be huge, but I think that slight elevation in attitude helps motivate them to demonstrate our five core values and just generally try a little harder all around while they’re on campus.

One of the ways we get scholars to focus on our core values and look for opportunities to express them is through our House system.  Our scholars recite our core values every day in the classroom. We also have a song about them that we sing at House meetings, pep rallies, and other events.

Here’s how we define those values for everyone at our school:

  • Empathy is looking out for each other’s feelings.
  • Grit is my personal favorite of the five, and it’s about perseverance and pushing through challenges.
  • Respect is treating other people the way you want to be treated regardless of their differences
  • Responsibility is following through on your commitments.
  • Unity at Oran M. Roberts Elementary is inviting in someone you don’t normally have in your social group.

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Embracing diversity in houses

To make sure we had a consistent program school-wide, we adopted CritterCoin as the platform for our House system. Our campus is diverse, so we wanted to include other cultures and named our Houses to reflect that: Novatores (Latin), Talawa (Jamaican), Spearheads (Native American), and Altruism, which is an English word.

The CritterCoin platform allows any teacher to award a scholar a digital coin when they demonstrate core values. We also award coins for other behavior we want to encourage, such as dressing in House colors on Fridays, being a little “extra” on spirit days, or winning physical education games like “flip the cone.” The Houses compete against each other to see who can earn the most coins. We have House displays with real-time scores throughout the school to keep scholars and teachers engaged.

I like to look for scholars who are paying attention in class or demonstrating core values, but I give out a digital coin for other behaviors, as well. The other day we were playing a song called “Follow the Leader” in the gym. It’s an example of soca music, so I asked the class, “What is soca?” I didn’t get a response until I said, “Okay, for a House point, who can answer me correctly?” Hands shot up around the room.

Getting everyone involved

To get teachers involved, each of us is assigned to a House, and each House is led by a teacher. Every teacher can reward any scholar with a coin no matter where they are: in the classroom, in the halls, or even off campus.

Because we are so focused on building community, the rewards for winning House competitions are shared experiences for the entire House. Every nine weeks, the House with the most points gets an ice cream or popcorn party, and at the end of the year, the House that scores the most points will get to go to Six Flags together.


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We also want to make sure all of our scholars are involved in some kind of club or activity beyond the House competitions, so we make sure we have lots to offer, like a chess club, cheer club, University Interscholastic League, and more.

And we love to participate in all the cultural celebrations throughout the year. This month is Hispanic Heritage Month, for example, so we’ll have potlucks of different foods, and we’ll have people from different Hispanic countries come on the morning announcements to tell their stories. In the musical program, we’ll represent the musical heritage of different countries of Hispanic descent by talking and singing about them, and other classes will have their own celebrations.

As our scholars continue to recover mentally from the disruptions of the past few years, we’ll have lots of fun events that our community can look forward to: our Fall Festival, Trunk or Treat, and a food drive around Thanksgiving. My goal is to include everybody. This is more than school, this is home, and we want to do everything we can to engage all of our scholars.

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