KIPP Shares Culture with LMS

For the team at KIPP Courage, Kickboard is a beloved tool that supports their culture of high expectations and character development. A software platform designed to help educators build school culture and manage their classrooms, Kickboard allows teachers to track and analyze student behavior. 

As KIPP Courage is housed inside of Landrum Middle School, Landrum Principal Luis Pratts and KIPP Courage School Leader Eric Schmidt have worked to calibrate the cultures across the two groups, creating ways to share LMS best practices with KIPP and vice versa. During a shared professional development meeting on Friday, KIPP Courage teachers introduced Landrum staff to Kickboard and shared the ways the program supports their work.

KIPP Courage teachers Hannah Swanson and Ryan Hambley
demonstrate how they use Kickboard in their classrooms

In one presentation, KIPP 5th grade math teacher Ryan Hambley and 5th grade humanities teacher Hannah Swanson were clear that while the program does not directly fix student behaviors, it does provide accountability for the pedagogy and belief that each of the KIPP teachers live by and work to develop in their students.

Since its inception in 1994, KIPP has valued character development as central to its mission. In every KIPP school, there are seven highly-predictive character traits infused into school life: zest, optimism, gratitude, social intelligence, grit, curiosity, and self-control. Teachers incorporate these traits into their lessons and help recognize and develop them in their students.

As Hambley and Swanson walked LMS teachers through the Kickboard system, they shared a piece of the KIPP Courage culture that lives within the Landrum campus walls. This meeting followed a previous joint professional development session when KIPP and LMS teachers shared their learnings after having co-observed each other's classrooms. As teachers from both schools learn from each other about expectations and systems used, the two groups continue their efforts to establish building-wide best practices to serve all students.