Ready, set, respect! : GLSEN's Elementary School Toolkit

R. MacGarry, L. Friedman, T. Bouley, P. Griffin

Ready, Set, Respect! provides a set of tools to help elementary school educators ensure that all students feel safe and respected and develop respectful attitudes and behaviors. It is not a program to be followed but instead is designed to help educators prepare themselves for teaching about and modeling respect. The toolkit responds to elementary educators' suggestion that they rarely teach about the kinds of topics (name-calling and bias, gender roles, and family diversity) addressed in the Ready, Set, Respect! toolkit. While educators have said that these topics simply "don't come up" we know that young children often have their own way of communicating what in fact is coming up, or identifying that which they are ready to explore or learn about. These kinds of issues reveal themselves in dramatic play, student to student dialogue, the informal rules of the playground and in a myriad of other ways. To that end, Ready, Set, Respect! asks educators to think comprehensively about "readiness" and in so doing consider what a ready child, ready school, and ready community look and feel like. The toolkit also assists educators in recognizing and understanding the readiness cues that may in fact suggest that these issues are indeed "coming up." To this end the toolkit poses the following pre-teaching questions: Ready, Set, Respect.