By Sarah Hall

Editor

We hear it all the time: No one cares about anyone else anymore.

“Over the last 30 years, empathy has declined by 40 percent among kids,” said Mike Erwin, U.S. Army veteran and founder of the Positivity Project. “On the opposite side of the same coin, narcissism is on the rise. Kids are focusing on themselves instead of others.”

So how do we reverse this trend? According to Erwin, it starts with promoting a number of important character strengths—and reminding kids from a young age that other people matter.

Those are the guiding principles behind the Positivity Project, which Erwin started in 2015 and which was launched exclusively at Morgan Road Elementary School in Liverpool in the 2015-16 school year as a new character education program.

“The core of our hashtag and our mission statement is other people matter,” Erwin said. “We’re building within kids a deeper focus on other people and an understanding that people are all different. No matter how tall we are, what our skin color is, the length of our hair, how we’re different makes our character. We need to teach that from a young age.”

Erwin, who did two tours in Afghanistan and another in Iraq, designed the program around the themes of positive psychology, which he studied at the University of Michigan under Dr. Chris Peterson, who passed away in 2012. Erwin taught psychology and leadership to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, ultimately creating what he called the Positive Psychology Project, which centered around 24 character strengths (see sidebar) and the science behind them.

In 2015, to honor Peterson’s memory, Erwin created a Facebook page focusing on the project, which he renamed the Positivity Project.

“I started posting about the various character traits — integrity, bravery,” Erwin said.

The page caught the attention of Mark Herron, a second-grade teacher at MRE. Herron reached out to Erwin and asked if he would speak to staff members about incorporating aspects of the Positivity Project into the school’s character education program.

According to third grade teacher Sarah Angotti, who was on the committee that brought the Positivity Project to MRE, the district’s previous character ed program was far less integrative.

“The pillars we would teach to the kids were the basics, right versus wrong, giving them examples of what they should be doing,” Angotti said. “This is so much stronger. We talk about the character strengths that are within each of us. These are a part of you. These are what make you special. In school and in the world, we teach them how to recognize these traits in themselves and in others and how they can use them to make the world a better place.”

Erwin designed a plan for the school that revolved around teaching one character strength per week; the school had previously focused on one trait per month. The school would focus on certain themes at certain points of the year — creativity at Halloween, gratitude at Thanksgiving, love at Valentine’s Day.

“We kind of did it and built it as the year went along,” Angotti said. “It ended up being bigger than we thought it would be.”

So much bigger, in fact, that Erwin, who had originally started the project just to help out the teachers at Morgan, ended up quitting his full-time job and turning the Positivity Project into a nonprofit.

“I came to Morgan Road before Veterans Day and saw it in action,” he said. “This idea has serious potential for the country to bring this perspective to as many kids as possible.”

Next year, the Positivity Project will not only be implemented throughout the Liverpool Central School District, but also in 28 other districts in Syracuse, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Texas. In those districts, they’ll benefit from the knowledge gained at MRE about the project in terms of the implementation of the program.

“Morgan was the first to do this. They’ve taught us so much,” Erwin said. “We learned it was very important to make sure before launching, we had to do a better job teaching and informing the teachers and the educators and the principals and staff about the character strengths, all up front. We didn’t do a great job last year.”

From the beginning, though, Erwin and the MRE committee made sure it was easy for teachers to work the curriculum into their lessons.

“We keep the amount of resources and time teachers need to devote to this simple,” Erwin said. “No matter how awesome it is, if the heavy lifting is difficult on a teacher or if it takes too much of their time, it’s going to have a hard tome being successful. Teachers have so much on their plates, we wanted them to see they can still achieve this while keeping the work on their part to a minimum.”

First grade teacher Deana Garland said she’s managed to incorporate it easily into all content areas for her students.

“During ELA, I teach a weekly vocabulary lesson that often focuses on one of the traits. Many of them are difficult words for first graders (i.e. humility), so it’s a great way to expand their vocabulary,” Garland said. “As we read books together, the kids naturally began using the traits to explore characters and to make connections to themselves — ‘Hey, this character has perseverance just like me.’ In social studies, there were many great opportunities to talk about love, citizenship and perseverance. The kids also have the option of filling out bucket sheets as part of ‘work on writing. As the year, went on I was very proud to see how aware they were of each other’s strengths and what a great job they did complimenting each other and ‘filling each other’s buckets.’”

Garland said the project has proven to be a great community builder in her classroom.

“I think it helps build tolerance and an understanding of each other’s strengths and differences,” she said. “They take great pride in their own strengths, and they also love talking about their classmates’ strengths. I have definitely seen a difference from the beginning of the year. I think they’re a stronger community.”

Angotti said she, too, saw a difference in her students.

“My class was coming back from PE one day, and one student said to me, ‘Mrs. Angotti, I won the game we were playing, and I was kind of bragging to my classmates, and I was not being very nice. I think I need to work on my humility,’” Angotti said. “That’s so precious. They’re building that vocabulary. That’s empowering these kids to express themselves in ways they couldn’t before.”

She said it really drives home the importance of her job.

“Our job as elementary school teachers is to teach them reading and writing and math, but it’s also teaching them to be good people and to be productive members of society,” Angotti said.

Erwin said that’s exactly what the Positivity Project is about: improving society as a whole.

“With that ‘other people matter’ mindset, we’re trying to reduce divisiveness in our country, strengthen our community and country by making our citizens more committed to the greater good,” he said. “Democracy is only going to work if the overwhelming majority of people are doing the right thing and treating each other well.”