The 100% RESPECT! Campaign is a comprehensive social and emotional learning program that seeks to transform positively the tone and culture of a school building. Matthew Guldin developed the 100% RESPECT! Campaign to address disrespectful behaviors being exhibited by students to each other and to staff during his tenure as Dean at East Side Community HS in NYC. Teachers needed a means to address the situation, and Matthew set about making a plan to ensure that everyone at the school got what they wanted: RESPECT!
The Campaign accomplishes this aim by acknowledging the fundamental equality of all people while at the same time recognizing the different roles we all play within a school community. Developed on the ground by Matthew, and implemented by his assistant deans, a core of committed teachers and a group of student ‘Respect Reps!’, the program has been very successful in reducing violent and anti-social behavior—leading to falling suspension rates, higher test scores and a much safer school environment.
The Campaign aims to help all members of a school community—students, teachers, school leaders and all school support staff—to treat each other with respect. Since there are differences (sometimes major differences) in how the various constituents of a given school define respect and interpret one another’s actions, we have developed a program that fosters communication and collaboration between all people who are members of a particular school community. The 100% RESPECT! Campaign is a program that can be scaled to suit campuses both large and small.
The Campaign begins by breaking down and rebuilding the primary relationships in a school environment: those among students and those between students and staff. The program structures activities to help people communicate with each other across all the social barriers that tend to keep us apart—those of age, class, color, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation. It then teaches skills to ensure that people continue listening to each other and begin giving respect in ways that others can accept. These are skills that students and teachers alike can use beyond the confines of the school environment.
The 100% RESPECT! Campaign operates on a participatory democracy model in which everyone’s voice is heard and all work to define what respectful behavior looks like. This approach acknowledges our common humanity and establishes the fact that everyone does, in fact, deserve 100% RESPECT!
Some of the major benefits of the 100% RESPECT! Campaign include:
- establishing clear guidelines for behavior, thus reducing suspensions and time away from the classroom
- increasing passing rates and tests scores due to less time and energy used addressing classroom management issues
- increasing attendance rates of students and work place satisfaction of staff
- acknowledging the fundamental equality of all, while recognizing & appreciating the differences in both background & roles within the school community
- addressing power imbalances within the school community and providing all concerned with the skills to communicate in spite of those differences
- teaching direct participatory democracy and its application in a real-world situation
- allowing for students & teachers to collaborate on leading aspects of the Campaign
- teaching conflict resolution skills to students which can be used at home and in the future [e.g. college, workplace, etc.]
- providing professional development for adults and teachers in how to improve their relationships with teenagers
The program is built in such a way that this new environment of respect is self-reinforcing: structures are established that facilitate responsible dialogue and criticism between adults and students, leading to a more positive social climate that welcomes and nurtures incoming cohorts of students. The end result is a fundamentally revitalized school culture, one that is academically, professionally, socially and personally beneficial to all involved.
Our Campaign starts off by engaging everyone in the school community defining how they would like to see people treat each other while they are all together in school. All students participate in a series of lessons in Advisory (a class in which social-emotional issues are dealt with) in which they define what respectful behavior should look like in 3 areas: student to student, students to staff and staff to students. Staff does a similar activity during faculty and other professional meetings.
Once the final list of ‘Behavioral Guidelines are compiled, each grade meets in a Town Hall meeting to review, discuss, question and ratify. When this process is completed, your school has established their RESPECT! Guidelines.
Though there are many other steps to fully putting the 100% RESPECT! Campaign in place, we’ll move now to one of our most effective restorative practices: The No Excuses Mediation. In this mediation format, which is a combination of the traditional Restorative Chat and the Restorative Conference, the goal is to have the participants take responsibility for their actions and 'repair the harm' or 'clean up the bad situation that you made'.
What really sets the 100% RESPECT! Campaign apart from other programs geared at including students in when setting behavioral norms is the component of Teacher to Student RESPECT! In this piece, school staff is asked to change and respond to student feedback on what respectful/disrespectful adult behavior looks and feels like to teens and preteens. This puts students and teachers on an equal footing. Experience shows that learning what is respectful to teens, and altering your behavior accordingly, facilitates communication with students. Rather than disempowering teachers, listening to and responding positively to students’ requests actually earns adults more respect from young people. By promoting this mutual respect and understanding, the 100% RESPECT! Campaign facilitates both academic and emotional learning—for everyone involved.
"Developing and implementing the 100% RESPECT! Campaign at East Side Community High School over the four years between 2005-2009 played a major role in increasing the safety of our school, the social and emotional development of our students and learning in general. Under the leadership of Dean Matthew Guldin and in collaboration with all sectors of our staff and students, this social emotional learning program gave East Side common language and behavioral guidelines, which anchored our efforts to help students mature and make better decisions. Additionally, it helped many staff members improve their relationships with their students.
"100% RESPECT! helped the community address bullying and do preventative No Excuses Mediations, which contributed to a substantial reduction in fighting. Within the first two years of implementation we reduced overall suspensions by 51% and now fights are extremely rare at our school. The 100% RESPECT! Campaign allowed teachers and students to focus on teaching and learning, contributing to our middle school and high school earning "A's" on our progress reports for all 8 years that grades have been assigned. I strongly recommend Cross-Cultural Consulting Services’ 100% RESPECT! Campaign and Matthew to any school that is looking to improve or even profoundly change the tone and culture in its building."
- Mark Federman, Principal, East Side Community, 2014
"Matthew Guldin and Cross-Cultural Consulting Services' 100% RESPECT! Campaign has made a positive impact in Bronx Lab School. It has allowed us to lay the foundation for a positive learning environment. Since working with Matthew three years ago, we have seen real results. Overall, fights decreased by 28% when comparing the 2010-2011 school year to the 2011-2012 school year. We also had 75% of staff agree with the statement that "order and respect are maintained at my school" up from 50% three years ago. Finally, the 100% RESPECT! Campaign helped open up a dialogue on respect and led to school-wide community events such as participating in National Coming Out Day, National Day of Silence, Respect Week, and an Anti-Bullying Week. We have seen positive results by making the 100% RESPECT! Campaign part of our school culture."
- Christopher Lagares, Principal, Bronx Lab School, 24 November 2012
"M.S. 217Q have been working with Matthew Guldin for the past three years with a specific focus on working with our Dean Team. The relationship has proven to be a rewarding experience, not only professionally, but socially as well. Matt has helped us to realize that our role in educating the “whole child” is vital to how well a school functions as a community. Matt introduced his Restorative Justice philosophy as a dean’s tool to create a framework of positive relationships throughout the building. Specifically, he gave us strategies such as “No XQZz Mediation” (No Excuses Mediation) that effectively de-escalate conflicts between students. Matt has streamlined restorative practices from a dean’s perspective and we were able to utilize his strategies with much success. Our suspensions decreased by 34% compared to the previous year. Last year, the deans also met with other deans, Assistant Principals, and RJ coordinators of select schools to discuss RJ strategies and share best practices.
"Matt was also a driving force in our school’s development of an advisory program that utilizes a restorative justice format. We implemented the program initially with our sixth graders two years ago and now all grades have advisory. During the initial planning process, he was instrumental in helping to author lessons that were meaningful to our school community. In addition, he provided a guiding influence in how we were to structure lessons to reflect specific themes that were important to the classroom community, and developing a curriculum that would potentially improve the student-teacher dynamic. After two years of successfully implementing the program, that initial group of students that are now eighth graders, are prepared to lead the discussions in advisory!
Last year, one of the proudest moments of our work together was the rollout of the “100% Respect Campaign”. Matt gave us advisory lesson plans that defined what “respect looks like” for three relationship dynamics: student to student, student to teacher, and teacher to student. It was a tremendous effort that required students to sort through 180 lists, as each class generated a set of these respect guidelines. Evidence of our RJ goals to foster positive working relationships were on display as students worked collaboratively to compile a definitive list for each dynamic with little to no assistance from the deans. We called these guidelines “The Declaration Of Respect” and used these guidelines to frame respectful relationships.
"The results of our efforts through advisory and the 100% Respect Campaign can be reflected in the school’s current Learning Environment Survey. According to the data, 58% of the student population in District 28 believe that students harass, bully or intimidate other students compared to 36% in our school. That is a 22% difference that we can proudly attribute to our behavioral shift in philosophy using Matt’s Restorative Justice strategies.
"We are grateful for Matt. His dedication to our school community and to the positive development of our students is second to none."
- Patrick Burns, Principal & Tyrone Paulin, Dean, J.H.S. 217 Robert A. Van Wyck
The 100% RESPECT! Campaign has also received accolades from:
If you intend to make the 100% RESPECT! Campaign work in your school, there are, of course, certain preconditions. Fortunately, every school can do it. All you need is to:
If you contract with the 100% RESPECT! Campaign, we will:
To learn more about bringing RESPECT! to your school, don't hesitate to write an email to CCCS' Director of Educational Programming, Matthew Guldin. We look forward to hearing from you!
Interview with Matthew Guldin
In this interview, Matthew Guldin describes the background of the 100% RESPECT! Campaign, its roots in Social and Emotional Learning as well as the Restorative Justice Movement, and its relation to his lifework in education.
Lehman College Panel, May 2018
A panel hosted by Lehman College and mderated by Matthew Guldin, in which Mentor Principals and Deans share their experiences in moving their school's culture away from suspensions and the process of building community that they needed to engage in.
In this video, produced by the Teachers Democracy Project of Baltimore, the case is made for Restorative Justice practices to be used in schools by Principals, parents, teachers and RJ movement leaders. It also features Matthew Guldin speaking on the importance of the Principals being on board to lead this process of change.