What is Dignity for All?

DFA is a curriculum rooted in recent findings in neurobiology. The curriculum focuses on giving students and teachers the tools they need to build skills in reflection, empathy, and teamwork in order to create a safe and supportive learning environment for the entire school community. DFA uses Urban Tech's ACID Test to remind students of the four characteristics of bullying: aggressive, continuous, imbalance in power, and deliberate.  
We want kids to feel free to tell their story and help shape a new generation of kinder, empathetic and civic-minded children.

Student Activities

Behind the Scenes provides background texts for each character in a provided DFA video as an empathy-building activity to connect the reader to the circumstances, beliefs, and attitudes of others. The stories and associated role-playing activities inspire students to actively empathize with others and strive to understand opposing perspectives.

Break it Down provides students with the opportunity to evaluate what they have learned from the Quest through both written and discussion-based analyses. This activity helps students understand the role they play in their school community and at home.

Write to the Point allows students to reflect privately through a series of journal prompts, helping students to put their emotions, thoughts, and values into words.

We Got Game prompts students to take part in a collaborative project with the goal to create a school-wide mission statement committed to a positive community for all. Students engage in research on mission statements of historical movements, brainstorming of values and goals, outreach to the rest of the school community through a variety of multimedia projects, and the organization of a school-wide event to discuss and implement the resulting mission statement. See the full list of components here.

Teacher Training

DFA’s teacher guides include in-depth descriptions of the research in neuroscience, restorative justice, and empathy upon which the curriculum is based. Urban Tech strives to give teachers the tools they need to coach their students on a personal level, deal effectively with emotions, and help develop positive responses to stressful situations. In this way we can help teachers and students raise self-awareness eradicate unconscious bias, and build skills in empathy and critical reflection.

Metrics

In 2018, we implemented DFA into its first pilot school in Brooklyn, NY. At the start of the school year, 63% of students indicated that they had been teased, lied about or socially isolated. After completing the first phase of DFA, in only ten weeks’ time, reports of the same behavior had decreased to 29%. Overall victimization rates fell from 23% to 17.9%, a rate lower than the national bullying average for middle school students, and prevalence rates among female students dropped by nearly 50%. Download our latest evaluation below.