Preface: It often takes a lifetime of interactions within one’s community and with loved ones to establish a philosophy that guides a person’s ethos for their professional development. I was lucky to come across the “we build up” theme in the summer of 1991 on the Pleasant Township summer playground.

My educational and coaching philosophy expanded in the early 2000’s upon learning of the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model (TPSR) and meeting its creator/author Mr. Don Hellison. In the following paragraphs, I hope to provide parents, caregivers, teachers, and administrators with information that can be utilized to guide our youth to a more enjoyable, respectful, and productive future.

— Flashback 1990: I am the director of the Warren County summer playgrounds, hiring many college students to provide programming for children around the county. One such employee was a St Francis University cross country athlete, Ms. Maria Tomassoni Munksgard. One day while watching two children play box hockey at her Pleasant Township playground, I witnessed a child say something very nasty to his opponent. Maria quickly said, “hey we build up here!” The chastised child quickly responded to his partner with a legitimate, “I’m sorry.” I was shocked and queried what had just happened?!?

Maria took me over to her playground bulletin board where a sign was posted: “At Pleasant Township Playground We Build Up – Not Tear Down.” I took that saying back to the Sheffield Area Middle High School, where with my physical education colleague Ms. Kim Nelson, began to implement that theme in our seventh seventh-grade physical education classes. We introduced the We Build Up (WBU) theme by having the children practice giving compliments to one another such as good job, nice try, way to go, great effort (they were already adept at giving negative comments like “you suck!”) and to take responsibility for their actions (e.g., mistakes) by indicating “my fault.”

The results of our efforts were astonishing! As educators, we seldom needed to reprimand students in the gymnasium for bullying or making fun of another student for making a mistake. There were very few teacher responses of “don’t do that” needed because the students in class would simply self-monitor. By the time those seventh graders were freshmen/sophomores in school If a student mistakenly made fun of someone in class; there were three students who would respond to the guilty party; “Hey we build up here!”

— The UNCG-Graduate Program: As a doctoral student in the early 2000’s at the University of North Carolina Greensboro I met and worked with Dr. Don Hellison the author of the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model (TPSR). Don, an educator, worked much of his career with at-risk populations utilizing physical activity to teach personal and social responsibility. At that time, he was a professor at the University of Chicago and implemented his model and physical activities to promote personal and social responsibility for children in the violence riddled housing development of Cabrini-Green located on Chicago’s north side. His model is based on five tenants: respect, giving effort, self-direction, helping others, and taking those values outside of the gym and into the children’s school and homes.

During my time at UNCG we worked with Don and his peer Dr. Tom Martinek in Project Effort, a club for at-risk children from an urban elementary school. Students came to the university one day a week for physical activities emphasizing the TPSR and then were mentored by college students at their elementary school. The results were very positive as reported by classroom teachers; less disruptive behavior, better attendance, and all exhibited more pro-social behaviors. (Fast forward, that program continued for years and as club members got older — i.e., junior and senior high school} they began to serve as leaders of the club’s physical activity sessions. Today the evolution of that program has resulted in a middle college high school on the UNCG campus for children from the neighborhood and the values are based on TPSR.

— Epilogue: The WBU theme combined with the TPSR model tenants has been the foundation of my coaching and teaching philosophy for the past 25 years. It has been ingrained with the members of the NCAA Division II Wingate University men and women’s cross-country teams where I coached from 2000-2015 and since my return to Warren with the areas’ high school wrestling teams.

— Finally, it is the underpinning wellspring for the Kinzua Youth Development Center-Home to the Kinzua Wrestling Club. The KYDC provides a multitude of youth development activities in a positive “we build up” environment where there is an emphasis on respect, giving best efforts, being self-directed, and helping others. In today’s world with our current political environment-what else is there?

Thank you, Ms. Maria Tomassoni Munksgard, Dr. Tom Martinek, and Dr. Don Hellison (in heaven), for contributing to my coaching/teaching philosophy! In closing, I have often wondered if the TPSR tenets combined in a “we build up” environment could be utilized by an entire school to eliminate bullying and promote positive personal and social responsibility attributes. Warren County School District, what do you think?

Dennis A. Johnson Ed.D, is a sport leadership consultant for the National Wrestling Coaches Association and secretary for the Kinzua Wrestling Club.