Aspire Dream BLDRS™ with Haynes Middle School
Aspire has partnered with Haynes Middle School to bring our award-winning college and career readiness Dream BLDRS program to you!
We are thrilled to announce the launch of the third year of DREAM BLDRS, our College and Career Readiness Program at Haynes Middle School! Led by renowned speaker, Best-selling author, and educator Patrick Walker-Reese. Dream BLDRS is designed to empower our students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to explore their future academic and career pathways through vision-based learning.
College & Career Readiness
Unique Incentives
Guest Speakers
A glimpse of Aspire Dream BLDRS in action!
Dream BLDRS
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Dream BLDRS at Haynes Middle School
Aspire’s Dream BLDRS program, now in its second year of collaboration with Haynes Middle School, continues to provide an unparalleled classroom experience designed to inspire and empower students.
This program offers students a series of workshops that contains three modules, each designed to empower them with the skills and mindset needed to shape and achieve their desired future: a vision statement activity that helps them articulate their aspirations, outlining what they aim to achieve in the future and how they plan to positively impact others along the way, exploring their personal strengths and learning how to develop effective personal branding strategies to support their goals, and identifying their passions by examining some of the world’s biggest challenges; fostering a sense of purpose and direction in their journey toward achieving their dreams.
DREAM BLDRS OBJECTIVES
- Encourage Future Aspirations: Help students articulate clear, actionable vision statements that align with their goals and highlight the importance of having a vision for their future.
- Foster Personal Growth: Develop students’ soft skills, social-emotional awareness, and self-confidence through engaging activities and self-reflection exercises.Empower students to recognize and embrace their personal strengths—what they do better than anyone else.
- Equip Students for Success: Provide tools and strategies for identifying strengths, setting goals, and connecting personal ambitions with solutions to global issues. Foster self-awareness and confidence through reflective, student-centered workshops.
- Enhance Engagement and Collaboration: Use interactive assessments, such as the animal characteristics activity, to build self-awareness, teamwork, and appreciation of diverse strengths and values.
- Encourage long-term thinking and purpose-driven decision-making in academic and personal life.
The Power of DREAM BLDRS
Why Dream BLDRS?
The Dream BLDRS™ workshops integrated interactive sessions focusing on Vision creation, character assessment, personal branding, and ideal employee/company traits.
As students transition to high school and beyond, it’s crucial for them to start considering their future goals and the steps needed to achieve them. This program aims to inspire and equip them with the tools necessary for making informed decisions about their education and career paths.
Dream BLDRS is a program composed of workshops to address the social-emotional barriers that many students face in today’s complex, challenging society. By creating a safe and supportive space for self-reflection and personal growth, the program aims to help students build emotional resilience, self-awareness, and confidence.
In addition to tackling these challenges, the series of workshops are designed to enhance students’ soft skills, such as communication, goal-setting, empathy, and critical thinking—which are essential for success both in and out of the classroom. This dual focus ensures that students are not only emotionally supported but also equipped with the interpersonal tools they need to thrive in school and beyond.
DREAM BLDRS EXPERIENCE HIGHLIGHTS
- Socio-Emotional Learning (SEL) workshops utilizing creative approaches to reveal the tools and techniques to dream building.
- Cash Prize Vision Statement Competition
- Field Trip to Asurion Headquarters
- Award ceremony at Nissan Stadium (Tennessee Titans)
- Sneaker giveaway
Impact of Dream BLDRS
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Impact of Dream BLDRS
The Dream BLDRS program at Haynes Middle School sparked powerful moments of growth, reflection, and renewed confidence in the students’ potential. At the outset, a pretest revealed low levels of student confidence and connection: 40.4% of students felt extremely confident in their ability to become successful, just 37.2% rated their passion for achieving their goals at the highest level, and only 28.2% felt highly capable of identifying and using their personal strengths. Perhaps most concerning, only 8.7% of students felt strongly connected to their school environment, and just 27% were highly comfortable seeking help to achieve their dreams. With these statistics as a baseline, the Dream BLDRS workshops aimed to build emotional and motivational growth across the board.
In the vision workshop, students began identifying career interests, with the majority gravitating toward sports and entertainment, followed by business. After this session, about 60% of students recognized the importance of having a vision to achieve their dreams.
Field Trip to Asurion Headquarters for #BeTheDreamDay
Dream BLDRS: Vision
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Dream BLDRS: Vision
In the vision workshop, students began identifying career interests, with the majority gravitating toward sports and entertainment, followed by business. After this session, about 60% of students recognized the importance of having a vision to achieve their dreams.
Dream BLDRS: Passion
During the passion and goal-setting workshop, 42.1% of students chose violence as the most pressing issue they wanted to solve—one student even shared that they chose violence because they “lost so many people to gun violence”. Homelessness followed at 19.6%, while education totaled right behind at 18.4%. Only 11.2% of students chose health care, 6.9% of students chose incarceration, world hunger followed at 7.4%. 5.4% of students chose global warming. Surprisingly,only 2.8% of students selected poverty: an issue highly relevant to their surrounding community.
The personal branding workshop revealed powerful insight about the students. The 3 most common important parts to a brand were: interests & passion (70%), education/experience, freak-factor, and values were all tied at 40%, and personality attributes, strength, and vision were tied at 30% of students. A closing survey showed that the most common area of occupation among students was ”All the Above” amongst future college students, future skills/trade professionals, and future entrepreneurs.
Dream BLDRS: Strengths
In the strengths module, students reflected on their abilities and completed an animal characteristics assessment, which identified their strongest traits. The strengths workshop revealed powerful insights: 79.1% of students identified as supportive for one of their 4 strengths that they represent the most. The next most common three core traits were: communication at 77.6%, visionary at 76.9%, and Integrity at 64.2%. The most common personality type among students was the Gorilla, representing a competitive spirit, while the least common was the Owl, associated with collaboration.
The overall student response to the program was positive. Almost 80% of students gave it a five-star rating. These findings suggest meaningful strides in social-emotional development and increased student engagement with their personal and academic growth.
A glimpse of Aspire Dream BLDRS in action!
