Last week during our Social Emotional Learning time, we focused on identifying the good in others. This is one of the five components of having an "other person mindset." This is something that comes naturally for some, but others struggle looking for the good and seeing the positives. We watched videos, had conversations, and participated in a variety of activities that all focused on finding the good in others.
I think we can all agree that hearing something positive about yourself feels good. If it feels good to adults, imagine how much it impacts a child. Miss Soja and I wrote notes to our students highlighting their strengths and what they bring to the class.
We then gave students the opportunity to do the same for their classmates. Rather than allowing students to choose who they wanted to compliment, we recognized that the true value in this activity came by pushing the students to identify positives in classmates that they weren't particularly close to. Therefore, we provided the students with the name of the classmate(s) that they were going to write to. It is activities like this that make a teacher's heart happy. The smiling faces as the students read their post-it notes was a perfect culmination to the week-long discussion of finding the good in others.
No comments:
Post a Comment