Reflect on Julene Reed’s article and post a blog entry that presents an idea for using digital media as part of a project, activity or lesson in which you aim to develop students’ respectful and ethical minds.
After reading the chapter on "The Ethical Mind" in Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner, and experiencing several disturbing incidents involving students this past week, I realized that students need some direction and education regarding the qualities and characteristics of friendship. I truly believe that to be a valid and valuable contributor to society in general, and the community in particular, a person needs to understand how to like themselves, and to make and maintain friendships built on respect and trust. This can lead to collaboration, which in turn leads to valuable input and change within the community and the student's world.
Although the lessons in the computer lab lately have been focused on bullying, I am still seeing bullying within the classroom, particularly with the younger grades. Part of this has to do with friendship, and students not knowing how a friend is defined. An incident in the fourth grade class made me think that this class should be targeted when starting lessons on friendship. Two female students who have been known to "not be nice" and "bully" in the past couple of years (and have received consequences because of their bullying), have been again named as the bullies in several teasing and harassing incidents. One girl thought that one of the aggressive girls was her "best friend", but realized she could not trust her when she told her that she liked a boy, and then the girl asked the boy to a dance instead. This girl (the victim) is frequently targeted by others in her class because of her size. She also does not like herself very much. She is constantly in tears when in my room because of these incidents, yet feels very comfortable confiding in me more than other adults at our school. Part of my solution was to invite her and several other girls who also were being harassed by the two to eat lunch in my room. To watch these six girls, who previously did not "hang out", laugh and talk during lunch was a true pleasure. It made me realize that these students don't know what a friend truly is. I feel like I need to work with this class on learning about the issue of friendship and self-esteem (being proud of who they are as a person).
I'll start by introducing a vocabulary list of words relating to friendship and also to bullying and harassment. Using a google doc, I'll have the students sort the words into positive or negative columns. I'll then encourage them to pair with a partner, and add more words to the positive and negative column. This will lead to a class discussion about the task.
The next step will be for the students to complete a survey about their likes and dislikes,. I'll compose this survey using google docs/forms, and then collect the findings and share the results with the class. I'll then compose groups of three students who have the same likes in at least one of the fields, and their task will be to come up with a list of words that are complimentary to others, and that they would like to hear a friend use. Included in these lists would be "trust" and "loyal". I would have the students use Wordle as a collaborative effort, and publish the words. I would create a wiki for the class about friendship, listing quotes from the discussion, the results of the survey, and the Wordle pictures. I would hope this would at least get the students thinking abut the words they use with others, and show them that they have more in common with their classmates then just the same teacher. The Wordle posters would be posted in the hall, hopefully inspiring conversations in other classrooms.
An additional activity could be creating Wordle posters using their answers for the survey questions, or just descriptive words about themselves. This would also give them another chance to see that they have more in common with each other than they think, as well as get them thinking about the positive traits that they have as a person.
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