A few days ago my wife and I were talking about some of the horrible illness that is impacting so many people that we know (mostly cancer). We then started talking about how no matter who you are, what age you are or what you believe in; bad things will happen to you. Immediately after this, we started talking about all the great things that is happening in our life.
I am not really sure how this applies to what we do at the school everyday, but I felt like it was the right thing to write about this week. I decided to search some articles online about appreciating what you have and I found this one. If you are more of a visual person here is a short animation about gratefulness.
Questions To Consider:
1. What does gratefulness look like in your life? How can you model that in your classroom?
2. Do you think you can impact some of these social emotional factors of students, like being grateful? Is that important for us to be doing?
3. How can a student show gratefulness in your classroom? How could you recognize it?
Very interesting post...first I like how you provided for the linguistic and visual learner. I chose to read the article attached :)
ReplyDeleteSecondly - these are tough questions and these are areas I have been working on in my own life. In the classroom, I feel like gratefulness shows itself in personalization and acceptance. It is understanding and grace given to and received by each other (students and teachers). Ultimately, I believe it is social emotional factors like this that are much more important to teach than any given intellectual fact / process. Facts and process can be memorized and useful, but living life requires character and when we fail to develop character above all we fail to help students become who they were meant to be in the best way possible.
Thanks Dustin for taking the time to read it. If they don't know you care, they aren't going to learn.
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