This year Emory School began our second year of professional development around the subject of Writing. Our first PD of the year encouraged each teacher to begin by building “a community of writers” in their classroom and our presenters even gave us a number of excellent writing exercises that would help to build a writing environment where students felt safe to take risks and to share their thoughts and writing with their peers. I recall walking into classrooms where teachers were working on the “identity poem” activity with their students and I was brought to tears to read and hear what students were sharing about their personal lives. I remember one day when I visited 3 different classrooms and in each classroom, when I looked at student work, I was struck with sadness and surprise to find out how similar parts of the poems were. When students were asked to use the mentor text, “Mention that it makes me sad when……….”, it was basically the same for many of the students. “Mention that I feel sad when my parents argue and fight”. I recall thinking, “If only the parents knew how much their fighting affects their children” and “Look how much we can learn about our students from this one simple activity” and “Wow, I wonder if these students realize how much they are alike in many ways”.
These questions and the idea of building empathy within our classrooms was recently brought back to the forefront of my thinking when one of my amazing Kindergarten teachers asked me if I could help her in brainstorming some ideas to address the amount of aggressive and negative behavior that she is noticing with her students this year. We discussed a few ideas and landed on the idea of spending some time each week having “class meetings” in hopes of building an environment where students have empathy for one another and see themselves as a family. We spoke about the time that might be taken away from other academic instruction but both felt it would be worth the investment if it ultimately diminished the amount of time dealing with these other time consuming negative behaviors. I also explained to her that the discussion, if structured appropriately, would most assuredly address Common Core speaking and listening standards consequently “killing two birds with one stone”!!
Today, the teacher began her intro to this concept by speaking to the students about the word “empathy” and did a great job of defining this in “Kindergarten/5 –year-old language”. We then quickly discussed what we do in our family to show that we care. I also introduced the concept of “roses” and “thorns”. (This is stolen from my daughter’s 5th grade teacher where each student has the opportunity to share one “rose”, something that has made them happy, excited, etc. and one “thorn”, something that has brought them sadness or frustration, during their class meetings) and I modeled with my own “rose” (My son just got back from 6th grade camp and that made Mrs. Palmer very happy because I missed him when he was gone.) I shared that my “thorn” was that shortly after returning from camp, he was already fighting with his sister and that frustrated me. We explained that today we didn’t have a lot of time to share but allowed one little boy, who was clearly sad as tears were streaking down his face, to share. He started by saying “My thorn is that no one wants to play with me at recess and this makes me sad.” It was so special to see how many students immediately yelled out (we will still need to work on how to respond without multiple shout outs at the same time) “I will play with you next time”. I even noticed the girl next to him was patting him on the back in hopes of helping him feel better. (Tears in my eyes!!) Every day I am reminded how much we can learn from our students when we give them time to share their thoughts, whether it be about Writing, Math, or “Roses and Thorns”.
This was just Day 1 in the class meeting “experiment” with Kindergarteners. The teacher and I discussed that she probably won’t have the time to allow each child to share daily (Imagine how long it would take for 25 Kindergarten students to share every day!!) so maybe she will draw sticks and explain to everyone that only 5 students will share every day but that everyone will get to share by the end of the week, if they want to. I’m sure we will find that we need to make adjustments along the journey but just seeing the responses today was encouraging and inspiring. As I returned to my office to do more research on other ideas for the class meetings, I was further encouraged when I read the following Edutopia post from Anne Shaw in which she states,
“Without an excellent, intentionally designed, emotional environment (one which builds authentic community in the classroom), the standards and the technologies are of little value. As Steven Covey and many others have said, “First things first!” There are three facets of a classroom and school environment: 1) the physical environment, 2) the emotional environment, and, 3) the academic environment. http://bit.ly/17qx3PI
I would argue that most every teacher would agree that the emotional environment of the classroom is critical. How much time are we investing in this? I challenge everyone to find the time because I am confident it will be well worth it! And I’ll keep you “post”ed on the Kindergarten experiment.
About the Author: Jil Palmer is the principal at Emory School
This summer I spent some time with my great-niece Amelia, she is an impressive little girl with many talents. Amelia is bilingual; she is able to speak English & Spanish fluently and will translate if needed. She loves to look at books and have them read to her, yet will correct you if you mispronounce a word or say a sentence incorrectly in Spanish. What was truly amazing was watching this newly turned three year old, navigate herself through technology with ease. She was able to sign-in to her Amazon account and read books, her YouTube account to watch her saved Nick Jr. & PBS videos and can exit each website correctly. After our visit, it made me ponder, what technology skills will our Kindergarteners have in 2015-16 & will we be prepared for them?
The SBUSD Year of Learning Project 