Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Over the past several months, I have worked on the soft skill of kindness. Esther Wojcicki, a gifted educator, advisor to our company, and author of How to Raise Successful People, defines kindness as one of five fundamental values, along with trust, respect, independence, and collaboration. Within the business world, kindness supports a culture in which people feel valued and respected.

Some educators would like to believe that their job is to be content specialists, but increasingly they are realizing that without the social and emotional skills to navigate setbacks and difficult relationships kids won't learn much. Some schools weave social and emotional learning throughout the day, integrating it with content, while others use advisory as a place students can talk about their problems. Mindfulness has gained traction in classrooms. And, increasingly schools are explicitly focusing on the value of kindness.

What constitutes a life worthy of being remembered? In this award-winning 2010 Thought Café video about kindness, the late New York Times best-selling author Amy Krouse Rosenthal asks, “How do you want to be remembered?”

“What have you filled the world with? In remembering you, which words will others choose? I wonder. Don’t you? Of all the possible adjectives, I think that if the word ‘kind’ appears in the mix, chances are very good that you have led a life worthy of being remembered. Kindness acts as a worthy marker that way.”

Some educators would like to believe that their job is to be content specialists, but increasingly they are realizing that without the social and emotional skills to navigate setbacks and difficult relationships kids won’t learn much. Some schools weave social and emotional learning throughout the day, integrating it with content, while others use advisory as a place students can talk about their problems. Mindfulness has gained traction in classrooms. And, increasingly schools are explicitly focusing on the value of kindness.

In his New York Times article Richard Schiffman discusses one kindness program inspired by the Dalai Lama’s call to take contemplative practice out of a religious context and make it useful to people’s lives. A big chunk of the program aims to help young kids name their emotions and talk through them. Schiffman writes there’s some research backing up the approach too.

Most people have heard the phrase ‘random acts of kindness’, which refers to a selfless act of giving resulting in the happiness of another person. Terms like this are increasing in popularity around the world, as more people identify a deficiency in their lives that can only be fulfilled by altruism.  

It seems we just can’t get enough of those addictive feel good emotions and with good reason.

Scientific studies have shown that kindness has a great number of physical and emotional benefits, and that children require a healthy dose of the warm and fuzzies in order to flourish as health, happy, well-rounded individuals.

Patty O’Grady, PhD, is an expert in the area of neuroscience, emotional learning, and positive psychology with special attention to the educational arena. She believes that “kindness changes the brain by the experience of kindness. Children and adolescents do not learn kindness by only thinking about it and talking about it. Kindness is best learned by feeling it so that they can reproduce it. Kindness is an emotion that students feel and empathy is a strength that they share.”

A great number of benefits have been reported to support the theory of teaching kindness in schools.

If you enter the physical world and open a door—say, to walk into a store—you will intuitively hold the door open if someone is walking behind you and you see them or hear them. Even if you aren’t intending to be kind, the weight of the door and the presence of a fellow human being will encourage you to do the right thing, the human thing.

In the digital world, it’s much more difficult to see and feel the doors we walk through, to see and hear the people walking behind us. As a result, it’s also much more difficult to do the right thing, the human thing—to hold the door open for a person walking in right behind you.

October is National Bullying Prevention month. I like to focus on getting students to spread kindness and feel the benefits of being kind versus being mean to others. Many children play social games, such as Roblox and Fortnite, and experience cyberbullying much more than we did in the past. Many students have shared with me their experiences of others being mean, trash talking, or cursing at them during the games. Many of the children don’t realize the impact of their reactions or words on others. To help students reflect more on how their words and actions impact others our objective this month is, “How to be kind online and offline!” Below are some resources and ideas related to this theme so you can challenge your students to choose to be kind online and offline.

How can we be kind? The Driving Question for our kindergarten Project Based Learning (PBL) is a topic that should be prevalent in every classroom today. Building a positive social and emotional foundation in our learners is just as important as building their academic foundation.

The holidays are the perfect time of the year to teach students the importance of being kind. To do this, I like to have my students complete random acts of kindness throughout the month of December using a Holiday Themed RAK bingo to guide us. On this post, I will share the bingo board that I use with tips for how to use it in your classroom.