Being Kind

In Are You Carrying Rocks in Your Backpack? A Lesson in Mattering, from the #FoxHollowFlyers from  Angela Maiers, Speaker, Educator, Writer by Angela Maiers shares with us a lesson plan from Matthew Goff and it is awesome! One paragraph states,

“This turned into an amazing conversation around Mr. Browne’s famous precept from the book, Wonder: “When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind.”  We underestimate the need to choose to be kind when we are talking to or thinking about ourselves.”

I think we don’t teach our students how to be kind. We ask them to be kind and we expect them to be kind but do they really know what this means? Do we share the definition of kind and give them real life examples of what kindness is?

I don’t think this lesson is necessarily for a specific age group either. I think it needs to be discussed in elementary, middle, and high school. I think the more it is discussed, the more that students will think about their actions and how it affects others.

I think these would be some items for discussion:

1.     What is kindness? What is the definition of kindness?

2.     Give some examples of people being kind to others?

3.     Is it harder to be kind to someone you know or don’t know?

4.     Could some acts of kindness be misinterpreted as not being kind? If so, what are they?

5.     Give some specific situations and ask students what they would do to show kindness?

I think I need to have more moral conversations with my students. I don’t think it is up to me to expect one right answer but to help them think critically about different situations. Sometimes my students see things as having only a black or white answer when there may be different perspectives on the same situation. There may be some gray areas that could affect people in different ways.

Have you taught about kindness in your classroom? If so, please share.