Some of my students, though very bright and energetic, did not quite understand what this respect towards their classmates meant. Over the course of four months, we had anti-bullying sessions and group work with the school counsellor in order to work on these interpersonal skills and emphasize how everyone could be a leader. A leader, we had defined, was someone who always chooses to do right thing, even when no one is looking.
I, myself, have had many lively discussions with my class about what this means and what it looks like, but I really wanted to show my students what respect means in our class and how we are a community. I wanted them to remember that a community supports each of its members. I started looking online for different activities and had someone from my Twitter PLN suggest the "Wrinkled Heart" activity. I was going to try that one, but then I remembered another activity that we did during our PSII classes last year.
One person would stand in front of the board while everyone writes kind comments and words around the person. When everyone is done, the person gets to step forward and read all the wonderful things about them. We selected our two professors to stand in front, and the rest of us wrote our words around that. It was that amazing moment where I could watch and see how my words (along with my classmates') could positively impact someone and make them so happy.
With my class, I gave each of them a positive word (happy, amazing, fantastic, wonderful, kind), and they look up various synonyms to those words and create a concept map. That way, when asked to write something kind for their classmate, they could not use the excuse "I don't know what to write".
At first, I wasn't sure how the students would take this idea. I was a little bit afraid that they would not take it seriously or not appreciate their classmate's words. However, from the first day, the students were eager and they genuinely enjoyed being the centre of attention for a bit while their friends and classmates wrote wonderful things about them. I did have to talk to them about adding silly words and taking the project seriously, but overall, the students were quite genuine in expressing themselves. I didn't have a name for this activity, but over time, we just ended up calling it Words of Kindness.