It is our job as educators to fortify the intellectual, social, and emotional capacity of our students. As concerns to the intellectual, we achieve success in this area by creating classroom environments that consistently provide clear and challenging learning targets, where modeling the skill(s) we want students to master occurs, while giving students multiple opportunities to master a particular skill or set of skills, and continuously assessing, coaching and providing feedback to make sure students are progressing in an adequate intellectual fashion.
In building students social strengths, we must consistently provide students with opportunities to collaboratively solve problems in the classroom. Students must work in pairs, triads, and groups of 4-5 within all subject areas and in the yard during playtime. Whereas society and public education historically has been built on separation, discrimination, individualism, and racism, Contemporary education is must be about collaboration, empathy, celebrating differences, and a win-win attitude. A focus on these areas will greatly help to fortify the social skills of students.
The emotional development of students is directly connected to the social development of students. Along with collaboration and empathy, student emotional capacity is further developed when considering the concepts of personal interest, curiosity, and optimism.
Collaboration, which is the willingness and ability to work well with others, is vital to sustained emotional health. First, collaboration builds life-long friendships, and counteracts loneliness, which can lead to depression, as well as suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Second, collaboration can solve society's problems of greed, poverty, and inequality. We are on this planet together and we must collaboratively take care of it and each other. We do not need to have 10, 100, or even 1000 times the resources of our fellow human. We need to share material, intellectual, social, and emotional resources with each other so that we can collectively live happy, healthy, innovative, and prosperous lives. Schools can facilitate this process by making collaboration an explicit part of school culture and curriculum.
Empathy is the vicarious emotional identification and experiencing of the thoughts feelings and attitudes of others. Their pain is our pain. Their joy is our joy. We understand their anger, joy, frustration, laughter, tears, and fears, because these emotional are universal in nature; they are not based upon race, gender, religion, wealth, age, sexual orientation, or political party. Empathy helps us to collectively work toward universal positive emotions for all. Schools have a responsibility to create empathic learning environments that meet the needs of all students.
Student interest might be the most critical element to consider in contemporary education and the most difficult to realize during this paradigm shift. It is human nature to be more invested in something we are interested in. If students know that their teachers will design lessons, units, and curriculum on what interests them, they will be invested in their learning and the classroom at a more personal level. Attendance will increase, behavioral problems will decrease, and most importantly, students will feel emotionally valued which will increase their self-worth. The classroom will become a vibrant, fearless, progressive place for learning.
Schools must also create environments and classrooms that facilitate curiosity in its students. "I wonder" questions, must be an essential part of lessons and units within the curriculum. “I wonder” questions helps students to stretch their thinking and make connections between concepts that initially may seem unfamiliar. We need a planet of people that wonder about the world. Wondering facilitates research, dialogue, and learning from each other, about everything, and from everywhere.
Schools must also facilitate optimism. Glasses are always half full. The news media, and many aspects of our popular world lead to low self-worth, fear, and debilitating anxiety in people. This does not have to be the case. The inspiring, uplifting stories of our world must be told, shared, and marketed with the goal of creating an optimistic society. Schools can do this strategically in the classroom by using articles, visuals, videos and other resources to spark discussion and critical thinking. Pragmatically, students can analyze case scenarios in which positive outcomes were in which students are asked to make connections to their own life and the life of others as well. Again, building empathy.
We have created innovative practices to assess student achievement on mundane standardized assessments. Let’s be just as innovative in designing this new holistic school environment on a local and national level. The will and the way are available. All we need now is the courage and humility to act and learn as we transition to a more joyful school experience for students and a happy and healthy planet earth for us all.
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