Ideas for Lessons of Exploration

Here is a list of ideas for social and emotional lessons that have emerged from reading such resources as Teaching Children to Care by Ruth Sidney Charney, Positive Discipline by Jane Nelson, Teaching Children Compassionately: How Students and Teachers Can Succeed with Mutual Understanding by Marshall Rosenberg, attending a workshop with educators and the Dalai Lama, and other ideas that just pass my way.

• Being a good listener
• What is power? Exploring power to assert oneself in a positive way. Students share times when adults have power over them. Brainstorm a school where students have power over adults. How would it feel to be a student in the classroom? How would it feel to be a teacher? What would it be like if power was shared and there was respect in the school What would the teachers do? What would the students do?
  
• How to enter a new group
• Choosing an activity, something you want to be doing
• What are our inner thoughts and beliefs?
• "Being the boss" of your own body. Staying parked in your spot. Keeping you hands only on yourself. Listening
• Raising your hand and keeping your hand in your lap when another is talking.
• Getting help from peers
• Learning how to invite people to join a game
• Learning what to say if someone wants to join a game
• Learning how to share 1 box of crayons or 3 pairs of scissors with 8 children
• Using kind language
• What words feel like and sound like to others
  
• Asking questions
• Solving problems together
• Having fun and enjoying jokes without teasing
• Learning expectations for behaviors during class
• What do you hope to do and learn this year?
• Draw what it would look like if your hopes came true.
• Visual dialogue -- communicating with lines and shapes. No words or letters. Each person is a different color.
• How good questions can expand and deepen an interaction -- Tell the first part of a story and have kids write questions for it to continue
• What can you do if you see someone making fun of someone else?
• What if you don't understand what a teacher means but everyone else in the class seems to understand. Do you fake it? Ask a question?
• What do you most want to work on this year in school?
• What is most important to you?
• Parents: What do you most want your child to achieve this year?
• Teachers: Name a unique, verifiable area of growth for each child.
• Thinking of and sharing what you would like to be complimented for.
• Role playing guidelines -- exaggerate and have fun. A role play where the person who has a problem plays the person with whom they have the problem
• Asking students what they wonder about. Asking teachers and parents what they wonder about.
• Feeling the emotional mood of a room
• Good friends that don't always want to be together -- how to say tactfully that I want to be by myself or to play with others today.
• Tone of voice for wanting to play or having a good idea.
• Saying "I like it and it's good for me" in group decision
• Exploring welcoming, greeting, hosting
• In a class meeting, share a mistake you made and what you learned from it.
• How to plan ahead
• Recognizing emotions
• Helping to control arousal
  
• Helping to put into words inner life
• Standing up for things that you think are unfair and cruel. If you don't stand up for it, you're condoning it. Having the courage to say and do whatever is needed to make things fair.
• Social responsibility
• Forgiveness -- What is forgiveness? How difficult it is to forgive. Why is it sometimes difficult to forgive? How when we forgive it decreases our own burden.