how your family would react if you made them the garlicky greens for dinner. And maybe you were asking a lot of questions and talking to different people in the class about what you were doing.
Describe in as much detail as possible what you were doing during that learning experience—not what someone else was doing, not what you weren’t doing, and not what the experience was like. Mental actions, like thinking and wondering, count as doing something. (Students write their descriptions; some might wish to share what they wrote.)
You’ve now described some of the things you did in a particular learning situation. Some of those actions are probably appropriate to that specific situation but wouldn’t be appropriate in learning situations at school. Washing sweet potatoes makes sense in a cooking class, but you obviously wouldn’t be able to wash sweet potatoes in math class. But if you also wrote that you were helping other people, listening really carefully, imagining possibilities, asking a lot of questions, talking to different people—these are all things you could do in math, English, gym, or Spanish—really any class. Go back through your description and underline actions you could do in several of your different classes, or while working on different kinds of school assignments.
Now pick one of the actions you underlined. Find something you think is particularly important, not just in the context of the learning experience you wrote about but in other situations, too. Circle that action. Would anyone like to share what you picked?
And now you’re going to create a very simple icon to represent the behavior you picked. Make it a simple shape—something you can draw pretty quickly and easily with just a few strokes of a pen. Draw a circle around your icon. (Students draw their icons. Some might wish to share them by drawing them on the board and labeling them with the behaviors they represent. See figure 2.4.)
Figure 2.4: Examples of icons.
Now I’m going to give you a black marker and three dot stickers. With the marker, draw your icon on each of your dot stickers. (Draws icons on stickers and shows them to the class as models.)
Put these stickers in places where they’ll be visual reminders for you to do the behaviors they represent. For example, if your behavior is asking questions, maybe you drew a question mark. If you hardly ever ask questions in English class, but you want to, maybe put the sticker on your English notebook.
You might put your stickers on your materials for a particular class, like your history binder, your science text, your music folder, or your calculator. You might put them on materials you bring to all of your classes, like a laptop. Your locker, phone, or homework area could all be helpful places. The best place is wherever you might look when you need a reminder to engage in the behavior. Who would like to share where you’re putting your stickers?
Follow-Up
After a few days or weeks, you can ask if the stickers ever prompted the behaviors they represent. How did it go? How did it feel? Are there other places the students want to put stickers? Are there other behaviors they want to try making icons for (perhaps using a different color dot sticker)? You can keep a supply of dot stickers on hand and occasionally ask students if they want to share stories, make new commitments, or renew old ones.
Variations
You can ask your students to think about how they can incorporate their valued behaviors into processes they learn in your class, such as the writing process, the process of analyzing a primary source document, or the process of doing a lab experiment. Students can share their behavior targets with one another to help hold themselves accountable to their values.
If you don’t have dot stickers, you could use sticky notes or have the students draw their icons directly on their materials in permanent marker.
You can suggest that students hide their icons so they find them in the future. For example, a student who wants to listen more actively could draw her ear icon on random notebook pages. On days when she gets to these pages, she’ll rediscover the icons and remember to listen more attentively during those class periods.
You can also use this activity to help students think about how they want to behave during less structured parts of their day. Instead of asking them to recall a time when they were engaged in learning, ask them to recall an experience when they were their most compassionate, kindest, or most respectful selves. They can list the things they were doing during this experience and make an icon that represents and prompts the behavior. This version puts group values ahead of individual values while letting students choose how they enact those values.
Challenges
Students who dislike drawing might resist making icons, and some might need help thinking of visual representations. Others might complain that their icons aren’t creative enough: “I want to ask questions, but a question mark seems so obvious.” Still others might create icons that don’t connect to the behavior; a student who draws a line to represent asking questions (because asking a question is like crossing the line from curiosity into knowledge, perhaps) might forget the icon’s meaning. Then it won’t prompt the behavior. These kinds of struggles could be great opportunities for your students to help each other, and also to notice that the point isn’t perfection but workability.
We’ve found that this activity works best if you have your students immediately put their stickers into place. Otherwise, the students most in need of reminders will be the ones who lose their stickers.
Some students might choose behaviors that are already easy for them, or that aren’t that important, or that they can most quickly figure out how to represent with an icon. After some time has passed, ask your students to think about whether their focus stickers are reminding them to behave in ways that genuinely matter to them. If not, they can make new stickers that better reflect their values.
For some students, the stickers won’t serve as effective cues. If the sticker isn’t working, you can help that student brainstorm other kinds of reminders that might work better.
How I Want to Be in a Group
Students spend a fair amount of their time in groups, whether they’re assigned a partner for a project, having lunch with their friends in the cafeteria, playing on a team, or just being members of different classes. Any of these group situations can feel threatening. Students might worry about looking stupid or uncool, getting a bad grade because of someone else’s mistake or lack of effort, being excluded, and all sorts of other unwanted outcomes.
When we feel threatened, our behavioral repertoire tends to narrow (Wilson, 2009; Wilson & Murrell, 2004). We fight back, run away, or freeze up—and in the process, we sometimes subvert our values. Think of a student who wants to treat others compassionately but rewrites his partner’s half of their essay because he’s afraid it will bring their grade down. Or a student who wants to express herself creatively but stays silent during a brainstorm session because she’s sure her peers will laugh at her ideas. Or students who want to treat themselves kindly but skip lunch for fear of getting bullied in the cafeteria. This activity’s aim is not to get students to behave a certain way, but rather to help them take stock of their options so they can act more flexibly in the face of a perceived threat.
This activity works best when groups are forming: on the first day of a group project or when a class, team, club, or ensemble first comes together. You can repeat it every time a group forms.
Materials for Each Student
For
