Day One: Cultivating Love

Every day I am intent on making sure my students know the learning objectives. I write them on the board as clearly as I can. Because my whiteboard skills are as effective as drinking with a fork, I also put them in powerpoints and my students can always view my lesson plans online.

            I direct my students to the whiteboard where the daily objectives have been written. They can be a good title for their daily notes, and when they are studying for tests and exams, they can look to the objectives to help them find particular notes from the unit, semester, or course.

Students will be able to (SWBAT) introduce themselves and begin to create a classroom of acceptance and understanding.

I lead students in this exercise. The class takes a more “social” tone at this point.

•      Before we do anything else, let’s answer this question: How can we cultivate Love in this classroom? What can we do to create an environment of compassion and sisterhood?

•      At your tables, introduce yourselves to each other and brainstorm ideas of how we, as a class, can make sure everyone feels accepted and welcome in this room.

•      When you are done making your list of ideas, send someone to write those ideas on the board.

Students create their own classroom expectations of how they are going to treat others and how they will be as students. I try to lead the students to “promise” they will cultivate Love in the course. Theoretically, these expectations will allow for more freedom of expression and learning in the classroom. Students will be able to share their thoughts and feelings openly and, as a result, be able to develop better relationships within the classroom. Also, as the class will be introduced to later, it will allow for more fruitful “Full Faith Fridays”. This will be explained more fully later.

The class looks at the notes on the whiteboard and they create a document entitled:

•      Cultivating Love and fellowship in this Classroom

I record this information and tell them I will formalize this document for the class. The trick to this assignment is to make sure everyone is participating so everyone feels ownership of these expectations.

Students introduce the person to their right to the rest of the class, stating their name and something interesting they noticed about them. I really only have one rule for this exercise; everyone who is not talking needs to do what they can to communicate that they “Love” the speaker. I encourage students to interpret this any way they can. If they are serious about becoming more Loving, then, naturally, I will see cell phones put down, iPads closed, and students giving non-verbal cues of participation and concern for the speaker. I stress to students that body language, eye contact, and posture can communicate volumes in terms of Love (or not) to others. For students who are not interested in cultivating Love, I really just tell them that these are the same kind of habits and skills they need to develop before they go to a college or a job interview. They can practice here so they don’t have to think about it later. Of course, as students practice cultivating Love, they discover that it is in their nature to want to show Love, so it actually gets habituated into them either way.

This is something that we will do regularly, but in a social and an academic sense. As a teacher, I am interested in becoming better and more Loving people, but if I can also coach them on becoming adequate students, then that’s nice too.

(Yep. High School Patrick)