Reaching all students

As I was monitoring my Facebook feed the other day, a friend of mine shared a blog post written by a parent about what one teacher does to monitor her students' feelings of belonging and inclusion. The mother talks about how the teacher has the students anonymously list three students who they would like to sit by the next week, and how she studies those requests to see which students are not being requested to sit by who may be lonely and may need some intervention. The author artfully threw in that this teacher had been doing this with her class (I think 4th or 5th grade) every Friday since Columbine in an attempt to prevent something similar from happening again by helping lonely students before it reaches a critical point. Although the blog post provided an impressive and insightful way of information gathering, it didn't go in to much detail about how the teacher actually goes about using the information she finds.

After I read the post, I tried to comment to try to get more information, but the site continually said it wouldn't post my comment because there was some sort of error (and now, as I try to go back to the post, the host says that page doesn't exist). So, I turn to you, my cohort and other small pocket of readers, to help me think about how to answer what I would have asked the original author.

Here is what I would have commented had I been able to:
"Wow. As a preservice teacher, I found great ideas in this post. I would be very interested in hearing what she does next with those students next. How does she arrange her room to try to make those who are outcasts more involved? How does she approach those who seem to be lonely? How does she actually go about using those lists to actually help the children in need?"

So what do you think? Once we discover which students are lonely, what can we do about it as teachers?

Mix It Up

This week at my student teaching placement the middle school was having spirit week, and they had a special day called "mix it up" day. This day has many elements meant to "mix it up" including having the kids sit with someone they don't know at lunch and the teachers change up what and how they teach for the day. My cooperating teacher, who is a 7th and 9th grade math teacher, did an intense, moving lesson on being understanding of others and bullying. 

He began by talking about the human tendency to react with emotions to stressful situations and other people who are emotional. He said that it can be very difficult to react rationally and calmly, especially when your brain is still developing, but it's an important skill to learn how to be calm in stressful situations.

He next had an activity where he read a statement about a type of stressful situation like "if you have ever lost a parent, sibling, or immediate family member" and had students stand if the statement pertained to them. It was eye opening to me and the students to see how many students had experienced serious life stresses in their young lives. One of his points in doing that exercise was to have the students realize that everyone has stress in their lives, that we need to be aware of that when interacting with others, and that we should always make a point of being considerate of others. He followed the activity by reading his own experience with being bullied in middle school.

Next came the climax of the lesson in showing two emotional videos. I was surprised by the teacher's choice to show a video talking about kids who had committed suicide due to having been so severely bullied. I don't know if I would have been brave enough to even think about showing something like that to middle school students, but it ended up being an appropriately powerful message for the kids to handle especially because he followed up that video with the music video of Josh Groban's "You Are Loved."

Unfortunately, the class didn't have enough time to have a reflection immediately following the lesson, and they had to do their reflection in class the next day. I feel that the students really needed a reflection immediately following the lesson because it was so intense, and if I ever did a lesson like this I would make use that the would be enough time to decompress before sending them off for the rest of the school day.

What do you think of the lesson? What would you add or take out, or would you even want to do a lesson like this at school?