A Teaching Tool

 

I came across the following article on Facebook. It has been edited.

Every Friday afternoon, a teacher asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit by the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student whom they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.

And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, this teacher takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her and studies them. She looks for patterns.

Who is not getting requested by anyone else?
Who doesn’t even know who to request?
Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?
Who had a lot of friends last week and none this week?

You see, this teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” This teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers, and she’s pinning down right away who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying.

As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children, I think that this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of things and into the hearts of students who need adults to step in and TEACH them how to make friends, how to ask others to play, how to join a group, or how to share their gifts with others. It’s also a bully deterrent because every teacher knows that bullying usually happens outside of eyeshot, and that often kids being bullied are too intimidated to share.

As this teacher explained this simple, ingenious idea, I asked, “How long have you been using this system?” she said. “Ever since Columbine. Every single Friday afternoon since Columbine.”