Kindness Challenge

                              Kindness Challenge

Have you ever engaged in a “challenge” with your students?  If you have, you know that when you make something a challenge or a competition, students will buy into it, excitement will grow, and it becomes easier to practice and teach that skill.  You can leverage that competitive spirit to work on character education.  Character education is something we must teach and cannot ignore. We must find the time to integrate character education into our curriculum to help prepare our students for the world.

Character Education

Character education is a continuous learning process that enables young people and adults to become moral, caring, and responsible individuals. It is a critical part of teaching our youth. The California Department of Education (CDE) clearly emphasizes the importance of incorporating character education into the curriculum here:  https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/yd/ce/charactered.asp

The CDE cites the International Center for Leadership in Education  (ICLE), which has identified 12 guiding principles to teach students for them to have successful relationships and become a vital member of society. The 12 principles are as follows:

•            Adaptability – The ability and willingness to change     
•  Contemplation –To think things through with proper care before taking action
• Courage – Bravery
• Honesty – Truthfulness
• Initiative –To take responsible action on your own, without prompting from others
• Loyalty – Faithfulness
• Optimism – Positive beliefs
• Perseverance – Trying hard and continuously in spite of obstacles and difficulties
• Respect –To show regard for yourself, others, and the world around you
• Responsibility – Accountability for your own actions
• Trustworthiness – Reliability
• Compassion - Kindness

The ICLE emphasizes that these non-cognitive skills must be intertwined into the curriculum “wherever and whenever possible.”

                                                  Kindness Challenges

I know what you’re thinking…something else to squeeze into our teaching day.  But I work on finding creative ways to incorporate this type of learning into my day.  This year I have begun implementing periodic “Kindness Challenges” to work on kindness in the classroom, on the playground, and at home.  The Webster Dictionary defines kindness as the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.  I started with defining kindness and giving concrete examples of showing kindness to others. Class meetings, good literature about kindness, and pointing out kind behavior will all teach students about kindness.


In December we did the “10 Days of Kindness” challenge.  
My students were so engaged in the challenge, they asked me every day how they could be kind to each other.  When I would turn over a new number on the challenge, the excitement in my room was apparent.  Each day we would try to build on our actions by completing the current day’s challenge and all the previous days’ challenges.  I could visibly see the compassion grow in my students as they reported how they were showing kindness to each other.  The best part of this challenge was that there were no tangible rewards; it was all intrinsic.  They were learning to be kind for kindness sake!

In January and February, our challenge was to "Fill your hearts with Kindness."  To increase the rigor and tie character education with academics, I decided to connect our latest Kindness Challenge to writing.  Instead of telling me verbally every day how they were kind, I had them write it on a stickie note and keep it in their pencil boxes.  At the end of the week, we did a Kagan Structure called Timed Continuous Round Robin.  The students took all their stickie notes for the week and individually shared verbally to their team how they were kind, one person talking at a time telling one act of kindness, and then the next person sharing and so on.   I set a time limit on this because some students had more pieces of “Kindness Evidence” than others.  After sharing out loud, they made an individual flow map of their three favorite pieces of evidence of kindness, and then they wrote a narrative paragraph about their Kindness for the week. 

We can creatively weave in Character Education, and it is essential to make this a priority in our teaching.  It’s helpful to leverage other areas, such as combining Character Education with Writing; that way you can make the time to fit in these lessons.  It is possible, and the benefits are phenomenal.  After all….It’s TIME TO BE KIND!

With Kindness,

Roni Weink