Creating a safe and supportive learning environment is a critical to a whole child approach to education. Usually when we reflect and work on implementing the Whole Child Tenets in our schools, we forgot one critical component in making them manifest: the students. Students are as important as actors in creating a safe school as teachers. They can be actors in helping to create a safe learning environment, and project-based learning (PBL) projects can be a way in which we harness that service and target learning in the content areas. Here are some project ideas I have done, or have seen other school educators create.
School Norms: Often we create norms for students, or co-create them at the beginning of the year. However, you can take this up a notch and have a class or even a grade level create school norms where they address the needs of all stakeholders, including other students, parents, teachers, and even community members. Here students engage in in-depth research for an authentic reason, and engage in revision and reflection to make sure the norms created meet the needs of the entire school community.
Guns And Schools: This is obviously a controversial topic, but what better way to engage students than
Respect, Compassion, and Fairness in Schools
The current debate about school safety, as tragic as recent events may be, risks derailing the positive direction we need to go in as a nation if we want to uphold the broadest purpose of education: What kind of people are we preparing to lead society into the future? The very sad incident in Newtown was the result of one individual's mental impairment and a variety of factors—including his access to weapons—that happened to come together in a perfect storm at an elementary school. But if our response is to arm our schools, I'm afraid that by that logic we must also arm our cinemas and arm our supermarket parking lots. The list will go on and on. In other words, the Newtown issue is not so much about school shootings as it is about a shooting that took place at a school, like many others that have taken place in many other environments.
In other words, as counterintuitive as this might seem, the gun violence issue, in all its urgency (and I believe it is an urgent national issue), shouldn't cloud the school safety issue (another urgent national issue). Well in advance of keeping students safe from the very rare outside attack of a disturbed individual, we have lots of work to do to make sure our students are safe from the various forms of harassment and bullying they continue toreport. We can do this by establishing schoolwide practices that uphold and consistently demonstrate core ethical values such as respect, compassion, and fairness. This doesn't mean slapping lists of words up on the walls of our schools. It means commitment to sustained, intentional scrutiny of how we do things, day in and
In other words, as counterintuitive as this might seem, the gun violence issue, in all its urgency (and I believe it is an urgent national issue), shouldn't cloud the school safety issue (another urgent national issue). Well in advance of keeping students safe from the very rare outside attack of a disturbed individual, we have lots of work to do to make sure our students are safe from the various forms of harassment and bullying they continue toreport. We can do this by establishing schoolwide practices that uphold and consistently demonstrate core ethical values such as respect, compassion, and fairness. This doesn't mean slapping lists of words up on the walls of our schools. It means commitment to sustained, intentional scrutiny of how we do things, day in and