EMPOWER Your Students - Lauren Porosoff

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it might be hard to picture a day in your life that far in the future, but try. Again, be specific. Instead of writing work, write what you imagine doing as part of your work day. Instead of writing home, what do you imagine doing at home? Instead of writing dinner, write what you’d make or where you’d go. (Circulates and supports students as they make their schedules.)

      How do your Tuesdays now compare to your Tuesdays of the future? What do you look forward to? What are you not so excited about? What do you imagine staying pretty much the same?

      If you look at these five eras of your life, what parts of your life become more and less important over time? What stays important throughout your life?

      Which of the five Tuesdays seems like you’re spending your time in a way that best reflects what matters to you most? What’s stopping you from doing what matters to you most right now? What small changes can you make to your schedule for this coming Tuesday to make it better reflect what matters to you?

      Let’s each share one small change to make for next Tuesday.

      After the following Tuesday, the students can share whether they made any changes to their schedule. If they did, how did it go? If they didn’t make any changes, what got in the way? If students bring up the fact that they don’t have much control over their schedules and don’t get to do preferred activities as often or for as long as they’d like, you can teach them mindfulness skills so they can savor the time they do have. Mindfully eating a piece of chocolate, or noticing their own breathing in and out, can help students experience good times more fully.

      Even students who never get to choose what they do with their time always get to choose the qualities of their actions: how they do what they do. When they consider what they’ll do with their time next Tuesday, how do they want to approach each part of the day? Students could make a schedule for the coming Tuesday that includes adverbs attached to each part of the day. (See the appendix, page 214, for examples of these sorts of adverbs.) You could later ask what they did to live those values.

      If you teach writing, this activity could lead to an essay assignment in which students compare and contrast typical Tuesdays at different life stages and discuss which Tuesday best reflects what’s important to them. Such an essay would give the students practice in making claims, organizing ideas, selecting relevant details—and discussing their values.

      Instead of filling out schedules with lists of activities, the students could write about their Tuesdays in narrative form. They could even role-play in pairs: one student could pretend to be a loved one at home and ask, “How was your day, sweetheart?” and the other student could answer as his or her kindergarten self, current self, adult self, and so on. The student in the role of loved one could ask questions to elicit more information and storytelling. Then the students could switch roles. You’ll probably have to model this process with a volunteer before asking the class to form pairs and do it themselves. Also, acting out various versions of themselves—and each other’s caregivers and partners—might elicit some silliness and will take more time than filling out a schedule. At the same time, the role plays might help students remember their pasts and imagine their futures more vividly.

      Students might express frustration because they don’t control their time. They might even become indignant about doing the activity: “Why are you making us do this? It’s not like we can go back to kindergarten and play. This is just depressing.” If students make statements like these, you have an opportunity to validate those feelings. Many people miss their younger days or look forward to bright futures. You can share some of your own fond memories and future hopes.

      As you help your students notice what they miss about their pasts or long for in their futures, you can also refocus them on qualities of action they can choose right now. Do they miss building castles in the sandbox because they got to be creative and purposeful? How can they live creatively and purposefully now? Do they miss getting to run around and be outside? What opportunities do they have to live actively now? Are they impatient for a future in which they can choose to spend more time with friends? How can they behave more lovingly or appreciatively toward their friends now?

      When it comes to how we spend our time, we’re not much better off than our students. Think back on the last couple of classes you taught. Did you spend every minute exactly the way you wanted? Do you have total control over what you teach or even how you teach it? Do you receive competing, changing messages about what’s most important for your students?

      We also have lives outside school that demand our attention, and we don’t get to leave our ideas and worries at home when we come to work. As we try to teach, we deal with a million distractions: the heater kicking on, a siren outside, a colleague’s voice from two doors down, our students’ whispers and slightly distasteful remarks—we’re not immune to any of it. Nor are we immune to feelings of boredom and frustration in our own classrooms.

      The good news is that our inability to focus on what’s most important can actually help our students if we’re willing to admit to it. If we do these activities alongside the students, they’ll be able to see that we, too, have to deal with demands on our time and energy. But we, too, can make values-informed decisions about how we spend our time (to the extent that we have that choice). We, too, can consider how we might enact our values in every part of our lives. These activities are not only opportunities for your students to explore their values; they’re opportunities for you to explore yours. Your students will see that exploring values can be a struggle—and one worth having.

      This chapter’s activities were about how students can explore their values. They notice how different situations, times, and people might influence the ways they can express their values—and how they’re empowered to choose their values even in contexts where they have less control than they’d like. In the next chapter, students consider how they can bring their values into the context of school and use them as motivation to do their work.

      EMPOWER

      Chapter 2

      • • • • •

      MOTIVATION

      Empower Students to Make Their Values the Reason for Doing Schoolwork

      When students find a task uninteresting (which, let’s face it, happens fairly often), we sometimes tell them why it’s important. If you do your history homework, then you’ll get a good grade and the knowledge you need for the next unit. If you avoid your work, then you’ll get a bad grade and unhappy parents. If you never do your history homework, then you’ll lack the skills to get into a good college. We frame schoolwork as being a condition for something—an if that has a then.

      But doing schoolwork isn’t necessarily a condition for anything good to happen, just as avoiding work doesn’t necessarily lead to anything bad. Some students do the minimum and still get excellent grades, charm their teachers (or at least escape notice), and go on to have brilliant careers. Other students complete every assignment to the best of their ability and still see few successes. When we frame an action—such as doing history homework—as a condition for achieving a specific goal, we feel satisfaction only upon achieving the goal, not from doing the action itself (Villatte et al., 2015). If Juan knows his history teacher will give a quiz tomorrow, he might do his reading tonight in order to get the grade he wants. Being satisfied with his grade doesn’t mean he finds the act of reading history satisfying, and he might not do his reading again until there’s another quiz.

      However, if we frame actions not as conditions for achieving a particular outcome but as components of meaningful lives, we can find satisfaction in the actions themselves and feel motivated

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