EMPOWER Your Students. Lauren Porosoff

when I’m alone I can act kindly toward myself. Acting kindly is an important value for me, and I can look for ways to act kindly wherever I am. Notice that whatever adverbs you wrote down are available as qualities of your actions when you’re with your family, when you’re with your friends, and even right now. And they’ll also be available to you when you’re working in your group.

      Look over the list of behaviors we made a few minutes ago. Choose two that are an important part of living according to the values you wrote down—but that might be sort of challenging for you to do. Maybe it’s something you haven’t done and you’re curious to try it. Or maybe it’s something you have done, but not as much or as often as you’d like. Or maybe it’s something you tried and didn’t do so well, but you’re willing to give it another shot. See if you can find two behaviors that seem important but that are hard for you, and write them down in your chart.

      Now think about the behaviors you need your group members to exhibit in order for you to work effectively. Maybe these are some of the same behaviors you chose for yourself, or maybe they come easily to you but not to everyone. Maybe they’re related to some of the ways groups haven’t gone so well for you in the past. Pick two behaviors that seem most important for your group members to do for you, and write them in your chart.

      I’m about to put you into your groups. You’ll share the behaviors you need your group members to do, and you’ll listen to what your group members say they need from you. Then you’ll pick two of the behaviors they need from you, and write them at the bottom of your own chart. Put your chart with the rest of your materials for this group project so you can refer back to it.

Follow-Up

      The behaviors that students choose for themselves, along with the behaviors their group members choose for them, could become a rubric for students to use throughout the project. Each day, they could rate their own behaviors and then make a plan for the next day. What can they do more, the same, and less?

      At the end of the project, students can journal about their experiences: How did it go in your group? What are some things your partner does well, as a student and as a group member? What are some behaviors you want to work on the next time you’re in a group?

      If you collect the behavior statements, you can redistribute them later in the year and see if students are still working on these behaviors. If you give another group assignment, you can invite students to decide whether to recommit to the behaviors they identified last time, try bigger or smaller versions of these behaviors, or explore entirely new behaviors. You could even use the behavior statements to make groups (for example, by pairing a student who wants to listen more thoroughly with a partner who wants to participate more actively).

Variations

      You could ask the students to reflect more deeply by having them write stories about specific experiences they’ve had in groups. What was the situation? How did they feel? How did they respond? How did that way of responding work out for them? You can offer to collect these stories so students who want to share them with you can.

      To help your students be authentic and vulnerable, you can tell a story about a time when you were in a group—maybe an academic department, grade-level team, task force, or committee—and didn’t act in accordance with your values. If students see that you’re willing to be vulnerable by sharing times when you’ve strayed from your values, they might open up, too. If nothing else, they’ve learned that values-consistent action is a lifelong but worthwhile struggle.

      If your school has a homeroom or an advisory period, your students can use that forum to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of group work, clarify their values, and identify important but challenging behaviors they want from themselves and need from others. This way, a group project in any class requires only that students share their behavioral commitments and needs and then make their rubrics. This approach not only saves time in the academic class but also helps students see how they can choose values-consistent behaviors across contexts.