Educational Podcast

I listened to The Balanced Educator Podcast, episode 140, which is titled "How to Teach Kindness & Compassion." Listed below are three takeaway of a few things that really interested me during this podcast.

Takeaway #1

Students are very perceptive of how we treat them, other students, and even our colleagues. We want to create a safe space for our students where they feel comfortable being themselves and advocating for their own needs. We need to be kind and compassionate. We need to deliberately give them opportunities to practice kindness and compassion and build on these skills over time. Like a muscle, it needs to be flexed and practiced and built over time. Structure routine and repetition are key factors.

Takeaway #2

If we want something to stick with our students, we must repeat it in ingrain it into a routine and practice it every day. Kindness and compassion are something that we need to teach, and students need to practice. They are developing their socioemotional skills all the time. They will make mistakes, but our job is to have a plan of action to help our students to move forward. We are proactive rather than reactive. Students can implement these skills when the conflict arises. We then will be doing less conflict resolution because students will be doing it themselves with an intentional practice of kindness and compassion. We are helping to reduce classroom conflict and we are encouraging compassionate conflict resolution.

Takeaway #3

We are teaching them kindness towards themselves as well. The way we treat others reflects how we treat ourselves. The foundation of being kind comes from the idea of how we treat others and stems from how we treat ourselves. If we treat ourselves in a good way, we will tend to treat others that way as well. We must teach students to treat themselves well so that they can treat their classmates and other adults with kindness as well. It is hard to be kind and forgiving if we are not kind and forgiving towards ourselves. We are teaching students to respect and love themselves, which is something that they will always need to be doing. It is a step in the right direction when they are growing. It also teaches them to treat others as they want to be treated, the Golden Rule. It will also show our students to treat other students and adults with kindness and compassion. It will be easier for them to show kindness and compassion if they already have practice being kind and compassionate towards themselves.