Gratitude

Definition: Appreciating what you have been given and experienced.

Motto: "I am grateful for many things and I express that thankfulness to others." ¹ What am I celebrating today?

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The Strengths Spotlight Podcast Series: Listen to the Institute of Positive Education descriptors of the strengths that include integration strategies.

What it Looks Like and How to Encourage:

• Having a feeling of abundance

• Thankfulness

• Appreciation

• Celebration

• Developing and using a self-talk algorithm to be mindful of the moment

• Promoting language around gratitude and wellbeing

• Situational analysis (Teachable Moments)

Teacher Strategies to Personally Strengthen Their Gratitude:

• Grow awareness of your strengths by making them more visible. Depending upon your learning style and preferred modality, choose tools from your instructional toolkit to apply to yourself. Examples: Audio Recording (have a friend interview you to record your very own "strengths podcast"| Concept Mapping|Outlining|Sketchnoting. Find ways to show how you combine strengths in some situations while also connecting to your talents/abilities, skills, interests, and values.

• Review some of the research connecting gratitude to happiness|Benefits of practicing gratitude|Journaling & How To Keep A Gratitude Journal|More research|TED Talks on gratitude

• Start with the CL construct of model, celebrate, and enable, to develop some strategies.

Character Lab Gratitude Teaching Strategies and Tips: How to offer age-appropriate versions of the strategies? Note: There are dozens and dozens of tips from Character Lab. These choices are filtered for elementary school and practicality to bring this strength into the culture of one's classroom.

• 3 Good Things: “At the end of each day, write down three things that went well for you and why they went well.” Adapt this worksheet to help students record their good things.

• Gratitude Letter: “Write a letter to a person who has influenced your life in a positive way. This could be a teacher, relative, mentor, or coach. If you can, read your letter aloud to the person you chose.”

• Gratitude Nudge

• Use WOOP to set goals supported by Character Strengths. (WOOP Worksheet from Character Lab. A more scaffolded worksheet.) Grades 3-5 lesson. WOOP App: Android | IOS

• Awesome Things - Elaborate on the work of Neil Pashricha's 1000 Awesome Things blog to connect to student curiosity, gratitude, zest, and other Character Strengths. Possible class activities could be to have a Wall of Awesomeness! where students post awesome experiences from their lives, a class blog or podcast of awesomeness that students author and publish, a school-wide weekly newsletter sharing out what students and teachers in your grade level find exciting and incredible in their lives and/or just take time periodically to read Neil's 1000 Top Things list to help your students to pause and appreciate!

• Beauty Breaks - Design protocols using the Character Strength of Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence. Character Lab is yet to provide support for this strength so it is not listed here. However, appreciation for beauty & excellence naturally connects with gratitude. A few protocols could be:

  • Have a Beauty Break wall where students describe examples of beauty and/or excellence in skills. You can really connect with the learning skills to have a category of the arts, writing, math, science, etc. to help students grow their understanding of how beautiful excellence can be.

  • Beautiful Moments - Connect with the strength of kindness and the PERMAH pillar of relationships by using language around beautiful moments between classmates. You could make a portion of your daily meeting time for sharing these moments.

  • Older students possibly have a class Instagram account in which students post photos of beauty from their day.

• Celebrate! - Act in the moment of appreciation connecting to mindfulness and feelings of joy and gratitude. Make celebrating oneself and others an integral part of your class culture. Habit formation author BJ Fogg writes about designing your own physical acts of self-celebration. Examples are raising one's hands to do the victory sign, high-fiving oneself, speaking a word or two (e.g., nice job!), sound (e.g., a cheer or whistle), singing a line of a favorite song... the possibilities are limitless. The point is to be in the moment and acknowledge one's efforts. The connection to multiple pillars of PERMAH is strong with this strategy! | Look to be very intentional about teaching the Active Constructive Response (ACR) and Acknowledge - Validate - Celebrate active listening protocols to help your students celebrate each other.

• Character Day - Find ways to participate and elaborate on the activities offered for this annual event.

• Compliments Project - Try this project. This project also connects to the strength of kindness.

• Gratitude Calendar - Choose a month to post a daily gratitude activity for everyone to try. Here is a kindness example for February.

• Gratitude Letter - Periodically make time for students to write a letter of gratitude to be delivered to someone in which they share their appreciation. This also helps support the social intelligence strength.

• Gratitude Wall(s) - Whiteboards in hallways and the possibility of having a wall in the atrium area where students and staff post their descriptors of appreciation.

• Gratitude Exercises and Journal - Read this extensive article, review these exercises and take a deep dive into gratitude journals to pull together your approach to having your students do engage in a wide range of gratitude practices. Also, look to bring a "gratitude tree" into your classroom.

• Growing Gratitude from Six Seconds - Adapt this lesson to your needs.

• Intersections of People - Places - Activities - Positive Psychology offers an activity using the Venn diagram shown below. Here are their directions: All you have to do is think about one of your favorite people, favorite places, and favorite activities. Draw a Venn diagram with three circles, as pictured below, and write your respective selections in the circles. Next, start to think about what these favorites of yours have in common. What feelings do your favorite activity and your favorite place both elicit? What are the similarities between your favorite person and your favorite activity? By extracting these specific similarities, you are most likely left with positive and favorable feelings and emotions in the overlapping areas, such as “safety”, “confidence”, or “respected”. I see this as a thinking routine that helps one go deeper in not only being aware of gratitude but how various aspects of one's life overlap and just how terrific those connections can be. :)

• Inward-Outward ³ - Think of ways to practice gratitude internally for your own wellbeing. Think of ways to express gratitude outward to benefit others. Example: Inward - Pause to give yourself some kudos for just being yourself and taking care of yourself. Outward - Share with a friend what you appreciate about him/her.

• Lesson Databases - Find lessons at the Heart-Mind Online resource site provided by the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Find lessons at the Greater Good in Education resource site provided by the Greater Good Science Center (University of California - Berkeley).

• Mindfulness Activities (Also included in Self-Control Character Strength strategies) - Design activities that help your students identify their physical and emotional states while practicing being present. Here is a video to introduce mindfulness to your students. Help students are present and aware of how they feel when interacting with others. Here is a lesson page with a few ideas. Positive Psychology provides research and a long list of activities to try in your classroom. Smiling Mind provides PDF downloads of lesson ideas for the different age ranges of our elementary school students. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the links to the PDFs. They also offer ideas on how to design learning spaces to support mindfulness and wellbeing. And don't forget to give their mindfulness app a try.
  
  Build in a few times during the day for students to stop, be mindful, and think about their emotions. You can announce the moments or possibly use a chime at set intervals or sound off randomly. Here is a digital chime. Choose from the many meditations for children at Insight Timer to take a longer mindful moment with your students.
  
  Research supports the mind and body benefits of intentional breathing. You might already work with your students to do belly or 4-7-8 breathing which supports their mindfulness practice. Here is a full listing of breathing techniques that you can incorporate into the wellness practices of your class.
  
  ReachOut.com (focus on MS and HS students) provides a few apps that can help students manage their feelings of anxiety and worry. Take a look at their main app ReachOut Worry Time. They have more apps at the bottom of the page. Also, look to A Little Guide to Mindfulness PDF for some mindfulness strategies. VIA provides a mindful/meditative strategy for each Character Strength.

• Savoring - Introduce this concept to then get input from students as to what they find themselves naturally savoring. Develop activities that help students grow their awareness of being in the moment and savoring their experiences. Here are a few activities for savoring and having gratitude: 1) Notice Nature - Guide students to dial up their senses during nature walks. 2) Enjoy Physical Sensations - Hyperfocus on smells and touch giving students opportunities to describe their experiences. 3) Remembering Happy Times (Reminiscent savoring) - Guide your students to visualize and re-experience past good and rich memories. 4) Looking Ahead - Encourage your students to think about upcoming experiences that they are excited about whether in or out of school. This also can involve practicing their strength of proactivity in planning for the experience. ⁴ Documenting - This strategy involves the act of recording and reflecting that goes with taking a photo, drawing a picture, voice recording, writing a poem, etc. of what is being savored. The photos and drawings could include text narratives to go deeper into the savoring experience.

• Sketchnoting to Paint the Strength Picture - Guide your students to make visible their self-understanding of how they currently engage with each strength. A secondary activity is to have your students sketch out new ways that they can exercise each strength. We know that going from thinking about ideas to then making them visible often leads to taking action with the ideas. The first step to this strategy is to teach your students about sketchnoting. You will find applications of this tool across all areas of your curriculum. :) Students can take pictures of their sketches to upload to Seesaw to then explain their thinking.

• Strength Chart - Teachers have lots of ways to bring strengths into the language and culture of their classrooms. A teacher at one of my schools connected to the school's core values by having the names of students on small sticky labels that he stuck to the core values poster. He would place the student's name by the value on the chart in the following ways that are adapted here for the strengths. One technique is for students who want the class to support his/her effort to grow strength to have his/her name placed beside the designated strength(s). A second strategy is for teachers to verbally highlight students who are applying their strengths at the moment in class. The teacher then puts the student’s name by the strength on the chart.

• Superhero Creation - Challenge your students to create a superhero who maximizes this strength. One approach is to have your students draw a picture of the character with a biography that describes how the superhero uses the strength in his/her life. You can provide categories such as physical, intellectual (thinking), emotional, and social as to how the superhero demonstrates the strength. This activity could take the form of playing cards that students then create games around.

• Weekly Time for Dedication to Others - Integrate the ritual of having each student share a short dedication to someone in their life during your community meetings. You can have dedication time once a week for everyone to share or assign a few students each week to have their sharing time during your daily community meeting. This article gives details on how this activity helps students open up to each other, builds trust, and engages the strengths of gratitude, and emotional and social intelligence.

• What Went Well? - Help students bring the question of "what went well?" into their daily conversations and reflection times to make it a habit. You can build it into the normal reflection protocols your students experience at the end of individual and group activities. It is also a nice tip to share with parents to have family members share what is well in their respective days. You can bring in other Character Strengths by having students answer the question "why did this happen?". This connection-making helps students see how their exercising their strengths can lead to positive outcomes. It can also be applied to individual PERMAH pillars. An example is a student feeling group work went well seeing how the application of kindness and proactivity within the Engagement and Relationships PERMAH pillars led to things going well for the team. :)

• Other possibilities - Gratitude Superhero marketing design projects, Student-created videos highlighting gratitude stories, building mindful practices into class cultures, Look-Hear-Feel routine to support mindfulness to connect to gratitude, high school IB students using CAS time to produce age-appropriate videos for ES students answering questions of “What is gratitude? What does it look like in action?”, older student buddies and their ES partners from time to time share personal gratitude stories, incorporate into co-curricular activities like field trips, after school activities, assemblies, etc.

Grade(s) Specific Teaching Strategies: The following ideas are offered as jumping-off points for teachers to build from and adapt to their needs.

EC-K>

• 3 Good Things- Possibly change to “1 Good Thing” with differentiation for some students to offer more examples. They draw a picture and the teacher decides whether to have shared and if so how. Possibilities> Weekly circle time to share drawings, with a partner, with a table, etc.

• Gratitude wall in each classroom.

• Lesson Listing - Access several teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

• Storybook readings, digital media, and share time by teachers and students to build understanding.

• Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.

1-3>

• Grades 1-2> Possibly doing some storybook readings and use of digital media. Eventually could lead to students writing their own storybooks that involve gratitude.

• Gratitude wall in each classroom.

• Lesson Listing - Access several teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

• Thank You Cards - Periodically have students write cards for students and adults in their lives.

• Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.

• Weekly Gratitude Seesaw Journal post - will need to develop prompt and potential categories for students to draw a picture of and/or take a photo of their examples of gratitude. They then voice-record their response.

• Work with students' ideas to learn and strengthen their gratitude.

4-5>

• Gratitude wall (and possibly a virtual one via Padlet) in each classroom. Use for personal posts and students might also pull from news stories where people share their gratitude.

• Journal - Google Doc or paper version. Could be a section of their portfolio.

• Lesson Listing - Access several teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

• Thank You Cards - Periodically have students write cards for students and adults in their lives.

• Three Good Things: At the end of each day, write down three things that went well for you and why they went well. Drawing pictures can support the reflection and make thinking visible.

• Work with students' ideas to learn and strengthen their gratitude.

Learning About Gratitude:

Websites>

Character Lab

Books>

Parent Engagement:

• Ask someone to video record the strength in action and publicize the efforts via social media (#----------) and the school website.

• Family Tree of Strengths: Provide parents with definitions and what strengths can look like in action. Provide a family tree graphic organizer with space for names and the individual’s main strengths. Offer prompts to guide parents to explain how family members and earlier generations lived specific strengths.

• Have students take their character cards home to teach their parents about their strengths.

• Jar of Awesome: Follow the directions to make your own "Jar of Awesome" to then schedule family meeting times to share what the jar holds.

• Strength-based Parenting - Share with your parents the Dr. Lea Waters website which includes resources and information on her book. Here is an article to help with your understanding of strength-based parenting.

• Teachers offer ideas for parents to weekly share with their children examples of their experiencing gratitude. Families can designate a place in the home where family members use Post-it notes to document their gratitude moments. At the weekly family meeting, those Post-its can be shared.

• Use our various communication pathways to inform parents of their children being involved in strengthening their gratitude.

• VIA Strengths Survey: Send parents information about the strengths and the English language Strengths Survey that they can take. The results can offer a discussion starting point for families. Teachers send specific reminders to have family talks around the gratitude reflection products the students produce.

Character Lab Research References

Character Lab Image Source

Benefits of Gratitude Source

Gratitude Venn Diagram Source

¹ Niemiec, R. M., & McGrath, R. E. (2019). The power of character strengths: appreciate and ignite your positive personality. Cincinnati, OH: VIA Institute on Character.

² Embedding Character Strengths. Institute of Positive Education. With permission.

³ Niemiec, Ryan M., and Neal H. Mayerson. The Strengths-Based Workbook for Stress Relief: a Character Strengths Approach to Finding Calm in the Chaos of Daily Life. New Harbinger Publications, Inc., 2019.

⁴ The Strength Switch: How the New Science of Strength-Based Parenting Helps Your Child and Your Teen Flourish, by Lea Waters, Scribe Publications, 2018, pp. 141–143.