Kindness

Definition: Actions or speech intended to help others. I am kind and helpful to others. 

Motto: "I am helpful and empathic and regularly do favors for others without expecting anything in return." ¹

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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: 

• Engaging attentive/active listening skills

• Showing empathy

• Actively helping others even when not in the best mood

• Seeking to understand instead of jumping to conclusions

• Developing and using a self-talk algorithm around how to engage others with kindness

• Bring the term kindness into your language around friendships

• Promote a language around kindness and well-being

• Situational analysis (Teachable Moments)

 Teacher Strategies to Personally Strengthen Their Kindness:

• Grow your 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. 

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

Character Lab Kindness 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. 

• Selfish for a Reason

• 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

• Active/Attentive Listening - One of the most profound ways to show empathy and kindness is to listen with attention. Design a listening protocol based on the tenets of attentive listening that fits the age of your students. One protocol is Acknowledge - Validate - Celebrate in which the listener acknowledges what he/she is hearing to then offer validating words to the sharer to then celebrate his/her actions. Use this article and this one as a starting place with your design work to teach and embed active listening into the culture of your classroom. Look to integrate active listening into your Turn and Talk activities. 

• Build A Culture of Kindness and Tolerance - Edutopia offers several activities. Also, look to draw from the activities and lessons at Learning for Justice.

• Celebrate! - Make celebrating and appreciating acts of kindness an integral part of your class culture. Work with your students to come up with hand signals, cheers, protocols, etc. that empower them as individuals and as a class to be in the moment to make time to celebrate acts of kindness! This strategy connects nicely to the Random Acts of Kindness strategy listed below. 

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

• Coaching Kindness - Present to your students the idea that you are going to be their kindness coach. As players on your team, they will learn skills and practice them. It will be important as for any team to be supportive of one another with a positive mindset working as a team. Search the web for kindness and friendship-making strategies. Put them into cards to draw from for your coaching sessions. Have a set protocol for how you will explain the strategy and model its implementation. Give students the opportunity to practice the strategy. 

• Compassionate Classroom - Edutopia provides resources to help your students understand inclusion and tolerance. Also, look to draw from the activities and lessons at Learning for Justice. They also have a lesson-building tool to use once you set up your account. Look to find ways to connect kindness to showing respect. Here are some resources for teaching respect: Lessons and Activities for Teaching Respect | Teaching Respect in the Modern Classroom.  

• Compliments Project - A lesson that also connects to gratitude. 

• Friendship Building - Reach into your teaching toolkit to pull out activities that help students grow their friendship-making skills. Do read-alouds from friendship-making books, do role plays of ways to make friends, bring in active listening skills, and make sure to have buddies for your new students... Use the four skills for making friends from Understood to give your students a framework to better understand friendships. 

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

• Inward-Outward ³ - Think of ways to be kind to yourself for your own wellbeing. Think of ways to share kindness to benefit others. Example: In- Make a plan for self-care activities. Then do it! Out- Make a plan to do something helpful for someone else. 

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

• Kindness Connection Corner - Have a wall area designated for students to write up narratives of how their teammates displayed kindness towards them. Connect to the idea of being a community where random acts of kindness are the norm. For younger students you could have them draw pictures of kindness interactions and/or you could post photos of them. 

• 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). 

• Loving Kindness Meditation - Periodically build the loving-kindness meditation into your class culture. 

• Random Acts of Kindness - Help your students understand the personal impact upon others of doing kind acts towards others. A helpful place to get resources is the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (RAK). Start by setting up an account to download the free lessons organized by grade level or access them from this folder. Review other resources such as their kindness ideas database. This website is loaded with ways to highlight and nurture kindness in our students. Here is a list of 18 ways to cultivate kindness in your life along with 45 possible random acts of kindness. An additional strategy is to run a counting kindness activity in which you have a tally board in the classroom for students to simply mark each time they experience kindness during the day. You can finish the day by doing a share out with students describing specific acts of kindness. 

• See-Think-Wonder Thinking Routine - If you can find short videos of social interactions where kindness is displayed, you can adapt this routine to help students deepen their understanding of potential steps one can take to be kind. Use the viewing of multiple scenes to guide students to map out how to interact in kind ways.   

• 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 they can exercise each strength. We know that going from thinking about ideas to then make 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 their strengths 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 strengths 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. 

• Other possibilities - Kindness Superhero marketing design projects, Student-created videos highlighting kindness stories, high school IB students using CAS time to produce age-appropriate videos for ES students answering questions of “What is kindness? What does it look like? What does it mean to be a good friend?”, older student buddies and their ES partners from time to time share kindness 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> 

• 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.

• Thank You Cards - periodically have students create art cards for support staff, parents, etc. 

• Use a language of kindness with the words posted in the classroom. 

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

1-3> 

• Come up with various ways to use the How Full Is Your Bucket? book as a part of your class culture. Talk with other teachers who do daily emotional check-ins, individualized student buckets where they write their status, etc. 

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

• 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 Kindness 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 kindness in action. They then voice-record their response. 

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

4-5> 

• Come up with various ways to use the How Full Is Your Bucket? book as a part of your class culture. 

• Journal - Google Doc or paper version. The teacher provided prompts and in time work with students to create new prompts. Could be a section of their portfolio.  

• Kindness wall (and possibly a virtual one via Padlet) in each classroom. 

• Lesson Listing - Access teacher-created lessons and those from other providers. (To be developed)

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

• Video: The science behind the health benefits of acts of kindness. 

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

Learning About Kindness: 

Websites>

Character Lab

Center for Well-Being and Kindness Curriculum for EC

Books>

How Full Is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton

How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids by Tom Rath

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. 

• 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 send specific reminders to have family talks around the kindness reflection products the students produce. 

• Teachers offer ideas for parents to share with their children weekly examples of their experiences of kindness.  

• Help parents bring the question "Who and how did you help others today?" into family dinner chats and weekly meetings. 

• Use our various communication pathways to inform parents of their children strengthening their kindness. 

• 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. 

Character Lab Research References

Character Lab Image 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.