GJW kindness is cool report

Frédérique, an English teacher in France, conducted a kindness school project with her 10th grade students. They created posters highlighting the positive and negative aspects of social media and wrote positive posts about their classmates. Despite initial difficulties, the students became engaged and focused on the task. The project took on a greater significance after a colleague's tragic death, and Frédérique's letter about teaching values resonated with the students. The project gained attention beyond the school, with an article being published on a worldwide platform. The students were proud of their accomplishments and recognized the power of kindness. Overall, the project was successful in promoting kindness and creating a positive atmosphere in the school. Hello, my name is Frédérique. I teach English in a high school in the Savoy region in France. I did a kindness school project with a group of 26 10th form students last October. They are about 15 year old students. One, genesis of the project, assignment. A, the beginning. At the beginning of the school year I started to study U.S. teens and their relation to social media in class. I had heard about Don Genois's kindness school contest and I thought it would be a good thing to study or to work on that subject with my students. At the same moment there were big decisions taken by the minister against harassment or bullying, cyberbullying in France, in French schools. And I thought it would be interesting to relate the kindness school project to this issue of harassment. I thought about doing the contest but because of GDPR regulations it was not possible to take part in the actual contest. B, assignment. So I asked my students to create a poster with two columns and a line at the bottom. The left column they had to write what was positive, fun and pleasant about social media. On the right column they had to write what was not acceptable. And on the line below they had to write a positive post on a classmate. It necessarily had to be a positive post. I chose the alphabetical order so that all of them would have a positive tweet. They had to create an A4 portrait poster to show them. And I wanted them to have all the same display so that they could see that they were all the same but all different. They could then illustrate their posters with glitter, with emojis, colored tape, etc. which they did. The difficulties, the obstacles that I met were that first of all the kids didn't know one another very well because it was at the beginning of the school year. And they all came from different schools, from different middle schools. So many of them did not know one another. Also one of the difficulties was that apparently for them, or at least for some of them, it was the first time that they heard that the word punchline could mean something else than just being negative and wanting to destroy the other person. I found it really sad to see things that way. So I was all the more invested in doing this work and having them have to find something positive to say using punchlines. Another obstacle was that it was difficult for them to find something positive to say about themselves because many of them have a very degraded or at least vague idea of their qualities and skills. And of course difficult to say positive things about their classmates. Their work was displayed on the school library windows on November 9th. That particular date was important because it had been chosen as the date of cyberbullying or bullying awareness day and everyone could see the posters. The librarian added posters on which were written, kind to the school, say no to harassment and bullying. Two, the atmosphere during the work in progress. At first my students were a bit disconcerted. They had never done such a thing. It's easier indeed to find one another's faults and of course one's shortcomings are easier to find than to find one's qualities. Little by little, however, they really got into it and they were very concentrated and quiet while doing the task, which is rather unusual for a language class because very often in language classes when they start to do oral work very easily it becomes quite noisy. But this was not the case on that particular day. Three, a major event gives another dimension to the project. On November the 13th, on October the 13th, sorry, a colleague, a French colleague was assassinated out of his school, well in his school just on the premises. And the whole teaching community in France was really shocked by this horrendous act. And I wanted to say something to my students, but I didn't want to point at the horror of the deed. I didn't want to show what was horrible. I wanted to show them what is positive, what values are at the core of teaching and what values are at the core of my teaching. Those values being for me truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. Then I wrote them a letter which I entitled Why I Teach English and I read that letter to my students. In that letter, as I said, I explained why I teach and what the values are for me. The students were actually moved because I was true and I was honest and the activity that I was asking them to do was really in keeping with those values. So the result of this letter was that the majority of kids wanted actually to cooperate because they had understood something probably through this letter and they understood probably that kindness was key. Four, the project goes beyond high school. St. Ambrose High School where I work is a member of a larger worldwide community of the Assumption. The Assumption has educational aims, so there are schools worldwide. And the aim of those teaching values are transformation, all that in the light of Catholic values. There are schools in Europe, in Africa, America, South and North, in Asia and all the schools share the same values and communication tools. A couple of weeks ago I had a meeting. I went on a meeting with other people from the Assumption community and I met a nun who is in charge of a communication worldwide site. And she asked me to write an article in English and in French about what my students had done. And she said that she would translate it into Spanish because our website is in three languages as it covers the whole world. Five, the consequences. So last Monday the article in three languages was published and I showed the article to my students. I told them you can be proud of yourselves, you can show your parents and your acts of kindness move the person in charge of the communication within the Assumption community. So I was asked to send an article and now this article of your acts of kindness will be read worldwide. A student asked me if Kanjin World was a real platform to which I of course answered yes. Conclusion. To be honest it was a rather smooth way even if I didn't know if it would work out in the end because I really worked on it step by step. Now I know that I can refer to that project if there are tensions in the class. Also the head of school was really proud of what's done in one of her classes. Of course it gives a good image of what is done in our high school. And the posters, the place where they were shown is really the first thing that people who come in the school see. So all the people who were not members of the teaching community were able to see the posters. Of course all the colleagues saw the posters and many of them gave a very positive feedback. Also what I thought really interesting was that the students understood their impact through a very concrete action. That of creating a poster and writing something positive about someone else. It was really a very simple act to do. And they understood that this very simple act had incredible power so to speak. Actually one of the students came to me and said that he was really moved by this project because he had been a victim of harassment himself. Also it shows that the students know how to find kindness in themselves and in others. They have a way that has been shown to them that kindness is around them and that they know how to find kindness in themselves and in others. Also as the article was published on the Worldwide Community Platform some students were really, really impressed. And some of them were actually right in the face with pride and happiness at what they had achieved and at all the encouragement that it all generated. So all in all I must admit and I must say I am proud and happy to say that kindness, yes kindness is cool. Thank you for listening.