First Day of School Kindness Activity

A former student sent me a story of a teacher asking her students to write something nice about every student in their class. This student thought it was a great idea, wished she would have done something like this when she was in school, and thought if anyone would do it for students it would be me. So, I decided to turn the story into my first day of school assignment for my juniors.

The assignment: Write something nice about every student in your hour. I gave the students a class list. They created a Google Doc and wrote down a statement about every person on the list.  They also knew that the person receiving the messages would have no idea who wrote that message about them. In the end, each student would receive a list of about 30 things their classmates said about them. (I did this for all three sections of my junior English classes.)

I am a firm believer in never asking the students to do something that I haven't done myself, so I did the assignment as well to provide an example. I explained to the students that I am not "friends" with every teacher in our school, but I can say something nice about everyone. We had some great discussions about empathy and kindness and how powerful receiving a list like this could be for a person.

The process of getting all of the comments to an individual person took a great amount of time, but I learned so much through the process. 

1. I learned, when given the opportunity, teenagers can be very caring and really share extremely nice things about others. (We often think about them only sharing negative things when they hide "behind the screen".) And, even when their comments are anonymous to one another, they can really share uplifting things about everyone. (And if there was a comment that I thought might be taken the wrong way, I simply deleted it and moved on. No one will ever know what was deleted.) 

2. This process taught me a lot about my new students. I learned things that particular students really enjoy based on the comments from their peers. (Things I now can use as a conversation starter with them to build relationships.)

3. The kids really do notice each other. (Even if they don't hang out in the same social circle.) 

4. The students were very curious to see what their list said. They all want to have nice things said about them and to get some verification that they are doing something right. This assignment did that for every single kid. Trust me, I saw the lists! 

The process. I copied and pasted every single comment that was turned in to one document (What you see below. Each of the blacked out sections is a different student's name). Then I created a separate doc for every student (see the tabs at the top of the picture!). I went through and copied and pasted each comment to the individual student's doc. When I was finished (literally hours later), I shared each document with that individual student. Doing it this way was important to me because I didn't want any student to have any idea who said what. I also didn't want students to have to feel like they had to share their list with anyone in the class if I passed it back to them in a hard copy. They got an email late at night on the weekend and could read it on their own time.