Caring beyond the classroom: Using role models to inspire altruistic behavior and providing opportunities for school and community service.
Key Ideas
- Character education should extend students' caring beyond the classroom into larger and larger spheres.
- Students can develop their awareness of the needs of others, their desire to help, and the skills and habit of helping through: (a) exposure to inspiring role models, and (b) opportunities for service in their schools, families, and communities.
- Service opportunities with the power to transform character are those that involve children in face-to-face helping relationships, so they experience the fulfillment of touching another's life.
Strategies
- Students should study heroes and other examples of caring and courageous persons in history and the news — then find everyday heroes in their own communities and tell their stories.
- Service should begin in the classroom (e.g., through classroom helper jobs and peer teaching).
- Students' first "community service" should be service to the school. The school is their community. Possibilities:
- School jobs (In Andover's South School, for example, each class volunteers for a special school job; teachers meet with the principal to match jobs to different grade levels; each classroom develops a plan for carrying out its job; and a class "foreman" meets with the principal to review the plan.)
- "Class adoptions" of younger classes by older classes
- Cross-grade tutoring, coaching (e.g., older kids coach younger ones in soccer and basketball and ref noontime games), and companionship (e.g., 6th-graders eat lunch with 1st-graders)
- A service club (e.g., Sweet Home Middle School's S.M.I.L.E. Club)
- Student government that maximizes schoolwide participation in solving school problems.
