Education is not only about teaching kids about academics, it is also about teaching students social, emotional, and self discipline skills. These skills can be thought of as life long skills, because they are skill the student will use for life, not just to pass a class. I feel that this relates to perennialism, because I want my teachings to last with the students for a lifetime, not just for one class. I want to create a love for learning, life, and English that will remain with my students forever. Students need to learn how to communicate with each other in my class, and how to develop their individual ideas within a group. As a perennialist, I feel that my students should have a grasp on what democracy is, and how they can speak their minds when it comes to their opinions. I feel that the importance of schooling in a democracy is to create well rounded students that are aware of their countries history, and are able to state and argue their opinion about what they think is right Listed below are ways that I hope to teach students about social, emotional, and self discipline skills.
- Partner Reading: Students will engage in partner reading of a book within my class. The students will have to decide between the two of them what book they will read, and how many pages they will need to read each week. Each week, the two will meet up for about 20 minutes in class to discuss their thoughts and questions about the book. This will help students learn how to cooperate in partner readings and to learn how to "speak about emotions and what causes them" (Villa, Thousand and Nevins 2010).
- Co-Writing: At least three times throughout the semester, I will assign students to co-write an AXES paragraph. The students will have to work together at home through the use of Google docs to create the live document, together. Both students need to have a part in writing the paragraph. The students will need to learn how to work together on the paragraph, and how to collaborate their ideas out side of class. Using a live document on Google docs allows the students to learn how to collaborate with technology, which is a skill they will use in any future job they will have after schooling.
- QuickWrites About the Past: I would like my students to become aware when they are acting irrationally. I will include weekly quickwrites that ask the student to think about the past week and any time they had an uncalled for outburst. They will write down what happened, what cause the outburst, how they felt before, during and after, and how do they think the situation could have been better handled. This will allow the students to focus on AWARE or, their "Attitude When Angry and Resolving Emotional) to teach emotional literacy to youth. The project focuses on social skills, self-examination, & problem solving" (Villa, Thousand, and Nevins 2010)
- Relaxation Time: Another way I can create long term support for my students, is to offer them some quiet time to my students when they are getting emotionally distressed. I can play some music and turn the lights off for about 10 minutes as needed to get my students to cool off and get "back on track" (Villa, Thousand and Nevins 2010). This will teach my students to allow themselves to cool down before making any rash decisions.
- Late Work Policy: Students will be expected to turn in their own late work, and ask me for their work that they missed while they were gone. This will teach the students self discipline, by holding them responsible for catching up when the miss school. When they get a job after school, they will be expected to maintain responsibility to keep their job. I will set them up by modeling this same expectation of responsibility within my own classroom.