Personal Values

Damien works to "Find Someone Who" shares one of his personal values in 7th hour.

Hard at work filling out planners during our Tutoring Tuesday.

We had a wonderful week in YESS as we further discussed our "roots" by talking more specifically about our values and morals. Our mentors did a great job guiding these discussions and I can really tell they are feeling strong about their identity and values. The mentees are a little bit more confused as we talk about things like, "altruism," and, "autonomy." We took a couple of days to work through our lesson on personal values so that each scholar really understood what he or she values and why. We even "Kagan-ized" the lesson by playing the game, "Find Someone Who..." Once we had all worked through our check-lists, indicating what is "very," "somewhat," and, "not" important to us, we then had to find someone who shared the exact same value as us (I always love getting to join in with our scholars when we do these activities!). In fact, we all had to find TEN people who shared the same values as us.

This acivity was a wonderful way to get our scholars interacting and I could see how they enjoyed the process as they better understood their classmates after we finished this exercise. We also employed the Kagan structure, "Think-Write-RoundRobin," where our scholars worked in groups of four to answer several questions regarding their personal values. They had to first share out their answer (number one asked them to identify their top three most important values, and they also had to tell why they picked these values); once they finished sharing, they then recorded their answer and the next person went. I really valued the way our scholars took the time to listen to one another. I was able to walk around the room and ask someone at a table to name another classmate's top value and they were all able to do so with ease.

Unwinding in 7th hour on Thursday after finishing our Personal Values lesson.

We were very lucky to host Dr. Diane Bassett in our classroom last week. Our YESS scholars are always overjoyed when we have a visitor, and I am very proud of our 4th hour class and the work they showed Dr. Bassett during her stay. I feel very fortunate to have Dr. Bassett's expertise this year as she will be my instructional coach. Cheers to the first of many productive visits!

Next week we will finally do our "Speed Matching" lesson where our mentors get matched with mentees. We will also vote for our class Presidents. Finally, on October 2nd we will have our first, "Mentor Monday." Stay tuned!