In the last week I’ve had several conversations regarding the intangible elements of education. I’m talking about the “soft skills,” the unquantifiable attributes that standardized tests don’t measure. I’ve always believed that these are as important, if not more so, than content knowledge. Whether it’s perseverance, social-emotional intelligence, metacognition, or executive functioning, as an educator I believe these abilities measure potential and success more than innate intelligence. For those familiar with the Carol Dweck research on “mindset,” this is what I’m talking about.
A former teacher from a fledgling curriculum start-up contacted me recently after hearing my podcast interview on “Educators Lead.” He was interested in putting together what he called “lightweight” lessons on some of these topics. At the same time, we’re examining our school’s standards in the areas of Personal Social Service, Careers, and Technology, many of which fall into these same categories. All of this demonstrates a way of identifying the kind of people we want our students to be when they leave us. We want them to have a well-rounded academic experience, but we also want them to be thoughtful, decent, inquisitive people. The word “dignity” has been hovering in thoughts. I think we want our students to be dignified and to value dignity in others.
How do you teach “dignity?” How do you teach students to recognize and appreciate the dignity of others? It’s more than social-emotional awareness. It’s different from empathy. It pertains to respect, pride, perhaps even honor, and like those other immeasurable qualities, it’s as important as knowledge. The most straightforward way to teach it is to model it. As educators it is incumbent upon us to model all of the qualities we prize in our students: life-long learning, empathy, curiosity, etc. Certainly, dignity is no different. But how do we do it?
1. Model. Model. Model. If dignity is a product of respect and honor, then we model respect and we act honorably in all things. Students will not respect a teacher who does not respect them.
2. We never take a student’s dignity from him. Kids, particularly young adolescents, can be frustrating to the point of hair loss. There’s no point in denying it. However, when we lose it, when we show that frustration, it often manifests itself in taking a student’s dignity from him, either by calling out his behavior or worse, publicly humiliating him. Discipline and correction ought to happen privately.
3. Highlight examples outside of the classroom. As I wrote last week, talking to students about the political climate can be treacherous, but there are examples in the public sphere. Whatever one may think of the President’s politics, empirically, he has been a dignified leader and has rarely, if ever, overtly undermined the dignity of others.
We don’t talk about dignity very often, in or out of school. I think we ought to. We need to re-emphasize its importance in our society. We’ve lost a lot of our dignity as a people recently and we need to re-gain it.
Meteorological Observation: I think it’s snowed more in March than in November through February. Three years ago there was record snow up here. This year there’s record lack of snow. But the jury is still out on climate change, right???