Cultural Respect

In this unit of Respect we talked about how we respect each other. I wrote on the board this phrase before students entered the room:

I had student quietly write on their desks their thoughts on the Kofi Annan quote. These thoughts were private, and not shared with others. I wanted the group to privately reflect on these words, because many times when discussing our human differences, whether they be in appearance or beliefs, we tend to get heated in our opinions. I wanted students to have the comfort in knowing that their reflections were their own and not public. I also wanted to challenge those students who eagerly want to share their thoughts on cultures, race and religion aloud.

I had students erase their desks and moved on to our respect questionnaire. They were given 10 minutes to quietly work on the document. I was prepared for lots of questions on if this was a quiz or not, you can field thoughts as you like. I chose to answer this question differently depending on my group. For my very comfortable students (for example my groups that were friendly with each other and spoke out more often) I phrased this as a quiz. For my quieter more anxious groups, I told them it was a questionnaire.

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Regardless of their knowledge on if this was a quiz or questionnaire, we went over the answers as a group. For each question I gave a shorter description of the cultural aspects in the answers. For the last question I had asked students to name our school cleaning lady. This was an important question, for in my experience the cleaning staff at schools is extremely underappreciated. I wanted our students to remember who our cleaning lady was, and to know her name so they would be more incline to interact with her/thank her for cleaning up after them.

Exit ticket: What is one way you can show respect to an individual in a service working field?