The Bullied Apple: A Transformative Best Practice

"Hearing is listening to what is said. Listening is hearing to what isn't said." - Simon Sinek

I tried to picture this. A class of twenty-five students, all with their own lives, families, dreams, learning abilities and difficulties. I can see how it can be challenging to keep track of what is going on in my classroom. Between lesson planning, delivering activities, assessing learning and ensuring that all of my students get the chance to grow into amazing individuals, I want to be there for them, I need to be there for them. My biggest take away from watching the video Hear Me Out (ETFO resource) was that students don't simply want to be heard, they want to be listened to. They need to feel that someone truly cares about them.

As a developing teacher, I started using the 2x10 strategy (Angela Watson, 2014) during my Community Service Learning (CSL). It's simple: I spend 2 minutes per day for 10 days talking with an at-risk student about anything she or he wants to talk about. This builds a rapport and relationship between teacher and student and leads to powerful change. It shows that you genuinely care about him or her as a person. Using this strategy not only with at-risk students but with the whole class creates a better classroom environment. Encouraging all students to truly listen to each other also develops their sense of empathy, and helps in preventing bullying before it happens.

Doing the Bullied Apple experiment in class also provides them with a powerful visual representation of what bullying looks like and shows the consequences that it has on the victims. Here's how it works. The teacher passes around an apple. Students take turn complimenting it and saying nice things to it. Then, the teacher passes around a second apple. It looks exactly the same as the first apple (except that beforehand, the teacher dropped it a few times to make it brown inside, but the students don't know that!). This time, students try to make the apple feel bad. They say horrible things to it. Once they are done, the teacher slices both apples in half and shows how two apples that looked fine on the outside looked completely different inside. Then a class discussion helps students identify the reasons why the apples look different and how words can permanently damage someone inside.

I believe that by doing simple empathy exercises like the previous one and by building a positive classroom environment where listening to each other becomes the norm rather than the exception will help foster learning and provide students with better chances at being themselves. Have a great spring!

-Mark

Reference: Angela Watson 2014, The 2x10 Strategy: A Miraculous Solution for Behavior Issues, The Corner Stone For Teachers. Retrieved on November 9th, 2018, from: https://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/the-2x10-strategy-a-miraculous-solution-for-behavior-issues/