There are many benefits to teaching the students in your classroom to evolve into service-oriented individuals. Helping others makes students see that people are just like them, with similar hopes, challenges, and feelings. It also helps to improve one?s self worth and practically eliminates bullying. By putting a focus on service, you are teaching life lessons and encouraging teamwork and cooperation. To become an altruistic classroom, model the behaviors that you are wishing for your class to attain and take action as a group through projects in the school and community.
Key Takeaways:
- By modeling a service mindset ? meaning proactive helpfulness and concern ? teachers can help students develop empathy, respect for others and self-discipline.
- Leading your class in service to the wider community or school around them can also help students to look beyond their own immediate wants and needs and think and feel more broadly.
- Service to others brings real intrinsic emotional rewards, and this makes it easier than you might think to sustain a class focus on service.
“Therefore, your own acts of kindness and service?greeting students, smiling, asking how they are, looking them in the eye and listening, even reaching down and picking up a dropped pencil?can have a powerful effect.”
