Читать книгу Keeping the Whole Child Healthy and Safe - Marge Scherer - Страница 23

by Laura Warner

At Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, Wellness classes combine challenge and choice to help adolescent students grow.

Eating sushi. Talking with your parents about drugs or alcohol. Playing basketball. After each of these prompts, the students in my Wellness class rearrange themselves in a series of concentric circles that indicate their comfort level with the action described. I use this activity, called challenge circles, in the first week of school to set the stage for the coming year.

First, I create three concentric circles using ropes or cones on the floor. The inner circle is comfort, the middle is stretch or risk, and the outer circle is panic. Then I ask students to stand in the circle that represents their comfort level when asked to do a range of activities. We start off with relatively innocuous activities (eating pizza) and then ramp it up (talking with your parents about sex; telling a close friend you disagree with him or her). Finally, I connect it back to Wellness class and to physical activity using such prompts as running the mile for fitness testing or getting sweaty in class.

At the end of this activity, students have seen the wide range of comfort levels within our class. One student might feel completely at ease taking free throws but be sent right into the panic zone by something like swimming in the ocean. Playing soccer, with those hard balls flying through the air, is scary for many students, but it can be a place of true comfort for an athlete. Challenge circles are a great reminder for middle school students that what is true for them may not be true for their classmates.

Early adolescents are often described as developmentally egocentric, meaning that they struggle to differentiate between their own thoughts and the perspectives of others and often feel as though they are on stage, being constantly watched and judged by their peers. So seeing this visual demonstration of the differences in how their classmates perceive risk and comfort can be especially powerful. To debrief the circles activity, I ask questions like, Were we ever all standing in the same circle at the same time? What were some of the similarities or differences in our group? In which circle do you think the most learning occurs?