In this week's lesson, fifth grade learned how to disagree respectfully. We started the lesson with a scenario where students had to write one word that described their thoughts about a task their little sister had chosen for them to do all day. Once all of the thoughts were collected, we shared them as a class. Many of the thoughts were negative, such as boring, dumb, stupid, not fun, etc. We talked about what would happen if we shared those ideas with a little sister. Many students thought they would get in trouble, their sister would be sad, their sister would be angry. When we are disrespectful to others about disagreements, it is harder to come to a solution.
We spent the rest of the lesson discussing two video clips of students disagreeing. The first video showed two students disagreeing in a very disrespectful way. They blamed each other and used absolutes like "always" and "never" to describe what the other student does wrong. We talked about how the students voices sounded (yelling, loud, attitude), and whether the students were listening to each other (no). We decided that these students most likely will not be able to solve their problem. We also talked about how they have essentially made things harder on themselves, because now they will have to seek forgiveness from each other before they will be able to even think about solving the problem.
The final video clip showed students disagreeing respectfully. We noticed that their voices were calm, and the words they used were respectful. We could tell the students were listening to each other because they took the time to process what the other student said, and said things like "I understand." We also noticed that they did not use blaming or absolute language, and they kept their emotions out of it. They were able to come to a solution that was a compromise for both students. The students were able to come to a solution by speaking assertively about how they felt and listening with attention to what the other student was saying.
