![]() "Sometimes our world seems dark and scary and we feel powerless to change it. Now he's hoping that more schools will hear about "Undercover Agents of Kindness" and pick up the assignment in their own schools. The project was a tremendous success, and Justin plans to make it a monthly exercise in his classroom. But almost every time they added that they were proud of themselves for doing it anyway and felt the power in brightening someone else’s day." ![]() "Again and again they acknowledged that it was difficult and felt awkward to approach someone they didn’t know well and do something for them. "It was my students’ reflections on the kindness activity that revealed its impact most," Justin described. Not surprisingly, kids were hesitant to reach out to other students whom they didn't know well, but once they performed their good deed they were incredibly glad they'd done it. Students reported on their mission reports that they enjoyed the assignment more than they thought they would. “Batches of homemade cupcakes and bags of leftover Halloween candy made their way onto desks in my classroom, as did origami, inspirational quotes, and hand-drawn portraits.” “Soon I began to see encouraging sticky notes on lockers in the hallway,” Justin revealed. It didn't take long after the kids drew their names before Justin started seeing evidence of those random acts of kindness in the school. After the deed was done, students had to write a reflective "mission report" to describe how it felt to perform their act of kindness. The only rules are that the act of kindness shouldn't cost anything, and the deed had to be big enough to be noticed by the recipient. The students then had 2 weeks to perform a secret act of kindness for that person. The exercise started with students randomly drawing a classmate's name from a bowl. Instead of modeling kind behavior and hoping it catches on, Justin created a new assignment for his students called “Undercover Agents of Kindness” that has changed the way his kids think about being kind. ![]() “Twenty plus years of experience teaching prescribed character education lessons have shown me that an adult simply talking about character or modelling positive behavior does not often lead to the changes we want to see in our children,” Justin stated on his blog. Justin Parmenter is a middle school teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina who has always tried to instill kindness in his curriculum for the 7th graders he teaches, but when a school shooting occurred in the very hallways of a school in his district, he knew he needed to step up his efforts. One teacher takes the notion that compassion can be taught very seriously. Zimmer said that Forest Lake students are reflecting on their acts of kindness through writing, drawing, a video or a digital presentation.ġ: Forest Lake Elementary School students showed their secret kindness agent badges after successfully completing kindness missions around the school.Ģ: Second graders, from left, Hammad Latif, Ceira Palmer and Ben Reilly reflected on their acts of kindness in drawings.Studies now show that compassion is not just a characteristic you're born with it can actually be learned. The idea came from the book “Secret Kindness Agents” by Ferial Pearson. Every child received a lanyard and name tag, and got to come up with his or her own secret agent name. Zimmer said that the intrigue adds a level of excitement in which students want to do small, kind acts for others. They don’t share their mission with others, they just do the kind deeds. Principal Jessica Zimmer said that students get different missions such as thanking an adult in the school, saying “hi” to five new people or cleaning something up. It’s actually not so secret, because every student in the school has been anointed a kindness agent. ![]() Students are quietly spreading joy at Forest Lake Elementary School in the Wantagh School District, taking their mission seriously to serve as secret kindness agents.
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