Today's guest post is brought to you by an experienced teacher and district leader dedicated to building learning communities focused on learner-driven design, social-emotional learning, and online/blended learning. She is also the author of the Bold Gratitude journal and Evolving with Gratitude, both have best sellers on Amazon!

Take it away, Lainie Rowell!

Guest Post by Lainie Rowell

The Power of Bold Gratitude in Learning Communities

Part 3: Engage in Prosocial Learning to Make the World a Better Place 

Experiencing and expressing bold gratitude is powerful for improving well-being and nurturing relationships, but wait, there’s more! When we connect gratitude to prosocial learning, we can make the world a better place. 

Prosocial behavior is defined as behavior intended to help other people. There are inquiry-driven pedagogical methods that are learner-driven and have the capacity to promote prosocial behavior. For example, design thinking, project-based learning (PBL), and challenge-based learning (CBL) can be effective learning frameworks that offer space to think about what we are grateful for and use that to design prosocial learning experiences that solve real-world problems. As we practice gratitude with kids, we can use their individual stories of gratitude to create a roadmap for how we can turn our gratitude into prosocial action. For example, when kids share that they are grateful for nourishing food at school, they can work with custodians and cafeteria workers to collect food waste for a compost bin. They can also tend a campus garden and use the crops in cooking classes or donate the produce to a local food bank. There are so many opportunities for prosocial learning!   

Working with adolescents, we have even more opportunities to get out into the community for prosocial learning. Service learning has been around for decades, and we can leverage these experiences as opportunities to cultivate gratitude.

• Gratitude for local history can lead to working with senior citizens to create a local cultural journal that reports on the unique aspects of the community.
• Gratitude for learning can lead to tutoring children in underserved areas on subjects such as math and reading, which deepens the tutor’s understanding of content.
• Gratitude for physical education and health can lead to conducting sports clinics for a variety of athletics.

Like many things in life, when we are more purpose-driven than we are afraid, we can do tremendous things! We can empower our kids to be agents of change who make the world a better place. Kids can experience and express gratitude as contributing members of society and we, as educators, will be better for it, too. Could gratitude combined with learner-driven practices be the catalyst for positive transformation in our learning communities and the worldwide community at large? I believe it is. 

Now is the time to make it a priority! We can use bold gratitude to create safe, equitable, empowering learning experiences for all, where both kids and adults flourish. 

How will you bring bold gratitude into your learning community?

And if you want to take it to the next level, check out these options to up your gift-giving game!

Want to take care of this with a few clicks? You can find these items on Amazon: 

• Transparent Sticky Notes
• Washi Tape  
• Colored Pencils
• Cello Bags
• Crinkle Cut Paper

- Lainie

PS— You can also add Evolving with Gratitude! Both will fit in the cello bags… We tested it!

Evolving with Gratitude bit.ly/ewgbulkdiscount

Thank You, Lainie!