Classroom Activity RP3.—What is emotional safety? (20 minutes)
DownloadConcept: Physical vs. emotional safety
In preparation for this activity, ask students to read "Did you know… what physical and emotional safety is?" accessible via the Advocatr™ app and the website
Goals | To familiarize students with the concept of emotional safety and to help them understand its significance for everyone. |
---|---|
Objectives |
After this activity, students will be able to:
|
Materials | Video "What is emotional safety?," handout (see below), paper, pencil |
Warm-up/Icebreaker (5 min) | Distribute handout and ask students to circle the examples of emotionally harmful behaviors in the list. |
Instructional Grouping | Whole class discussion, peer discussion |
Classroom Activity (15 min) |
Teacher: For the warm-up I asked you to select which behaviors you think are examples of emotionally, rather than physically, harmful behaviors. Before we go through the list together, let's look at the reality of emotional pain. We all have a pretty good idea about what physical pain is. But what is emotional pain and how does it differ and how is it similar to physical pain?
Now that we've discussed the difference between physical pain and emotional pain, how would you define emotional safety? Teacher and students work together on a definitions of emotional safety, e.g.: Emotional safety means feeling accepted by others, feeling it's safe to be ourselves, and feeling safe to share our thoughts and to interact with others. Let's talk about how some of the behaviors you circled on the handout threaten people's emotional safety. Pick a behavior you circled and talk about how it threatens emotional safety. If your emotional safety were threatened by any of these behaviors, how would it affect you? ( e.g. hate school, avoid going, miss classes, do badly on tests, feel awful): Video (3 min): Now let's take a look at the video to see how they talk about emotional safety. What thoughts do you have about this video? Are they right or wrong? Do you think this is relevant for our school? Wrap up: Today we learned about the concepts of emotional safety as well as emotional abuse, and why it is important to feel emotionally safe at school. Remember, it is your right to feel safe at school. You can use the AVOCATR APP to report issues related to your emotional as well as physical safety, or you can directly talk to an adult you trust in the building. The ADVOCTR APP is a quick and confidential way to share with school administrators when things are happening that are harming your safety at school and you want help to resolve the issues. |
Key terms |
|
Homework | Try to recall how you felt when you were the victim of emotional harm (laughed at, shamed, excluded, lied about, etc.). Make a list of words describing how you felt. Then think about the times when you might have emotionally harmed someone else. Write a paragraph describing what happened right before you might have emotionally harmed someone. Be prepared to share your list of words and paragraph with the class. |
Handout: