The past few days have seen me beavering away on two entirely distinct tasks - the writing up of recent projects in four Wakefield primary schools carried out under the banner of the Council's 'Risk and Resilience' programme, and the making of a personalised wedding gift for friends. No prizes for guessing which has been most pleasurable, but you may well wonder why the latter even merits a mention, or what the connection between the two tasks could possibly be. I hadn't spotted it either, until it struck me while pondering my next task - how to construct a pithy July blog piece which would capture, without simply rattling off a list, the many positive results that have emerged from sifting through the mountain of data generated by the projects. (By way of context, the Risk and Resilience framework is competence-based, and the work we were commissioned to do with targeted groups of 'vulnerable' children was focused on achieving demonstrable outcomes in four specific areas of competency - Loving Myself, Expressing Myself, Living Together and Knowing Where I Am Going. It therefore followed that all the fantastic material collected from children, artists and school staff had to be carefully scrutinised through those four particular lenses in order to come up with the required evidence of impact. You take the money, you do the spadework...).
The connection is Gifting - or more specifically the pleasure of it. Now, this wasn't necessarily a theme we explicitly planned into the projects at the outset. What we planned, and delivered in abundance, were a set of intertwined focuses on developing 'Luggage for Life' skills that would equip children for transition from Year 6 to high school, and indeed life in general: positive self-identity, self-esteem and appreciation of own uniqueness; self-expression, ability to talk about feelings and worries, understanding the connection between feelings and behaviour; empathy, tolerance, and respect of difference; understanding (and practising) the ingredients of good friendship; contributing to and enjoying teamwork; ability to set goals, identify strategies for getting there and ask for help when needed; confidence, self-belief and aspiration. All essential ingredients - I'm sure I don't need to spell this out - for being 'resilient' and managing 'risk' in the context of journeying from the safe, nurturing environment of primary school into the unknown, daunting and more exposing environment of secondary school (and of course adolescence). In other words, the skills and qualities necessary for young people's thriving and flourishing.
The idea of Gifting emerged in the later stages of two of the projects, and I have no doubt that it was able to do so because the building blocks (see above) had been so skilfully put in place by our Lead Artist, Mary Robson. It came initially through an activity designed to shift the focus of children's thinking from self (identity, feelings, behaviour, goals, aspirations...) to others and their positive qualities (empathy, respect, friendship...). It involved writing an Acrostic Poem to another person, with the first letter of each line being the letters of the person's name and the poem being an ode to the person's skills and positive qualities. The concept of Unconditional Positive Regard (or "The Golden Thread", as it became known by one group) was established as the starting point. The results were tear-jerking and heart-warming in equal measure. The children's delight at putting their poems into origami-folded cards and passing them on to the appreciative recipients was manifest - such excitement, pride and pleasure from something so simple. The reflective conversations which then followed - about how it had felt to be the giver, and how the making and giving of similar hand-made cards and booklets could be used in other situations to convey thanks, appreciations, messages of support etc. - were an important extension of the learning.
And from there it took off, for one of the groups in a big way. Putting decision-making into the children's hands, Mary invited the group to decide what they would like to focus on in their final couple of sessions - and thus the Unconditional Positive Regard Experiment was born. The group really went for it. They hatched a plan to 'spread the positivity' by writing 'UPR statements' for every other child in their Year 6 class, distribute them anonymously as folded notes (to be left on everyone's chairs during break for them to come back and find), and then question the bemused/surprised/delighted recipients about how it had felt to receive such a personalised, positive testimony out of the blue from a mystery giver. Then they came back together with Mary to reflect on the experience of their 'gifting activism' and research their findings. It was a great example in itself of the unexpected and powerful things that can happen when you let children get their hands on an idea. What happened next was even more so. Year 6 willingly took up the 'spreading the positivity' baton, eager to know how to make the folded notes - so our project group obliged, enjoying the opportunity to pass on the knowledge, and off went 'the chain reaction'. Year 6 passed on the UPR gift in notes to Year 5. Year 5 followed suit, on to Year 4, and so on, right down to Year 1. The last we heard, Year 1 was in the process of sending a collective letter of thanks back up to Year 2. Who knows where it would have gone next, had it not been the end of term?
I chose to tell this story partly because I spotted a good hook for a piece of writing - I'm in the middle of making a gift the creation and giving of which will undoubtedly give me ten times the amount of pleasure derived by the recipients, something that was a huge Luggage for Life learning point for our children and one that we couldn't possibly have planned, certainly not with the same meaning. I chose to tell it partly because it's a good one - children in the driving seat, enthusiastically taking the lead in a way that unexpectedly touches the life of the whole school, and choosing to turn 'what can we take for transition?' into 'what can we give'? And I wanted to tell it because - with the grown-up world currently awash with policies, guidance, toolkits and training encouraging schools to give priority to wellbeing and mental health - it's perhaps worth remembering that wellbeing can come from the simplest of things, and be nurtured in the simplest of ways. You just need to lay the ground, and maybe till the soil a little too.
The connection is Gifting - or more specifically the pleasure of it. Now, this wasn't necessarily a theme we explicitly planned into the projects at the outset. What we planned, and delivered in abundance, were a set of intertwined focuses on developing 'Luggage for Life' skills that would equip children for transition from Year 6 to high school, and indeed life in general: positive self-identity, self-esteem and appreciation of own uniqueness; self-expression, ability to talk about feelings and worries, understanding the connection between feelings and behaviour; empathy, tolerance, and respect of difference; understanding (and practising) the ingredients of good friendship; contributing to and enjoying teamwork; ability to set goals, identify strategies for getting there and ask for help when needed; confidence, self-belief and aspiration. All essential ingredients - I'm sure I don't need to spell this out - for being 'resilient' and managing 'risk' in the context of journeying from the safe, nurturing environment of primary school into the unknown, daunting and more exposing environment of secondary school (and of course adolescence). In other words, the skills and qualities necessary for young people's thriving and flourishing.
The idea of Gifting emerged in the later stages of two of the projects, and I have no doubt that it was able to do so because the building blocks (see above) had been so skilfully put in place by our Lead Artist, Mary Robson. It came initially through an activity designed to shift the focus of children's thinking from self (identity, feelings, behaviour, goals, aspirations...) to others and their positive qualities (empathy, respect, friendship...). It involved writing an Acrostic Poem to another person, with the first letter of each line being the letters of the person's name and the poem being an ode to the person's skills and positive qualities. The concept of Unconditional Positive Regard (or "The Golden Thread", as it became known by one group) was established as the starting point. The results were tear-jerking and heart-warming in equal measure. The children's delight at putting their poems into origami-folded cards and passing them on to the appreciative recipients was manifest - such excitement, pride and pleasure from something so simple. The reflective conversations which then followed - about how it had felt to be the giver, and how the making and giving of similar hand-made cards and booklets could be used in other situations to convey thanks, appreciations, messages of support etc. - were an important extension of the learning.
And from there it took off, for one of the groups in a big way. Putting decision-making into the children's hands, Mary invited the group to decide what they would like to focus on in their final couple of sessions - and thus the Unconditional Positive Regard Experiment was born. The group really went for it. They hatched a plan to 'spread the positivity' by writing 'UPR statements' for every other child in their Year 6 class, distribute them anonymously as folded notes (to be left on everyone's chairs during break for them to come back and find), and then question the bemused/surprised/delighted recipients about how it had felt to receive such a personalised, positive testimony out of the blue from a mystery giver. Then they came back together with Mary to reflect on the experience of their 'gifting activism' and research their findings. It was a great example in itself of the unexpected and powerful things that can happen when you let children get their hands on an idea. What happened next was even more so. Year 6 willingly took up the 'spreading the positivity' baton, eager to know how to make the folded notes - so our project group obliged, enjoying the opportunity to pass on the knowledge, and off went 'the chain reaction'. Year 6 passed on the UPR gift in notes to Year 5. Year 5 followed suit, on to Year 4, and so on, right down to Year 1. The last we heard, Year 1 was in the process of sending a collective letter of thanks back up to Year 2. Who knows where it would have gone next, had it not been the end of term?
I chose to tell this story partly because I spotted a good hook for a piece of writing - I'm in the middle of making a gift the creation and giving of which will undoubtedly give me ten times the amount of pleasure derived by the recipients, something that was a huge Luggage for Life learning point for our children and one that we couldn't possibly have planned, certainly not with the same meaning. I chose to tell it partly because it's a good one - children in the driving seat, enthusiastically taking the lead in a way that unexpectedly touches the life of the whole school, and choosing to turn 'what can we take for transition?' into 'what can we give'? And I wanted to tell it because - with the grown-up world currently awash with policies, guidance, toolkits and training encouraging schools to give priority to wellbeing and mental health - it's perhaps worth remembering that wellbeing can come from the simplest of things, and be nurtured in the simplest of ways. You just need to lay the ground, and maybe till the soil a little too.
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