Скачать или смотреть Students Help Themselves When They Help Others

As a teacher, Cathleen Beachboard’s aha moment had its roots in a kid telling her she was too fat.

The student wasn’t being mean; he was just relaying what he had learned about obesity in his health class. What it led to was a class project on how Beachboard could lose weight. Students would do the research and Beachboard would follow their advice.

As the project progressed, Beachboard noticed that kids were smiling more, working harder and their scores were rising. That eventually led to her career-changing epiphany: Students feel good when they’re helping others and do their best when they feel good. She had discovered a powerful way to motivate students, and it was the beginning of her full embrace of problem-based learning and service learning.

Beachboard now looks for problems in the community her eighth-graders can tackle. These are problems with no easy answers. Recently, her students have tried to help younger kids develop a love of literacy, recorded the memories of dementia patients and broken a Guinness world record to help a local charity.
Beachboard urges teachers to get their students out into the community so “they can be the heroes that they were made to be.”