Shadows & Deeper Shadows

Yesterday, we were working with two young men who had been suspended from school for fighting over questions that one of them had been asking the other privately on facebook. Apparently, on the recent school holidays, one young man asked the other if he liked such and such a girl. His reply was, "no." The other young man continued to ask him this question and related questions through his facebook inbox.

To cut a long story short, on returning to school, the question answerer felt threatened by the question asker and a fight ensued.

I decided to use the Shadows & Deeper Shadows cards (which were used during my Intensive Advanced Week training) during one of our sessions and I wanted to focus on giving ourselves better advice.

I removed all of the cards which did not contain pictures of people and used only those with people in them. I asked the young men to each select a card. Any card at all which they found interesting. Our Learning Support Officer and I did the same. We then had three minutes of thinking time to develop a history of one of the people in the card (kind of like developing a character in Drama lessons). We each took a turn in telling the history of our person and what has led the person to be where we see them today. We also asked each other questions about the people in their cards.

We introduced the concept of Total Behaviour (without calling it that) by describing the feelings, thoughts, physiology and actions of the people we had created.

Then, we asked the young men to pretend that they were the very best friend of the person in the card. They were given the brief "Give your very best friend the best advice possible to help with this situation". This was great. It opened up a great deal of discussion and the empathy that the students displayed was quite surprising (lucky that these cards focus on the darker emotions).

After that, we talked about how the person we spend most of the time communicating with each day is ourselves. We gave examples of positive and negative self-talk and what it means to give ourselves good advice.

We placed our cards back into the main deck (with the non-person cards), shuffled them up and asked the students to pick a card that represented a time when they were feeling dark and not in control. After some thinking time, we had turns describing the situation and total behaviour components that went along with it. We then became our own best friends and gave ourselves the very best advice possible. We also discussed what we could have told ourselves at the time to be more accepting of the choices we had made.

These cards can be found here. I have to remember that I'm not developing an ebay shop here but the cards were brilliant to use in this situation. Teenagers often spend a great deal of time in dark places and can relate to these cards quite well.

W - What did I want?
I wanted a way of engaging the students in a discussion and activity about some of the darker emotions we experience.

D - What did I do?
I think I pretty much answered this above.

E - Did it work?
YES.

P - What learning can I take with me into the future?
Young people today are able to empathise with others, especially the elderly, and are able to discuss Total Behaviour when placed into the context of a situation. They are quite creative when they are allowed to explore their own imaginations and deeper feelings.