Lesson 5: Sharing Humans of Your School Portraits
25-40 minutes
Introduce the lesson and present portraits (20-30 minutes)
Tell students: “Today we are going to present the portraits you created from your interviews. I’m excited to listen and learn more about members of our school community.”
If necessary, give students a few minutes to finalize their portraits and prepare to present.
Things to consider:
Make it optional for students to present or call on students to present at random.
Set up a projector so students have the option to display their interviewee’s portrait.
Consider a process for inviting students to provide shout-outs, or compliments, to each other after they present. This is a great way to build trust among peers.
When students present their portraits to the class, ask each student to reflect silently.
What kind of story did the image and caption or narrative tell together?
What did you learn from or about this person?
Debrief (5-10 minutes)
Once all students have presented, take 5-10 minutes to debrief the entire Humans of Your School exercise.
What was easy about this exercise? What was hard about it?
What did you learn about your classmates and our school community from this exercise?
What can we learn from listening to other people’s stories?
Why is it important for us to consider other perspectives?
How do we get in the habit of thinking beyond appearances and first judgments?
Praise students for their work and vulnerability. Consider our suggestions in the Extension Ideas (see below) for encouraging students to learn about others, be moved by their stories, and appreciate different perspectives.
Extension ideas
Consider having students turn their Humans of Your School portraits into a podcast series. Students can record their stories and publish them online as a way to share this information in a new medium.
Using the Humans of New York stories, choose a story or two to read and discuss as a group each week, or have students rotate to select and present a story each week.
Create time in class for students to continue to interview and create Humans of New York style portraits of members of their community in and out of school. Invite school members to join during presentations or gallery walks. You may also consider pairing your class with other classrooms, subjects, grades, or neighborhood schools.
Ask students to continue their focus on listening and empathizing with others. Some options include the following:
Have students commit to specific ways they will continue this work. For instance, students can pledge to try and get to know a different student every week, or to be kinder to students and school staff they don’t know.
Implement a regular “Humans of Your School” sharing session. Students can share about moments when they learned something new about a member of the school community without identifying others’ names or other personal information.
Content developed by Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
