Modeling Live, Love, Learn & Leave a Legacy

I wrote in the past two posts that I plan next semester inshallah to introduce my students to the idea of Live, Love, Learn and Leave a Legacy (inspired by Covey’s First Things First book). My hope is to do a class activity to get them brainstorming about what that might mean for them, and then follow up with a reflection where they consolidate what they want their mission in life is, set goals/aspirations for the semester, and revise once or twice in the semester.

I’ve been brainstorming my own live, love, learn and leave a legacy missions, and I’ll write about those later, but I thought also that it might be useful to model to students how I design my own COURSE to help THEM do the same thing! That might sort of kickstart their own thinking about it – vs. giving generic examples from my personal life, or someone else’s, you know?

So here goes. I made a Google slide deck which has as its first slide an empty intersecting image of the 4 L’s, and then the next slide is one filled with some of the things I already plan to do in the class. The important thing here is to share these, but also invite them to think of OTHER ways I could support them with each quadrant. Then, there would be a slide for each student to fill their own quadrants with how they might fulfill their mission in life via those 4 L’s. (maybe done the same class or a previous class).

Side note: This should all be preceded by an exercise in trying to verbalize/articulate their mission in life, usually via one of two possible paths:

1. Imagine it is your 60th or 70th birthday, and you have a party with all your family, friends and work colleagues and anyone whose life you have influenced present. Who is there? What would you like them to be saying about you?
2. Imagine it is your funeral, and your family, friends, work colleagues and and anyone whose life you have influenced is present. Who is there? What would you like them to be saying about you if they are speaking at your memorial or something similar?

So here are the Live, Love, Learn & Leave a Legacy for my own class. As you read them, if you’re a teacher or former student, let me know if I’m missing something in the list that you think would be a good idea to add, either because you know me, or because YOU do it 🙂

1. LIVE

FOOD: I bring food to class often, and I think that maybe I should start to bring healthier food. I usually bring a variety, including healthier and less healthy options, but towards the end I get lazy and get chocolate. I think chocolate is a good mood booster, and if small pieces, it’s OK, but it should not be the only option, as I always tell students (someone could be diabetic, dieting, allergic, vegan fasting, etc.)

PHYSICAL HEALTH: taking a break in the middle of class, doing things like meditation and stretches in class (have not done it before, just the stretches sometimes in workshops and keynotes and online classes – need to do it in person too), and also theater of the oppressed exercises because it gets us moving, and any activity that gets us moving, actually, not just the very structured ones. For example, with Wild/Mad Tea, I get them to move a bit.

SOUL: play music in class sometimes.

SLEEP: sometimes do online classes instead of in-person during Ramadan coz class is going to be really early in the morning during Ramadan! They may not be able to make it

OTHER: What else can I do to better support students’ living?

2. LOVE

I’m just going to list these quickly: warm-up activities to build community, peer feedback, sharing wellbeing tips and thoughts and things that delight us or bring us joy, and Slack for ongoing community conversations between classes. Also, I think it will be important to help students be aware of which relationships in their life are caring/loving/nurturing/sustaining for them vs ones that are toxic/draining?

3. LEARN

For this one, I’d like to focus on their goal-setting and aspirations for learning in the course, and the agency they have to choose their learning path several times in the course and focus on what they want to improve and learn.

4. LEAVE A LEGACY

This one is the hardest. They need to set this for themselves, but I will remind them that their blogs are public and that the games they develop will be used by others beyond the course. Finally, a suggestion that they can share what they learn in this course with others at any time if they find it useful.

What do you think? Can you suggest other areas?