Guidelines for Teachers

2.3 Good Practices in France: The Label Game

The resource consists of getting students to reflect on the prejudices they hear about themselves and others. They become aware of the words used, the emotions, the behaviours that these words can provoke and learn to look at themselves and others with a positive value.

Analysis: in the three classes that used this resource

1. The participation of the pupils is global, they are attentive and interested, even in a 6th grade class atmosphere, which is not considered to be serene.
2. A first reflection on emotions takes place in the class group during the reading aloud of the negative prejudices and the explanation of certain words. Pupils start to become aware of the impact of certain words.
3. The engagement of the pupils in writing down the prejudices heard about them and the symbolic destruction of these post-its allows the pupils to clarify and distance themselves emotionally.
4. The writing of positive adjectives is more complicated for the pupils because it affects the development of self-confidence.

At the end of the practice, all the pupils were emotionally affected by the experience, they acquired a certain capacity to project themselves and to put themselves in the place of others, some even spontaneously expressed apologies.

Conclusion
This practice of playing with labels creates a space for the development of emotional skills, develops the necessary confidence in pupils to reflect on themselves and leads to the creation of a classroom climate conducive to learning.

This experience, which the teachers appropriated differently, taking into account the specificities of the pupils and the context of the school, was positively evaluated by the teachers who implemented it.

One teacher emphasises that this Key Code experience has "shaped his attitude in the classroom and the way he does things".

Even if the feedback has been positive from pupils and parents, even if the behaviour of some pupils has changed, the teachers underline the fact that this work must be carried out on a regular basis, in a methodological approach and reflected upon by the whole teaching team.