Celebrating Peer Support
To strengthen positive attitudes, understandings, and practices regarding peer support, it is important to publicly celebrate and analyze instances of helping. In our project, we used thank-you notes and a thank-you protocol. To learn more about this stage of the project, read Chapter IX: Our Progress: Moving Towards a Community of Helpers.
Students may use this template to write thank-you notes to people who helped them. In our class, we dropped the notes in a “Thank-You Box” and then read them aloud during our daily reflection circle. Occasionally, we asked students for more details about the peer support interaction.
This conversational protocol allows many students to thank one another simultaneously. In contrast with the composition of thank-you notes, it offers a verbal method for recognizing peer support.