The Tikkun Project
Lesson
3
What Would an Ideal Class Look Like?
Concept
To understand how global change makers operate, students must first learn to identify the invisible values that fuel visible, daily actions. By collaboratively mapping, auditing, and prioritizing the behavioural norms of an ideal classroom community, students discover that a positive culture is built through intentional, repeatable human choices.
Focus Question
What does a positive classroom community look like, sound like, and feel like, and which specific actions will bring us closer to that ideal?
Knowledge & Understanding Goals
Language, Oral Communication Strand B, Grade 3: Collaborate in peer groups to construct visual media, synthesize shared observations, and present rationale for collective behavioural choices.
Language, Comprehension Strand C, Grade 3: Extract explicit and implicit ideas from visual media, identifying evidence for an abstract concept within a concrete image.
Thinking & Learning Skills
Thinking Skills (Concept Extraction): Deriving abstract criteria - belonging, safety, participation - from concrete drawn scenes.
Research Skills (Structured Interview): Using guided sentence stems to gather outside perspectives on classroom culture.
Context
Now that students have established their framework for selecting personal action projects (Lessons 1-2), they pause to examine the immediate ecosystem around them: their classroom. This lesson also runs the Lesson 1 sentence stem in reverse: rather than starting with a person and asking what they do, students start with drawn actions and work backward toward the value each one represents - the same underlying skill, approached from the opposite direction, which is real preparation for Lesson 4's explicit action-to-value mapping.
Lesson Outline
DRAWING OUR IDEAL CLASSROOM
In teams of 4-5, provide drawing materials and mural paper. Introduce three core criteria of a positive classroom community: everyone has the space, quiet, and tools to learn deeply; every person feels safe, heard, and celebrated; people actively care for each other, the school space, and the planet. Teams draw an active scene of their ideal classroom, including concrete actions (taking turns, picking up dropped pencils, inviting a lonely student to play, recycling).
EXTRACTING CONCRETE ACTIONS
Display all murals for a gallery tour using three prompts: What shows students can learn effectively? What shows everyone feels respected and valued? What shows people care for each other and their environment? As students point out details, write each distinct action onto a sticky note.
GATHERING OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVES
Invite guest experts (principal, caretaker, a parent or grandparent, an older student leader) or assign student role-play teams representing these positions. Provide three sentence stems to complete: "I know students can learn effectively when I see..."; "I know everyone feels respected when I hear..."; "I know people demonstrate care when they..." Add responses to the master sticky-note board.
AUDITING OUR CURRENT HABITS
Draw a four-point Classroom Frequency Continuum: Do All The Time / Do Often / Do Seldom / Never Do. Student representatives place each sticky-note action on the continuum based on an honest audit of current habits.
CHOOSING PRIORITY ACTIONS
Groups review actions placed under "Seldom" or "Often" and select three actions that would create the most immediate, powerful shift toward the ideal, guided by: which changes would have the biggest impact on daily learning, and why? Is an essential action missing? Groups present their three priorities; record all selections on a master tally sheet.
PERSONAL COMMITMENT
Each student commits, in their Difference Maker Journal, to one action they'll practice consistently over the next week, and creates a simple 5-day tally tracker to log it.
Notes for Teaching and Evaluation
Starting with a drawn scene gives students a concrete artifact to extract values from, rather than asking them to generate abstract values directly, which is a much harder cognitive task at this age.
Auditing actual current frequency (the four-point continuum) is what turns this into a genuine baseline measurement, the same evidence-based habit built throughout the Tikkun curriculum.
This lesson runs the Lesson 1 sentence stem in reverse: starting with drawn actions and working backward toward the value each one represents, rather than starting with a person and finding their actions.