Activity
Community building activities, Reflective activities
Live, Love, Learn and Leave a Legacy
Maha Bali
This is a reflective activity that can be done at the beginning of a semester to help students set their academic goals.
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ACTIVITY PURPOSE
- Encourage students to reflect on students’ personal values and goals.
- Develop a sense of purpose and direction in their lives.
- Think about how students want to live their lives, what they are passionate about, what knowledge and skills they want to acquire, and how they can make a positive impact on the world.
- Motivate students to pursue careers and engage in activities that align with their values and passions, and that have the potential to make a positive difference in the world.
USEFUL FOR
At the beginning of the semester for raising students’ awareness of what is important to them in their lives in order to inform their academic goals. This could work if your course later encourages retrospection or it can help students choose project topics that align with their values and goals. Below are other ways that students can use these reflections to inform their academic work:
- Choose a major or career path
- Select extracurricular activities
- Create a personal mission statement.
PREPARATION
A slide deck or paper for students to write out their 4 items: Live, Love, Learn and Leave a Legacy.
INSTRUCTIONS
- Ask students to imagine their 80th birthday, and what they would like everyone in their lives to be saying about them on that day.Â
- Explain to them the four dimensions: Live, Love, Learn and Leave a Legacy.Â
- Give the students time to think about how they would fill each of these items, as their goals in life. Help them then compose a ‘mission in life’ statement based on all four of these items.Â
- Explain that there are some points in our lives where we cannot ‘balance’ all four of these at once (for example, having a baby is one time where you cannot focus as much on other people instead of taking care of your child) but that throughout our lifetimes, we can have goals in the four areas. This activity is based on Stephen Covey’s book, First Things First.Â
DURATION
It is good to give your students a long time to create their first draft and then time to revise it asynchronously.Â
ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES
Very adaptable over time and formats, and how much happens individually and what gets shared.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
None.
USEFUL RESOURCES
Covey, S. R., Merrill, R., and Merrill, R. R. (1995). First Things First. Prentice Hall & IBD.Â
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ABOUT
- Educator prep: None
- Student prep: None
- Synchronous, Asynchronous
- No tech needed, Paper / pens
- Duration: Variable
This activity is one of a series of activities from Equity Unbound, focused on equitable online community building.Â
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