As a speech-language pathologist, you’re undoubtedly aware of the essential role you play in nurturing the communication skills of middle school students. Today, we’re going to delve into an often overlooked but vital aspect of interpersonal communication – how to disagree with a friend. In this blog post, we will provide you with a comprehensive lesson plan, inclusive of simple, no-prep activity ideas, and a versatile friendship worksheet PDF for middle school optimized for your teaching needs.
Understanding Disagreement: Setting the Stage
To begin, let’s set the stage for understanding the concept of disagreement. Help your students grasp that disagreements aren’t inherently bad but are a natural part of all relationships, including friendships.
Activity Idea: Role-Play
Engage your students in a short role-play exercise that illustrates different scenarios of disagreement among friends. Use this activity to highlight both healthy and unhealthy ways to handle disagreements.
Encouraging Constructive Disagreements
Once students understand the concept of disagreement, it’s time to delve deeper into the art of constructive disagreement.
Activity Idea: Agree to Disagree
Create pairs or small groups and give them a hypothetical situation where they have differing opinions. Challenge them to reach a point where they can “agree to disagree.”
Building Empathy and Respect
Teaching empathy and respect in disagreements helps students understand the importance of considering other perspectives.
Activity Idea: Perspective Shift
In this activity, have students share a time they disagreed with a friend, and then ask them to re-tell the story from their friend’s perspective.
Friendship Worksheet/PDF for Middle School
This printable worksheet includes exercises on recognizing differences, articulating personal views respectfully, and understanding others’ perspectives.
Download our Friendship Worksheets for Middle School PDF here.
Fine-tuning Communication Skills
Finally, have students practice specific communication skills that are helpful in disagreements, like active listening, ‘I’ statements, and nonverbal communication cues.
Conclusion
Teaching students to disagree respectfully with friends is an essential part of their communication development. By utilizing our lesson plan and friendship worksheet for middle school, you can effectively educate students on navigating disagreements.
Stay tuned to our blog for more speech-language pathology resources and lesson plans.
Sample Video
Students learn best from watching real students their own age model skills. Try out this sample video-modeling lesson below. We offer our entire Social-Emotional Learning platform free for 30 days here!
