Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts: Helping Students Develop Inner Strength, Resilience, and Meaning

In today’s fast paced world, the need to find meaning in classrooms requires attending to matters of the heart in addition to discipline content. Imagine entering a classroom where the complexity of subject matter is deepened and enriched by establishing a space for the emotional and spiritual needs of students and teachers. This valuable resource will help create this culture in your classroom through accessible activities that inspire awareness and stimulate creativity.

Many people have spoken of the need to help our children and our society get from ‘here’– a place where shallow materialism and dehumanizing experiences make school environments socially toxic– to ‘there’– where schools are emotionally safe and spiritually affirming. Sandra Finney has done more: she has given teachers a detailed action plan and road map to help get us from here to there. I salute her!

Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts emphasizes that children are not merely learning machines but are vulnerable beings that can best be reached through their emotional and spiritual (not religious) sides. Finney offers educators wise counsel on how to help students develop their fullest humanity, as well as academic capacity. Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts takes a systemic approach to providing a caring, safe community in our classrooms and our schools. Filled with excellent suggestions for activities that will increase children’s trust and participation in class, it supports a strong social-emotional intelligence focus to cultivate each student’s individual growth. Aimed specifically at middle school grades, teachers can utilize the important messages in their direct interactions with secondary school students as well.

Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts is an impressive and inspiring compilation of ideas, activities and lessons that promises to enrich students’ spirits within public education. Sandra Finney encourages transformational approaches to learning. Her book is a must-read that is easy to use without oversimplifying essential ideas and processes.

Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts offers teachers thoughtful language to transform the relationship between educator and student. Now more than ever, we must shift education’s test-driven, factory paradigm from clinical to compassionate, compulsory to exploratory, and mechanistic to spiritual. This book is a gift to help teachers make that happen. Powerful questions, discussion points, and insightful prompts from this book can help students find a new level of belonging, reflection, and understanding. If you’re ready to move beyond the box, enhance your commitment to diversity and gratitude, and raise students as whole people with whole lives, start reading. Learning will transform in this guided, safe space Finney provides.

Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts: Helping Students develop Inner Strength, Resilience, and Meaning meets a real need by providing teachers with holistic learning strategies that can be readily used in the classroom. Sandra Finney presents these strategies in a way that is accessible and grounded in the author’s teaching experience. The ideas in this book are particularly helpful to teachers in public schools who are seeking ways to engage the whole child.

The concepts presented in this book resonate with many of our First Nations and Metis cultural teachings regarding healthy holistic human development. I believe the subject matter in this compilation will be helpful towards restoring the spiritual balance within our community of learners, as we all strive for greater peace and harmony in education.

This is one of those books that as a teacher I wished I had at hand as I dealt with the day-to-day trials and tribulations of my student’s lives. It provides the resources, lessons, discussion questions to guide you and your students in the exploration of their inner and outer lives. It is a spirited book that deals in actions a teacher can take with a community of learners in their classroom to provide support for their active engagement in their lives from a place of communal connections and inter-strength. This gem of a resource will assist in creating resilience and hope in our students and provide them with the strength to transform our world into one of peace and sustainability.

Sandra Finney has had many roles in her life time in education including public school teacher, teacher educator, and director of curriculum development for K -12 classrooms. Her interests include supporting students’ emotional and spiritual growth, critical and creative thinking abilities, and cross cultural understanding.