"I've always thought that people need to feel good about themselves and I see my role as offering support to them, to provide some light along the way."
In our text Whale Done--The Power of Positive Relationships read the introduction and chapter one. Reflect on the chapter and make a connection to our education system--how are our philosohies different or the same. These connections may be within your classroom or school.
- Do we accentuate the postive?
- Build trust?
- What do we do when mistakes occur
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3 comments:
After reading the introduction and the first chapter it really got me to think about how much time as educators we spend on the negative. In our education system we're always worrying about and being lectured about test scores, AYP, MAPS testing, WKCE, etc. Although I understand the need to help schools and students excel, I feel that we worry about numbers sometimes more than what the real focus should be: the children and how they learn what we teach. Administrators always want the best in scores, but never really provide you with the tools to do so.
I guess after thinking about it, I don't believe the school that I worked in accentuated the positive a lot. They would spend more time on negative behaviors and the consequences rater than trying to be proactive in the school and create a positive environment. This is one of the reasons why I'm not teaching this year. My philosophy and the school that I worked for had completely different philosophies. Our education system as a whole has great intentions on trying to accentuate the positive, but if you were not actually in the school system, the news would give you a different perspective.
As far as building trust, I think this is really important in having a successful learning environment within a school. As an educator, trust is the first component that I try to build within the classroom. I try to make it a community for all students to learn. To build trust in a classroom, everyone needs to have the ability to feel safe and have a sense of belonging. Once you've established this trust, learning will come naturally.
I'm a firm believer in finding strengths in everyone so when a mistake would occur in learning, I would recognize that a mistake was made and focus on how to fix the mistake to make the outcome positive. I always try to own-up to my mistakes and have students take ownership in their mistakes because that's how we all learn.
As I read the introduction and the first chapter I realized that some days I focus on the negative. Just a few days ago I was lecturing the entire class that not completing homework and not doing the different things I think are important was bad for their education. When reading the first chapter I realized that I was lecturing about 2-3 kids out of 24. What a waste of time. Why not applaud or praise the 20 students that were completing their homework and doing the appropriate things for class. Accentuating the positive would be much more beneficial and get more out of the 2-3 students that were not completing their work.
The majority of the time I think I do a good job of letting kids know that I care about them and want them to be successful in school. I try to be as positive as I can, but when I think about it, I give that same speech from above almost every month. I thought that telling kids they need to stay on track and keep their focus would be a good thing. Was I wrong. I look forward to reading the text and finding a way to incorporate positive relationships into my classroom.
Once I started reading, I couldn't put the book down. I really enjoyed reading this book! We do spend some time on the negative with out test scores, however I am a very positive person and always try to catch my students doing the positive. I feel I do accentuate the positive and do so all year. When mistakes occur, I express how other students around that student are sitting nice and quietly. Also, the other students have great listening ears and I call on them. The other student will show he or she is listening so that I call on him or her. This method works well with Primary Students at least. I always catch the students making positive choices and having positive behavior. But, when they make decisions that aren't the best I talk one-on-one with them and discuss how I like all the great things they have been doing on a daily basis instead of dwelling on the one negative choice that they made that week. My students really do strive to do their best with the positive classroom environment.
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