In the beginning of my second year of teaching I cried ALL THE TIME. I was teaching a seventh grade science class. The students were so challenging. I did not know how I was going to get through the year. There was a veteran teacher who worked in the English department. She was amazing; she was really supportive of me. She told me she had similar experiences early in her teaching and that at the beginning of every year she would re-read a book called, Liberated Parents, Liberated Children by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlisch. She told me that although it was a parenting book, it was completely applicable to teaching. I read the book, and it changed my life!
Although the book was published in 1974, the concepts and scenarios are similar to ones we still encounter today. The book was based on the parenting classes of Dr. Haim Ginott. The two women who wrote the book took his classes, and then wrote a book using his teaching. The book reads like a novel, not a textbook, so it is an easy read and easy to understand the points. The biggest lesson I got out of the book was about praising or being critical of the behaviors not of the child themselves. If a child does something good, they are not a “good boy”, but they did a good deed, or on the flipside, if a child does something bad, they are not a “bad boy”, but the behavior they engaged in was bad. This is a simplified version, but it comes back around to the idea of praising students’ accomplishments in the classroom.
In the article we read for class, Recommendations for classroom practice: providing recognition, it says, “Recognition should be given for legitimate achievement; otherwise, it can have negative effects on student achievement and motivation”. This is the same concept, it is about what the student has accomplished; that is what makes the praise legitimate. If teachers went around saying “good girl” or “good boy” for everything students did, it would have little meaning and in turn have a negative effect on the students’ performance.
rebeccaaf 