Something I've struggled with as a teacher is to know whether to tell my students that they're doing great, or to tell them why they're doing great. I know, really sounds like I'm focusing on the semantics here, but I've noticed a huge affect on students depending on what I focus on. When I tell students why they're doing great, they focus a lot on what they can do better. When I tell students that they're doing great, they focus on building their ego. Both are so necessary.
My first year as a teacher, I really thought that I was onto something because I would give my students feedback on every single thing that they did. It wasn't until I saw a teacher write feedback to another student that read "great work :-)" where I thought to myself, "Why is there so much more written in her notebook for that class as opposed to mine?" I might have given that student great feedback about her grammar, her voice, her content, and everything in-between, but to her, when she saw that feedback, what her mind probably heard was, "You need to change" as opposed to "You're doing great." And when students hear this, over and over, writing just stops being fun. This was a hard pill for me to swallow, especially as a first year teacher who wanted to make a world of difference, but what I am proud of is that I had the courage to reassess myself.
As a basketball coach, something I try to tell my students as often as I can, whether there's depth behind it or not, is "you're doing great." Some students will ask me, "do you mean it?" after they miss a shot or a dribble, but I'm not even thinking about that. It's just the way I want to make them feel, and maybe that matters just as much. I think everyone should hear the words "you're doing great," whether it's because of a specific shot or not, because if you keep hearing those words, it really makes you feel like you're something special.
It's something my dad used to tell me, every day, right before my trip to school: "Today's gonna be grrrrreat." Did it matter what was going to happen that day, whether there were special events or anything like that? No, of course not. What mattered is the way that it made me feel, and that feeling could carry you through tough tests, strange moments, and everything in-between. It was a tough lesson for me as a teacher, that not everything has to be about improvement. Sometimes, it's just about making your students feel good about themselves, that they don't need to feel like they have to change.
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