The Power Of Affirmation In The Classroom

The Power of Affirmation at Work is a Harvard Business Review article that has tons of applications to the classroom.

It offers lots of ideas on how to use affirmation though, interestingly, the author only describes how managers can use it.

In the classroom, teachers can use the same advice and be affirming to students.  But the author misses that an affirming culture can be created by providing a framework so that everyone can be more affirming.

I described how I did a version of this (borrowing it from another teacher) at I’M USING THIS GREAT NEW VIDEO TO INTRODUCE A CLOSING “APPRECIATION, APOLOGY, AHA!” ACTIVITY.

If I was still teaching, I’d take ideas from the HBR article and turn them into sentence-starters that students would use a couple of days each week near the end of the class, like:

_______ made a difference for me today by ___________________.

Today, I noticed that ____________________ did/helped ____________________.

When _______________ did __________________, they made me feel ________________.

But, before I did that, I’d probably take a short excerpt from the article and turn it into a class Read Aloud.

I’m adding this info to The Best Questions To Use For Class Closing Activities — What Are Yours?