If there was a way to help the children you teach to increase their ability to pay attention, to develop a better working memory, and have an increased openness to new information, would you be interested?
An important way to do this is to help children in the area of their strengths ….. the things they are good at, the things they enjoy.
Classroom applications of strengths can be easily implemented and have a profound impact.
As an example, I recently visited a Year 1 classroom where each child was represented by a star hung with pegs on a line. Each star announced that its child was good at something positive.
On the other side of the room a section of the wall was covered with bright yellow laminated sheets headed “Year 1 Yellow Pages”. One page was headed “A listing of helpful experts in Year 1”. The other sheets were headed “Shoelace Tying Experts, Artists and Craftsmen, Roaring Readers, Super Spellers, Maths Minds”. After a class discussion identifying possible contributions, each child was listed as an expert on one of the yellow pages. Children were then encouraged to look up the yellow pages and get help, especially if the teacher was busy helping someone else.
“Ticket to Leave” is another idea. Just stand at the door and ask the children a simple question that they have to answer before they go home at the end of the day (making sure to leave enough time so this doesn’t become stressful). Questions can be as simple as “What’s your favourite colour?” to more personal ones such as “What’s something you would really love to do well?”.
Or how about giving everyone a piece of notepaper with the name of someone else in the class at the start of the day and asking them to write something they notice that person do well during the day. Then simply had these out individually as the children leave or do this a few times and share them with the whole class.
These ideas will most likely work best with younger children but whatever the age of your students, look out for the strengths they are showing and name them, making clear that you value them and so should your students.
Then help your students to claim their area of strength. They need to actually believe they have the particular strength/s you have seen in them.
Then help them to aim their strength/s. They need to make use of the strengths they have accepted as being valid for them.
