One of the legacies from my mom is that I try to be unfailingly positive with my students, and I encourage and expect the same from them. I have a set of classroom signs that I post all around the room, many of which are meant to inspire/remind students about their attitudes and behavior toward one another. If students say things that are disparaging to one another or themselves, I pause the class for a quick reminder. (The reminder is friendly, positive, and often humorous, which allows the student(s) to save face.) Frequently I find myself pointing to the sign that says “All observable data must support the hypothesis that you are nice.” or the one that says “If you can’t say something nice about yourself, don’t say anything about yourself at all.”
Over the course of the year, as I model a positive attitude and continually encourage (and teach!) my students to exhibit the same, the environment in the classroom gradually shifts. Students in my classes are generally positive and supportive of each other, and after the first month or so of classes, I simply don’t have incidents with my students antagonizing one another or “acting mean”.
I don’t usually think consciously about this. I simply act like myself and it gradually happens by itself. A few weeks ago, one of the biology teachers had to leave school because her infant daughter was sick, and I had to cover one of her classes. My initial reaction was that I was amazed by the immaturity of her students. However, upon reflection I realized that what I was actually seeing was the difference between my own students, who by this point had been through a full school year of my “niceness” training, and a control group of students who hadn’t.
A few days later, a couple of my students were in my room after school for extra help, and one of them had brought a friend. The friend was not one of my students, but I knew her from the Diversity Club, which I advised. She is one of those nice, generally positive, upbeat students that everyone wants in a classroom. However, on this particular occasion, she was commenting on another girl in school whom she didn’t like. I jokingly said, “Sounds like you’ve got some anger issues. I think you need a year of being in my classroom to work on that.” She caught the humor and replied, with a smile, “That’s OK Mr. Bigler. I’m good.” At that point, one of my students chimed in with “No, really. He’s right. You’d be surprised.”
