Teaching Tip #66

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #66

This one is so simple, but it took me a long time to get it down: praise in public; criticize in private.  You see early on in my career, I was doing far too much criticizing and no praising.

This was a for a couple of reasons.  One, I don’t think I gave my students anything worth praising.  I mean how can you praise busy work or the questions at the end of the story?  Worse yet, I didn’t have the chops yet to tease out the really good thinking and writing, so I was just left to criticize them.  And what fun is constant criticism?

Now, though, I praise daily.  Don’t think that it’s all fairies and roses though.  I still criticize.  But I do it one on one, privately.