Chapter 4: Creating a Culture of Success

Comparing students to other students or praising and criticizing in class can be detrimental to students’ learning. One student even claimed, “most students do not want to be singled out—praise and criticism feel almost the same” (67). Students want to learn, but they also want to fit in, and honoring both of those wants is something students wish teachers could learn to do.
This really leapt out at me because I’ve felt the exact same thing, and this student said it so eloquently. In high school, I had English teachers who would pull good examples of essays from the class and copy them to hand out or put them on the overhead to discuss what made them good, and they made sure to never include names. But when you’ve been going to school with the same group of kids for years, you learn what people write like, you can always pick out the kid who’s fidgeting in their seat trying to look like they’re not the one who wrote the paper: I was often that kid. It’s so wonderful to be praised by a teacher and hailed as a good example, but sometimes it feels like criticism because your classmates are angry you understood what they couldn’t seem to grasp.