• Welcome to Teachers At Risk

  

• Elona Hartjes, MEd Candidate, Ontario Certified Teacher

• Recent Comments

  • Litsa on Listening to Music Helps Students Be More Productive in The Classroom
  • Ebony on Parenting angry children and teens training program
  • Joyce Gray on Setting SMART goals help students succeed
  • Tracy on Poor teachers dramatically reduce students’ life-time earnings
  • Jessie on Listening to Music Helps Students Be More Productive in The Classroom
  • garrick on Listening to Music Helps Students Be More Productive in The Classroom

• An honour

  • Edublog Awards
• 
• A Public Service by Dentist Advisor

• Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

uploaded by schhmish
I’m always telling my students they can use their strengths to help them be successful. By successful, I mean help them achieve their goals. Trouble is that many of my students can’t see their strengths because school often focuses on their weaknesses, and many of them don’t have goals because they don’t think to have goals. They just kind of drift along and let life happen to them instead of making things happen to create the life that they want.

Students tell me all the time they suck at math, English, organization etc. I tell them that everyone sucks at something. I suck at lot’s of things. The thing to do is to use your strengths to help you succeed in the different areas of your life. That’s the smart thing to do. Everyone has strengths they can use to help them succeed. I tell them that I’m good at teaching people things and good at working with teenagers, but I really suck at dancing. I just can’t get my feet to do what I want them to do. So, I became a high school teacher and not a dancer. Then we discuss their strengths and explore ways that they can use their strengths to help them succeed in school, in the world of work and in their lives generally.

Often, my students don’t know what they want in life, or even think that they can have a successful life at all.They just see themselves as losers who are doomed to failure, so we spend time determining their strengths, setting goals for the future based on their strengths and planning how to use their strengths to help them achieve their goals. Basically that’s what a ot of my Advanced Learning Strategies Class is all about. But to be honest, I do much of the same thing in my grade nine math class.

I’m not sure that my students always believe me when I tell them they can use their strengths to help them be successful. I get the impression that they want to believe me but have difficulty doing so. That’s why I was absolutely delighted to find the following video where Marcus Buckingham supports what I’ve been telling them all along. I intend on showing this video the first day back after the holidays. It should generate lots of good discussions.

Related Posts

• Challenging academically at-risk high school students academically and professionally.
• Don’t tell me anything more about students in Finland and how great the education system is there.
• You don’t have to be a superhero to teach kids who are academically at-risk
• Teachers Can Transform Off-Task Behaviors into Powerful Learning Tool
• Parenting angry children and teens training program

Comments

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Email Address(required)

Website

• 
• Tweet
• Search for:
• 
  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

• Archives

  Select Month February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006

• Dislcaimer

  These are my personal views and not those of my employer.