Instilling Pride in the Class Room Will Improve Behavior and Academic Achievement

When you start your first day in school as a teacher, you are filled with ambitions and dreams of inspiring your students to become great thinkers and great students. You have your lesson plans laid out so that you will not only teach the state standard, but your will have the children learning beyond the standard and fulfilling their want and need for education. These are grand ideas but the most important thing you can teach your students is pride in them selves and pride in their accomplishments. Without pride, your students will flounder and see no point in being at school or completing the work.

As a teacher you are a leader in the classroom and pride building should be a daily goal for you. A simple word of praise to the child that has accomplished something beyond their daily work will go along ways in motivating the child to try to break the barrier of their own learning. It has been known for a long time that people are more motivated about their own work when it matches the challenges put forth by a teacher or boss. The child wants to do the same good job as their peer next door, but without pride of accomplishment for the first time, the job will go unrewarded and the enthusiasm will diminish.

To instill pride in your pupils it is your job as a teacher to hype of anticipated glory of a finished project. "Just think how proud your parents will be," and "won't you be proud when you have finished the project," are two phrases that will get the student to think about pride and what they must achieve to get it. As they learn and mimic the behavior you want to instill in them they will be learn that the idea of being proud of something is a positive idea and one that they will want to emulate in the future. Not on individual students can be bought in on the idea of pride, but entire classrooms and schools can achieve a level of pride that is reflected in accomplishments and deeds.