Effective teachers treat everyone with respect, every day. Even the best teachers may not like all of their students, but they act as if they do. And great teachers understand the power of praise.
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It’s not difficult to treat some people with respect, or even to treat most people with respect. It’s even possible to treat all people with respect quite a bit of the time. The real challenge is to treat everyone with respect every day. Each of us can remember at least one occasion in our professional lives when someone in a leadership role treated us inappropriately. No matter how long ago it was, or how often that person treated us well, we remember. The same thing is true in our schools. If just once in a month, or even once in a year, we choose to make a sarcastic comment or cutting remark to a student or colleague, we might as well have carved it in stone. They may pretend to have forgotten that moment, but they will never forget. What’s more, anyone else who witnessed it will probably remember, too.
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To be effective, praise must be authentic, specific, immediate, clean, and private.
