6 Simple Ways to Embed Gratitude into our Teaching
Research links gratitude to happiness, health, and positive relationships.
Simple practices can help us cultivate habits of gratitude in our students and ourselves.
Teaching can be a stressful profession. The moment-to-moment management of students, content, transitions, standards, evaluation, safety, relationships…. these can be overwhelming.
Research links gratitude to happiness, health, and positive relationships. In one study, researchers found that people who wrote about things for which they were grateful were happier, exercised more, and visited the doctor less than those who wrote about things that irritated them. Gratitude is a feeling of thankfulness that spurs a desire to return kindness. Developing our own gratitude practices can increase the quality of our professional and personal lives. Passing a practice of gratitude on to our students can improve our classroom climate and help them develop healthy habits to thrive, even in the face of today’s mental health and other challenges.
Here are five simple ways to integrate gratitude into our work with students.
1. Thank your students. Taking the opportunity to thank our students, individually and collectively, benefits us and them. “Thank you for learning with me today!” “Thank you for taking care to leave our classroom so neat and organized.” “Thank you for pausing to check how your classmate is feeling….” Thanking our students fills their buckets and models gratitude while also stimulating gratitude and happiness in ourselves as we go about our often stressful work days.
2. Have students thank one another. Create and reinforce an expectation in your classroom. Every time students work with a partner or group, precede the clean-up transition with a reminder to “thank your partner for working together today.” If a class helper holds the door for others or helps distribute supplies, prompt a “thank you”. Gratitude is a practice we can easily incorporate into our student’s daily activities.
3. Teach and use the ASL “thank you” sign. Incorporating sign language into your classroom lexicon offers easy ways for positive interaction that do not escalate the sound in the room or interrupt the flow of instruction. The simple sign for “thank you” can also be used to indicate “you’re welcome”. Students can use this to silently thank one another or helpful adults, and we can silently thank individual students.
4. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude for growth. Constructive feedback can be hard to receive. This is true for us as we strive to continue to grow as professionals (it feels much easier to get great evaluations than suggestions for improvement!). This is also true for our students, particularly if our schools get caught in a “have the right answer” focus that inhibits risk-taking and stigmatizes struggle. Gratitude practices can help us build resilient individuals who persevere through challenges. “I am so grateful for the time you are taking to figure this problem out.” “Thank you for helping me improve.” “Thank you for offering your ideas.” This can help us be ready to grow, too.
5. Embed gratitude into learning activities. In addition to embedded gratitude practices, gratitude can become a focus of learning activities, not just in the Thanksgiving season, but through the year. Writing thank you notes or acrostic poems, carefully observing and writing or drawing elements of our natural world, or consciously learning information about those who invented, discovered or developed the tools or knowledge we regularly use can all be ways to build gratitude muscles in the learning context.
6. Write it down. Teacher Owen M. Griffith suggests posting gratitude sticky-notes on the classroom door together as a regular reminder upon entry. Keeping a gratitude journal can be another valuable practice, particularly for us as teachers.
We are blessed to be positioned to help young people grow and learn and thrive. May simple gratitude practices focus our energies and sustain us in in this mission, and may we pass the orientation toward gratitude on to our students.