No, you’re not going to say “I forgive you.”
You’re going to offer your forgiveness to misbehaving students internally. That is, within yourself.
This is a powerful classroom management strategy that can be game-changer for both you and your students.
Here’s why:
It relieves a mountain of stress.
When you decide to forgive every student for misbehavior ahead of time, before they can even break any rules, they lose the power to get under your skin.
This can only happen if you allow your classroom management plan to do its job without your interference or inconsistency.
It eliminates resentment.
If you can’t forgive students for disrupting your class—ergo, it affects you emotionally—you will resent them. Just seeing them will annoy you.
And they’ll know it. It’s something you can’t hide. The result is that they’ll dislike you right back. Forgiveness repairs this relationship.
You’ll naturally like your students.
When decide to forgive, you’re free to like your students regardless of their day-to-day behavior. In fact, doing so becomes natural.
It also triggers the Law of Reciprocity. Meaning, they’ll like you too. They’ll even want to please you and show you better behavior.
It makes your consequences matter.
When students don’t like you, they’ll blame you for their misbehavior instead of reflecting on it and taking responsibility.
If they like you, on the other hand, the opposite happens. They’ll feel it, grasp their wrongdoing, and choose to improve all on their own.
It feels good.
Forgiveness makes you happier. Research shows that anxiety drops, blood pressure lowers, and you sleep better.
Multiply it by however many students get on your nerves and your stress level will plummet.
How to Forgive
The question is, how? How do you forgive misbehavior when anger arrives out of nowhere, seemingly out of your control?
The answer is within your own free will.
You see, forgiveness is choice. Nothing more. You don’t have to work yourself up to it. You don’t have to fight to overcome it. You don’t have to meditate into emotional detachment.
You just need to decide to offer free and unconditional forgiveness. Think of it as a promise you make to yourself.
Yes, you may slip up a time or two. No big deal. It will get easier with time. In fact, if you stay with it, if you remind yourself to forgive each morning, eventually you won’t even have to think about it anymore.
It will become who you and how you carry yourself.
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