This teacher spends ten minutes every day complimenting his special ed students in class.
“I love having you in my class. I think you’re very funny. You’re a great soccer player. Everyone in here loves you,” He says: “I noticed the kids were always more motivated, happier and better behaved…. So we started doing it every day.”
Ulmer said the change has been remarkable in his students, whose diagnoses range from autism to traumatic brain injury to speech apraxia to agenesis of corpus callosum.
“They all came from a segregated environment [from general education students]. Now they’re participating in school activities, dancing in front of hundreds of other kids and in the debate club.” And while Ulmer agrees academics are important, he thought it even more important to reverse the psychological damage that came from being made to feel like outcasts.
If this doesn’t prove that appreciation works, I don’t know what does.
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