May 20 2008
The One Sentence Intervention
Have you ever come across a bit of information that works like magic in the classroom? Mine is the one-sentence intervention, explained in the Teaching With Love & Logic book by Jim Fay and David Funk. I highly recommend adding this book to your summer reading list if you’ve never read it before.
The authors suggest experimenting with your most uncooperative student. They suggest going to that student at least six times during the next three school weeks using a “one sentence intervention.” The intervention is simply you noticing something personal about that student. “I noticed that you are wearing blue sneakers.” “I noticed that you got a hair cut.” “I noticed that you like pro wrestling.” “I noticed that you really like to draw pictures.”
There should be no value judgments attached to these statements; no praise or evaluation of what you observed. Just a simple matter-of-fact statement about the student. If they say “Yeah, so what?” you say, “Well, I just noticed that about you.” According to the authors, if you offer praise or comment that you like what you noticed, students can feel manipulated, so simple observation is best.
What this does is work on the old adage that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”.
After doing this for several weeks, you can test whether the student is becoming more cooperative by asking “Will you try that just for me?” or “Will you stop doing that just for me?” If your relationship building efforts are taking root, you may be surprised by the outcome of these simple requests.
The thing I like about Love and Logic is although the target audience is parents and teachers of K-12 age kids, it still works with older students as well. I have successfully used this technique on building relationships with college aged students. My problem is that I get so involved, I sometimes forget my techniques. I’m posting this in my blog not only to share with you, but to remind myself about this in the future.
My memory was jogged about this simple intervention by Paul Bogush’s post on his blog. Thank you Paul.
