Admiring Negative Attitudes How many times have you had a student that displays a ‘bad attitude’ or a student that seems intent on being the class clown?
To be an effective teacher, you need to know what the goal of these behaviours are and how to manage them. The theory of ‘admiring negative attitudes and behaviours’ is based on a well-establsihed area of research known as positive psychology (Seligman, 1999) and it looks upon negative student behaviour as a skill they have been practicing and refining for many years.
Armed with this knowledge, the teacher can cleverly redirect these skills for a more positive outcome. If we think about the student with the ‘bad attitude’ and consider that the goal of their behaviour is most likely to be to display and announce defiance and independence, then this can be reframed as great leadership skills. The teacher can then ask the student to use these abilities to help lead the class, and suddenly a negative is turned into a positive.
In the case of the class clown, the reframe would be along the lines of admiring the student, then reframing the clown act as natural comedic skill. A possible redirect could consist of a challenge to the student to use that skill in a creative way and in an appropriate setting that can be set up by the teacher according to the personality of the student (Beaty-O’Ferrall, Green and Hanna, 2010).