A Thousand Words of Care: Microaffirmations as a Pedagogy of Voice

“Do we view ourselves as sole keepers of knowledge, or as facilitators of learning? Do we view ourselves as dominant over children, or can we have the humility to see ourselves walking shoulder to shoulder? Are we able to understand that children, if we allow it, teach us as much, if not more, about who we are and the world we live in as we teach them?”

-Denise Augustine, Street Data Pod, Episode 3, 

“Walking Shoulder to Shoulder with Children”

This year I have framed my teaching goal as a question: How can I model that gentle  devotional practices, such as small daily rituals, are the root of our authentic, human creativity and voice? 

My entire life I have been a perfectionist, so modeling gentleness and authenticity for my students challenges me personally. Although I am a loving person, I frequently have a deficit mindset when it comes to progress towards a goal, rooted in my belief that I am not good enough. Although in the big picture I know my students feel my support and love, I am realizing there are micro movements I make as an educator that reinforce my need for things to be perfect in order to be good, which has shaped my teaching craft in fundamental ways. 

Year after year I tell my writing students that process work is more valuable than a final product, and that I don’t want their work to be perfect. But when am I going to have this mindset in my own life? If modeling for students means walking alongside them, as Denise Augustine of Street Data Pod notes, “shoulder to shoulder,” we adults must then be as vulnerable as we ask them to be. For me, I suspect being vulnerable means embracing gentleness and creating rituals that promote who I am, versus who I am not. If I can do this, I hope my students will benefit too. 

In my goal the words gentle and rituals are precursors to broader aspects of identity: voice and authenticity. Our identity is not only our origin story, but also how we see ourselves, which is built day by day in small moments of decision-making and self-talk. I empathize with my students because I have sat in their seats and been a high school girl, and to this day I carry the emotional baggage of needing to be perfect to be accepted and safe.

My students, though, face barriers to self-acceptance that did not exist when I was their age, which compounds this problem of perfectionism, not the least of which is the ever-present lure of generative AI. Some of the most capable student writers will, working from a deficit-mindset of their own, substitute beautiful and original topic sentences and paragraph hooks worked on in class with AI-generated ones, using prompts like, “Make me sound reflective when talking about my connections to this story.” They don’t believe their voice is enough. 

This is absolutely not how I want my students to live. The message must be that their voice is enough–that what these writers say is far more important than a robot who churns out ideas for them. I am trying to dismantle my own not enough/deficit mindset by leaning into affirmations as resistance: resistance to the narrative that I am not enough and therefore my classes aren’t either in the hopes that students, too, can resist.  

Here are some ways a deficit mindset shows up in my teaching:

-Only marking student writing with comments about what needs to be improved

-Comparing myself to other teachers, and finding myself lacking

-Identifying a disruptive student as a problem to be fixed 

-Only writing or calling home if there is a problem to be addressed, or if a student is “failing”

-Allowing one interaction with a student to define them for the entire year

-Making assumptions about students not reading or doing their work, based on this interaction

–Focusing on what we have not learned and ignoring or taking for granted what we have

As a companion on my journey to confront my deficit mindset I am reading Pedagogies of Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency by Shane Safir, Marlo Bagsik, Sawsan Jaber, and Crystal M. Watson. Safir et al. take inspiration from bell hooks’ 1990 essay “homeplace: a site of resistance” to argue that before students can harness their own voice, there are conditions and habits that teachers can cultivate to create a warm classroom space for taking that risk, or a safe “homeplace.” Hooks was inspired to call classrooms homeplaces in honor of her grandmother’s house, which she said provided a “safe and nurturing space in the face of the brutal reality of racial oppression.” 

But in order to create a warm classroom that feels like home, we must first be capable of designing that space into existence as mentors, and embody warmth ourselves. As we have discussed so many times on this blog, Safir et al. note, “The way we show up as educators matters far more than we know.” I am a little obsessed with their discussion of “10 Ways of Being that Awaken a Pedagogy of Voice,” or fundamental human practices that create classroom homeplaces: embodiment, vulnerability, abundance mindset, curiosity, deep listening, intergenerational learning, holism, healing, learning as ceremony, and relationality. These ways of being feel like beautiful lamp posts for teachers trying to find their way while doing the personal work required to coach others. 

My dream is to offer this level of affirming care for students

For now, I am beginning the school year with a pedagogy of voice called “microaffirmations.” Safir et al. name this pedagogy as one that awakens identity. They cite researcher Mary Rowe’s definition: “Microaffirmations are tiny acts of opening doors to opportunity, gestures of inclusion and caring, and graceful acts of listening” as a pathway to creating identity (and therefore voice) nourishing classrooms. What I love most about this pedagogy is the rebellious resistance inherent in rejecting oppressive patterns of self-comparison. Small, often unseen gestures and kind words or affirmations push back against the idea of perfection and instead recognize the person, their presence, and their inherent goodness. And by microaffirming my students, maybe that warmth will also flow through my own self perception. Is it possible that creating a classroom homeplace for my students by modeling more microaffirmations will create a homeplace for me, too?

Verbal micro-affirmations I am trying in class discussion include: 

”What a great question, I love that you asked that.”

”I can see you really thinking through that conflict, and it’s great work.”

“All of your revising and drafting has really paid off in the connections you are making here, I see your hard work.”

“That is such an interesting thought. I am not sure how to answer that, so I will need to think about it on my end.” 

A benefit to verbal microaffirmations is that by recognizing a student publicly, teachers can confer status, which Harvard psychologist Dr. Joseph Henrich explains “comes from one’s reputation for being competent and valuable to the group.” In 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People David Yeager calls this status “earned prestige” and links earned prestige to a sense of leadership in the classroom that ultimately boosts student morale, and we can then assume, voice.

Some additional microaffirmations I am trying:

-Standing at the door and greeting / saying goodbye to students, often by name

-Creating more journals where students express gratitude for a peer 

-Writing emails home to spotlight a student’s work in class. I was recently copied on two emails from teachers spotlighting my advisees, and I loved seeing positive news go home. They inspire me!

-Provide clear feedback on writing that says why something the writer has done is good, versus simply writing “well-said” or “lovely.” I would like to be clear about why their writing is lovely. 

Microaffirmations can be so small, you almost miss them. For example, my exchange with this student:

While reading Pedagogies of Voice, I am meditating on how the authors note that “students often live into who we expect them to be.” This is so true. I can’t even imagine how many times I have decided a student is a “certain way,” and although I thought I was supportive and fair to them, maybe I wasn’t. What if a student felt they didn’t have a chance to improve? What if they felt I wasn’t seeing them for who they are? It’s a little awkward to write about these micro moves that seem part of just being a good teacher. I fear someone reading this could think, you didn’t already do these things? You must be a big jerk! Well, I’m sure many of us do a lot of these things naturally, but the practice for me now is intentionality about gentle rituals, and also knowing that I can always be better.

Affirmations can’t be performative, because the students would sniff out a phony, so an affirmation mindset must come from a feeling of warmth inside me- which can only come from my own self-relationship. I think I am on a lifelong journey of “offering a thousand tiny words to heal a thousand tiny cuts” within my students because I myself am also wounded from years of assuming I am doing everything wrong. I spent the day in Megan’s classroom yesterday, and while introducing Jane Eyre, she said that “love is a religion to Jane; she just wants to belong.” I feel this way, too. Maybe by affirming my students in micro moments, I am sending more love to them, and therefore me, and right now this love and healing feels collectively essential.

Source

Bagsik, Marlo and Sawsan Jaber, Shane Safir, Crystal M. Watson. Pedagogies of Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency. Corwin Publishing, 2026. 

Kate Schenck is currently reading The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and getting ready for winter.