How to use them
- Use the parking lot. Before you get out of the car, take three slow breaths and say one line for the day ahead.
- Keep one where you’ll see it. A sticky note on your desk, the inside of your planner, the lock screen of your phone.
- Use a line as a reset mid-lesson. When a class tips sideways, one silent sentence (“I can pause, reset and try it another way”) buys you a second before you respond.
- Close the day on purpose. As you leave the building, say one line from the after-school section. It marks the end of the workday so it’s less likely to follow you home.
- Share them with colleagues. A line on the staff room whiteboard is a small kindness to everyone who reads it.
Why believable lines work better
Teachers are good at spotting empty praise, including their own. That instinct is right. In one study, people with low self-esteem who repeated a glowing line they didn’t believe ended up feeling worse (Wood, Perunovic & Lee, 2009). Lines that are true, or true as work in progress, avoid that trap.
There’s also evidence that reflecting on what you value can help under pressure. In one experiment, chronically stressed students who first wrote about a value that mattered to them did better on hard problems, solved under time pressure with someone watching, than stressed students who wrote about a value that mattered less to them (Creswell et al., 2013). That’s why the last section is about why you teach. Remembering what you care about isn’t just sentimental. It can steady you.
Using affirmations with your class
Teachers often ask whether to bring affirmations into the classroom. A few things worth knowing:
- Values writing has the most research, and mixed results. In a well-known study, a short in-class writing task, where students wrote about values that mattered to them, improved Black students’ grades and narrowed the racial achievement gap (Cohen et al., 2006). But a large replication, in schools where a similar exercise had worked before, found no effect (Hanselman et al., 2017). Worth trying, not worth promising.
- Keep it optional and private. Students write for themselves, not for a grade or to share.
- Make lines believable for students too. “I can try hard things” works better than “I am a genius.”
- Model it out loud. Saying “Let me try that a different way” after your own mistake shows students how to talk to themselves after theirs.
For ready-made lists to share, see affirmations for kids, affirmations for teens and affirmations for students.
When it’s more than a bad week
Affirmations won’t fix a workload problem, and they aren’t a replacement for care. If exhaustion, dread or low mood has lasted for weeks, talk to your doctor or a counselor, and lean on colleagues you trust. If you’re struggling or thinking about harming yourself, you can call or text 988 in the US (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.