Discover the ‘One Good Thing’ Exercise: How Rebecka Peterson Became the 2023 National Teacher of the Year with a Confidence-Boosting Technique

It is a mathematics teacher, Rebecka Peterson, who has just been named “teacher of the year” in the United States. Every year, the Headteachers Council, a non-profit organization, designates the “rare pearl”, whose method of transmitting knowledge has particularly borne fruit. The jury has just named this mathematics specialist who works in a high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the confidence she transmits to her students, thanks to a very specific exercise that she offers them before each lesson: find the element positive, inspiring, motivating of their last 24 hours. She assumes that this little gymnastics creates confidence and that confidence is the number one engine of success.

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Rebecka Peterson has been teaching for 14 years, in college and especially in high school, and a few years ago, she questioned her whole model. Too many students dropped out, gave up, not seeing the point of getting involved. So she looked into the question of self-esteem, she looked for techniques to build confidence. And then she discovered a collaborative blog where other teachers exchanged accounts of only positive classroom experiences, the so-called “One good thing” method, determining a positive thing that happened during the day.

Each student confides in front of the others

After participating herself by publishing hundreds of examples on the blog, she quickly imported the exercise into her classes, before each lesson: ask each student to find a positive thing. And it works. Everyone agrees to confide in front of the others, and the accumulation of examples creates collective encouragement. To achieve this level of freedom of speech in the classroom, Rebecka Peterson explains that she works on trust from the first lesson.

First, she introduces herself, she talks about her childhood as an Iranian-Swedish immigrant, her school career, then she meets the students one by one, alone, for at least a quarter of an hour, “and that’s howshe said to CBS, that trust is built, that we can then discuss what is positive, and the more we practice this search for the positive, the more examples we find, and the more we change our state of mind, we build up a strength.” Receiving her prize, she dedicated it to all teachers, emphasizing that they deserve two things, salary increases, and a real appreciation of their profession, “un magnificent job, the one that consists of helping students to reveal themselves.“