ABSTRACT
Share this week’s encouragement experiences. Have those group members who did the centering exercises share experiences. Having them share will probably be interesting to the others. Converting praise statements into encouragement statements, what happened with that? Role-playing encouragement versus praise, even using one of the actual accounts of one of your members would be good. Someone could take the part of the teacher, another, that of the student. At first, use a praise kind of comment. The second time, for the same incident, use an encouragement statement. The person who took the role of the student then reports how it made him/her feel each time. This kind of activity often helps us to see the difference between praise and encouragement more quickly. If the student role is that of a young child, have the teacher stand on a chair and/or maybe have the student kneel.
