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The Importance of Student Identity and Validation

A student’s identity is one of the most important things that we should value as teachers. Identity is something that can vastly improve the social and emotional health of our kids. Validating those emotions and identities is just as important!

What Does Identity Mean?

Our identity is who we are. The term identity can be used to describe our physical body, but it is most often used when thinking about the personality, emotions, and character traits of a person.

identity

What Does Validate Mean?

When we validate a student, we are giving them the self-efficacy and self-confidence to say “Yes, that IS who I am!”

How Do We Help Students Figure Out Their Identity?

There are a lot of ways that we, as people, create identities of ourselves. When our students come into our classrooms, they have already been exposed to their own idea of their identity as well as the validations they’ve received from their parents, their family, their peers, their teachers, etc.

Let Me Give You An Example

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Jung is a 4th grader this year. He’s been able to come up with some identities on his own (he’s kind, he’s helpful, he’s a good baseball player). His Dad and Papa also have helped shape him by telling him how sweet he is, how he helps around the house, and when he makes good decisions. His teachers have given him identities like smart, a critical thinker, and an amazing reader!

These are all great, but we must remember as educators that there are identities inside of each of our students that are negative – and we have the power to change those!

For example, Jung identifies as a “horrible math student”. His PreK-3rd grade teachers are all awesome, but no one has ever explicitly told Jung that he CAN do it, or that he IS a good mathematician. He is always pulled to a small group and knows he’s with other kids who struggle with math.

How We Can Help

It seems really simple, but here’s the trick: we can change the way students perceive themselves when we tell them that they are a certain way.

This is a really important point: this can be positive, but it can also be negative. Often, without even realizing it, teachers can reinforce a negative identity in a child by not addressing it. In this case, we want to tell Jung that he’s such a flexible math thinker. We can tell him that he tries hard in math class and perseveres in an overall context, and we can also pinpoint specific examples (“Wow, Jung!! Your number line method for Problem 3 is so creative! I love how you tried to solve that problem.”)

Identity Can Change

Over time, our identities can change. Sometimes, those changes are a result of our own thinking. For children, a lot of the changes are either given to them by an adult or validated for them by an adult.

Using Jung again, sometimes he can be a little impulsive on the playground. Jung knows this about himself and sees it as a negative. He gets impatient with Sariah as they play tag and yells at her that she stinks at tag.

We can validate Jung’s own thinking by yelling at him or punishing him, OR we can begin to change Jung’s identity by having a conversation about ways he could respond differently. We absolutely want to curb that behavior, but changing an identity like that takes positive experiences and conversations. Punishment alone only deepens the negative identity.

identity discussion

Warning: We Will Mess Up

Teachers will inevitably mess up and reinforce (validate) a negative identity in a child. When you catch this happening, make sure to have a conversation with the child and negate the reinforced identity. If we yelled at Jung for yelling at Sariah and then realized a few minutes later that we need to help Jung overcome this negative identity he’s formed, we have to call him over and reverse the negative with praise.

And, don’t try to fight it. You will mess up. We all will!! It’s about making sure each child feels valued, and apologizing can go a long way.

Identities are Individual

One thing I’ve learned as I’ve studied social-emotional learning is that each identity in a person is individual. You can validate one identity at a time, AND you can also validate multiple identities depending on how you phrase things.

For example, if we tell Jung “You are a fast reader!”, we’ve validated that Jung is a fast reader. If we say “You really persevered when those new vocabulary words popped up in your book and you tried to define them!”, we’ve validated more than one identity.

Making Identity Visible

By nature, kids don’t often think of their own identities unless we ask them. We can encourage this by asking them to journal, to create acrostic poems about themselves, or to write letters to themselves about why they’re awesome! When kids know their identities, they are more able to change them on their own (and even learn how to validate them on their own).

It’s important for us as educators to continually remind each individual student of their own unique identities, but it’s also vital that we help children understand how to recognize and validate their own awesome selves.

How Do I Do It?

As I said above, we do a LOT of journaling in class about ourselves and what makes us us. I also use a Google Slides presentation to help students think about some of the major emotions and identities they have. We talk about how to identify specific emotions and then how to validate those emotions. This is one specific way to identify identities and validate those identities with our students while also allowing for some self-reflection. It’s a free resource that you can use with your kids right now!

identity activity

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