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Seven Strategies for Building Positive Classrooms

Drawing on the Positive Action program, the article offers seven strategies for building classrooms that support both achievement and character.

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By Positive ActionSep 1, 20088 min read

A classroom filled with lots of desks and chairs

Positive teaching strategies for a positive classroom from Positive Action, checked against social and emotional learning research.

In this 2008 article, the Positive Action program sets out seven strategies for building positive classrooms that support both achievement and character. A new section below connects them to current social and emotional learning frameworks and reports what the research shows.

The Positive Action program shows that we can promote academic achievement and build students’ character. Every day as millions of students go to school, their parents and caretakers hope these young people will be treated with care, valued, inspired, and educated. Students hope they will get along with their peers and teachers, have their work measured up, and enjoy the process of learning. These hopes define positive classrooms for parents and students, so we provide Seven Strategies for Building Positive Classrooms below.

Unfortunately, the accountability requirements of No Child Left Behind have created a different definition of positive classrooms for many educators. For them, positive classrooms have come to mean places where students arrive at school ready to learn; work diligently to master academic standards (particularly math and reading); go home and accurately complete homework; and return to school the next day eager to learn more. Often, teachers are so focused on ensuring that students pass achievement tests that they have little or no time to address students’ social and emotional needs.

Education has to work for all stakeholders. By implementing the following seven strategies, we can combine the need for positive classrooms that support the whole child with the need for accountability and improved academic performance. The Positive Action program (www.positiveaction.net) has refined these strategies through 26 years of research, evaluation, and development, and has implemented them in more than 13,000 schools.

Seven Strategies for Building Positive Classrooms

1. Make Learning Relevant

Students are more engaged in learning and retain knowledge better when they see that it is relevant and vital to their own success and happiness. By discovering students’ talents, learning styles, and interests, teachers can adjust teaching methods and strategies. By giving students a say in how the classroom operates, teachers increase students’ sense of ownership in the education process.

2. Create a Classroom Code of Conduct

A positive and productive classroom requires a common understanding of positive and negative behaviors. To establish this understanding, teachers ask students to identify the ways they like to be treated. This discussion elicits lists of behaviors that are respectful, fair, kind, and empathetic. Together, teacher and students conclude that treating others the way you want to be treated is the best code of conduct, and they agree that this code will dictate the behaviors that are appropriate for their classroom.

3. Teach Positive Actions

The importance of doing positive actions to feel good about yourself.
Positive actions for a healthy body (such as nutrition, exercise, and sleep).
Positive actions for the intellect (such as thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving skills).
Positive actions for self-management (such as managing time, energy, emotions, and other personal resources).
Positive actions for getting along with others (such as treating others fairly, kindly, and respectfully).
Positive actions for being honest with yourself and others (such as taking responsibility, admitting mistakes, and not blaming others).
Positive actions for improving yourself continually (such as setting and achieving goals).

4. Instill Intrinsic Motivation People need to feel good about themselves. In the Positive Action program, teachers help students understand that people are likely to feel good about themselves when they engage in positive actions. The program explains a three-step process for choosing positive actions: First, we have a thought; second, we act consistently with the thought; third, we experience a feeling about ourselves based on the action. That feeling leads to another thought, and the cycle starts again. With practice, students learn that if they have a negative thought, they can change it to a positive one that will lead to a positive action and a positive feeling about themselves—a powerful intrinsic motivator.With repeated reinforcement by the teacher, this simple explanation helps students understand and improve their behavior in any situation.

Teachers can strengthen intrinsic motivation by recognizing and positively reinforcing positive actions when they see them. Recognition activities and items—such as tokens, stickers, and certificates—can be effective. But when teachers or other staff use this strategy, it’s important that they recognize the positive behavior, ask how it made the student feel, and tell the student the extrinsic reward is a reminder of that good feeling. When students make the connection between their performance and feeling good about themselves, intrinsic motivation is enhanced and positive behaviors continue.

Families and community members are concerned about their children’s welfare, often want to be engaged in their children’s education, and have resources to offer. Educators can integrate them into many classroom and school activities, such as curriculum activities, assemblies, committees, after-school events, and homework.

7. Always Be Positive

Perhaps the most important strategy, yet often the most difficult to carry out, is to be positive—from classrooms to playgrounds, during school and after. There is always a positive way to respond to a situation. A positive attitude is the change agent that will create positive classrooms and schools that produce happy and successful students.

A Research-Based Program

It is challenging to implement all of these seven strategies continuously and well. For schools looking for a tool, the Positive Action program is one proven approach. The program provides an easy-to-use curriculum for teachers at each grade level; a principal component for developing school climate; and kits to facilitate the involvement of counselors, families, and communities. Positive Action has been rigorously evaluated in longitudinal randomized studies with students from a range of backgrounds and in a range of community types. The U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse reviewed these studies and recognized Positive Action as the only character education program that—by the clearinghouse’s standards—achieves positive effects in both academics and behavior (see ). The many schools using Positive Action stand as testimony that focusing on positive reinforcement and intrinsic motivation in the classroom results in a positive environment for teaching and learning and enhances academic rigor.

Positive teaching strategies in 2026: what the research on a positive classroom shows

The seven positive teaching strategies above come from the Positive Action program, and they were written in 2008. Positive Action is both the name of a commercial K-12 program and its central idea, that people feel good about themselves when they take positive actions. This section places the strategies beside current frameworks for social and emotional learning, reports what independent reviewers and trials found about the program, and notes the newer federal law passed in 2015.

The CASEL framework now guides much of the work on social and emotional learning in schools. It names five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. For classrooms, CASEL describes explicit teaching of these skills, reinforced through cooperative and project-based learning and integrated with academic subjects, and it says the work is most effective in nurturing, safe classrooms with caring relationships between students and teachers. It also describes whole-school climate and partnerships with families.

Read against that framework, the original strategies line up in recognizable ways. Creating a classroom code of conduct with students builds relationship skills and responsible decision-making. Teaching positive actions for self-management and honesty covers self-management and self-awareness. Involving families and community members matches CASEL’s family and community settings. This mapping is a reading of the two documents and not a claim made by either.

The ASCD edition of the 2008 article, Seven Strategies for Building Positive Classrooms, names the strategies that are missing from the text above. Strategy 5 is “Reinforce Positive Behaviors,” which recommends recognition and asking students how a positive action made them feel, and strategy 6 is “Engage Positive Role Models,” which invites families and community members into classroom and school activities.

What the evidence says about Positive Action

The U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse reviewed character education programs in 2007. Education Week’s coverage reported that the review covered 93 studies of 41 programs, and only 18 studies of 13 programs met its evidence standards. Education Week reported that only two programs received the top rating, “positive,” and Positive Action was one of them. The clearinghouse’s current evidence snapshot for Positive Action, last updated in April 2007, shows that 2 of 5 eligible studies met its standards, with positive effects on behavior and potentially positive effects on academic achievement for kindergarten through grade 6. The 2008 article describes positive effects on both, so the current wording is slightly more cautious.

A cluster randomized trial in Hawaii, published in 2010 by Frank Snyder and colleagues, compared 10 matched pairs of elementary schools from 2002 to 2006. At the one-year follow-up in 2007, schools using Positive Action had about 15 percent fewer days absent, higher proficiency rates in reading and math on the state test and a lower share of students suspended. The authors list real limits: only 10 pairs of schools, school-level records and not student-level data, control schools that ran other social and emotional programs, and results that apply to schools willing to adopt such a program. The trial dates from 2010, so a leader should also look for newer studies, and for ones carried out by researchers with no tie to the program, before deciding.

The federal accountability rules since 2008

The article refers to No Child Left Behind. Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act on December 10, 2015, as Public Law 114-95. Its accountability provisions require states to include at least one indicator of school quality or student success beyond test scores, and the measures a state may choose include student engagement, educator engagement and school climate and safety. The concern in the original, that test pressure leaves little time for students’ social and emotional needs, therefore now has a place in state accountability plans, though states decide which indicators to use.

Choosing among the strategies

Start with a code of conduct that students help write, because it takes little time and any teacher can begin it.
When using tokens or certificates, follow the original’s advice: name the behavior and ask the student how it felt, so the reward points back to the behavior.
Ask families what they can offer and where they would like to be involved, as the sixth strategy suggests.
Before adopting a packaged program, ask the vendor for independent studies and for outcomes in schools like yours.

For further reading, see the edCircuit social-emotional learning guide and the classroom management guide.

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