Jennifer Gonzalez (Cult of Pedagogy), Nothing’s Going to Change My Mind: How Unconditional Positive Regard Transforms Classrooms (September 18, 2023).

This article starts with acknowledging an issue that the author reports to be prevalent in K-12 education, but I must confess that I have seen it a lot in legal education, too.

I worked with far too many teachers who held a pretty low opinion of many of our students. There was a lot of “These kids (insert negative generalization)” or “Well what do you expect from him, he (insert negative generalization).” 

I think many of these attitudes come from a real, valid, and vulnerable place, from teachers who once had high hopes but felt disappointed and hurt when things went wrong, teachers who had good intentions and got their hearts broken a little bit every time students rejected their efforts . . . [R]egardless of where they come from, these mindsets hurt our relationships with students, and that makes everything else worse . . .

I was intrigued when I came across the phrase unconditional positive regard. It was in Alex Venet’s book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, where she names it as the most important guiding philosophy in her work. Venet explains that unconditional positive regard is a stance that communicates this message to students: “I care about you. You have value. You don’t have to do anything to prove it to me, and nothing’s going to change my mind.” In her book, she asserts that taking this stance and putting it into practice builds the foundation on which our students can thrive . . .

The concept was introduced to psychotherapy by Carl Rogers in the 1960s and applied to education by Alfie Kohn in a 2005 essay called Unconditional Teaching. Venet sees this stance as foundational in her work in equity-centered trauma-informed teaching “because it starts from that place of students are worthy, valuable people.”

I will leave you with a final quote, which is in the article and, per Gonzalez, in Venet’s book:

“If we commit to an ethic of care, building relationships and caring for our students aren’t strategies in the name of increasing academic achievement but the actual goal itself.”