As a teacher, you should be familiar with Glasser’s Choice Theory. Click here for a quick overview.

In short, it focuses on the needs of students:

• Love & Belonging: belonging being loved being respected friendship sharing cooperation

  Power recognition success importance achievement skills

  Fun enjoyment laughter learning change

  Survival health relaxation sexual activity food warmth

  Freedom choices independence freedom from freedom to

It also defines caring and ‘deadly’ habits that can occur in a classroom. These affect our ability to establish relationships with students:

You should be familiar with the Ten Axioms of Choice Theory

1. The only person whose behavior we can control is our own.
2. All we can give another person is information.
3. All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.
4. The problem relationship is always part of our present life.
5. What happened in the past has everything to do with what we are today, but we can only satisfy our basic needs right now and plan to continue satisfying them in the future.
6. We can only satisfy our needs by satisfying the pictures in our Quality World.
7. All we do is behave.
8. All behavior is Total Behavior and is made up of four components: acting, thinking, feeling and physiology.
9. All Total Behavior is chosen, but we only have direct control over the acting and thinking components. We can only control our feeling and physiology indirectly through how we choose to act and think.
10. All Total Behavior is designated by verbs and named by the part that is the most recognizable.