The Green Pen Method For Reinforcing Children

One of the educational methods that has caused the most interest in recent years is the green pen. It is an original method that consists of the teacher correcting the exams and the students’ notebooks with a green pen instead of red.

We have all been overwhelmed at some time in our academic lives by seeing an exam full of corrections in red pen. Red is a strong and energetic color that has been commonly used to highlight errors in tests and exercises. The color green however has a positive and motivating connotation.

Normally students when seeing the amount of mistakes they have made are blocked and their self-esteem suffers. A test or exercise full of red corrections can only demotivate the student more than help him or her to try harder.

The skill of a mother

The pen method was born from the idea of ​​a mother who thought about what would happen if teachers used the green pen in their corrections to point out what is right, instead of highlighting mistakes. At that time his daughter was learning to write and did not make the letters correctly.

She thought of circling each line with a green pen for the best she had done instead of pointing out in red what she had done wrong. Curiously, she realized that the method worked and that her daughter felt more motivated if she marked the correct answers with a green pen.

This mother was the editor of the Russian blog  Real Parents  and in 2013 it occurred to her to write a post in which she explained her green pen method. At the end of September 2015, this post began to circulate on numerous websites and has not stopped circulating on Facebook, reaching a wide circulation. Soon the green pen method was known to many parents and began to be applied by many teachers and schools around the world.

Benefits of the green pen method

The green pen method is based on the fact that motivation is the main engine for learning for any child. For the child to learn, a positive teaching based on positive reinforcement is necessary. A teaching based on negative reinforcement will never help the student, but will surely demotivate him.

From the spread of this green pen method it has been proven that children more easily remember the correct answers marked in green and will feel motivated to do well in the next exercise or exam. As in sports, goals, goals or successes are always remembered more, and much less problems or failures.

The green pen method is not based on avoiding the negative but on underlining the positive. Children have to know where they have been wrong or what their mistakes have been in their exercises or exams, but they have to see their successes and progress highlighted in green.

Its main benefit is that it motivates children to be interested in learning every day. This method increases children’s interest in learning thanks to this positive reinforcement. We will try to give more importance to the 15 or 30 correct answers that you have more than the 5 errors that you may have made in an exam or in an exercise.

Although it seems that it is the same, it is a total change in the educational concept because it involves highlighting the successes to the child and not the mistakes. If it is applied from early childhood education together with other methods of educational reinforcement, we will have a new generation of motivated students with a desire to learn.

The green pen method invented by this mother has been put into practice by many teachers and pedagogues over time, but it has never been so widely used until now. This mother has unintentionally created a revolution for the students.

If we try to apply this simple and original educational method in the education of children from childhood together with others that promote the positive points of the students’ efforts, surely in the future we will begin to see the results. Do not hesitate and put the green pen method into practice soon when you help your children with their homework or exams.