Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is the affective evaluation a person makes about his abilities in a particular area. The affective evaluations are a product of a legion of affective experiences, which have been integrated and assimilated into the person's self-evaluative structure. Self-esteem is thereby composed of a certain type of experience called affective experience. The affective experiences are composed of the following three elements: behavioral, affective (feeling), and evaluative.

According to the primary design of the program, every time a child puts forth energy into working to learn, he is recognized, praised, and validated by the teacher. Anytime a person takes upon himself a project and completes in, there is an intrinsic sense of satisfaction. If at the same time that effort is recognized by a parent or teacher, it is believed that the person will have a positive affective experience. This is an experience that takes place in time and space, and for that moment in time enables the person to feel good, more particularly, enables the person to feel successful and competent.

Self-esteem is defined as the affective evaluations a person makes about his abilities in a particular area. For a particular area to emerge as a structural factor, it must be an area that is a distinct form of human expression, which requires and develops unique and specific skills and abilities. And the child must have an opportunity to develop the unique and specific skills and abilities in a particular area, plus receive some type of evaluative feedback in terms of his performance.

The program is designed to systematically structure numerous positive affective experiences daily for each child. Positive affective experiences are the building blocks of self-esteem. There are three hierarchical dimensions in the systematic development of self-esteem in the program. The first is the actual creation of the positive affective experiences. The second is the bringing of the experiences back into consciousness for definition, assimilation and integration into the self-structure. Over one hundred self-esteem exercises have been incorporated into the Project Learning Series for this purpose. The third hierarchical dimension is the final cementing of the affective experience into the self-structure so it truly becomes a fundamental component of the child’s self esteem.