Being a warm demander begins with establishing a caring relationship that convinces students that you believe in them. When students know that you believe in them, they will interpret your demands for their maximum effort as care from a teacher with their best interests at heart. Warm demanders care enough to relentlessly insist on two things: that students treat the teacher and one another respectfully and that they complete standards-aligned academic tasks to the best of their ability. All of this requires unconditional positive regard. At the heart of unconditional positive regard is a belief in the individual's capacity to succeed. 

 We all must make it our practice to clearly, respectfully, and insistently repeat our expectations and requests for students' best efforts. It is best to keep warm demands simple and short; illustrate your words and statements with modeling; remind students that their best efforts are necessary. Be explicit with students what the non-negotiables are; and use words that invite cooperation. It is very important to also remember that warm demanders must speak warmly and firmly, their tone is a matter-of-fact. Warm demanders never threaten, demean, or create power struggles. 

 Warm demanders establish supports to ensure that students will learn. There are a myriad of learning supports that a teacher may apply to help their students learn but the supports of a warm demander have the following in common. First, giving up is not an option for both teacher and student. Second, warm demanders provide a variety of scaffolds to support different kinds of learners until ALL students embrace the process of  mastery.  This includes but is not limited to explaining and re-explaining material thoroughly and in multiple ways; outlining steps for getting to an answer; think aloud and modeling; moving to new material when they believed students were ready rather than according to the lesson or unit plan; emphasizing multiple ways of approaching a problem. 

 Our students need your next steps to improve their work. This requires specific actionable feedback and the opportunity to revise to strive for mastery. Our grading policy includes mastery as a key component. Recall that mastery assignments are not new assignments. They are simply an opportunity to revise a prior assignment or assessment. This is our way to help students reflect on their learning and improve the quality of their work while feeling unconditional positive regard from their teacher.