Teacher Praise and Student Focus and Behavior

 This week’s article summary is Teacher Praise Helps Students Focus and Behave Better.

 

Every morning before school I complete a number of daily crossword puzzles and other word games on my iPad. On one game, once I complete my daily challenge, my screen fills with fireworks and written comments like ‘Nothing can stop you!’ or ‘Great work! Keep it up!’

 

I know these comments are a result of objective binary coding, not a personalized assessment of my performance, but I must admit, it feels good to get a compliment on my crossword puzzle completion.

 

The article below provides research evidence of how praise and positivity in the classroom rather than reprimands, threats, and negativity lead to better student behavior and attention.

 

If you’ve been at Trinity for a few years, you have probably heard Jill, Marsha, and others talk about John Hattie and his research. And I’m sure all of us are familiar with Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset.

 

To Hattie, for teacher feedback (including praise) to be effective it needs to be specific about what’s good and clear about what needs to be improved and how.

 

Similarly for Dweck, only praising effort (‘Good try, Billy! I like your determination!’) doesn’t lead to successful learning. Fostering a Growth Mindset must include providing students with strategies how to improve.

 

Completing the Holy Trinity of educational pundits in this article is a warning from Alfie Kohn that too much praise can have a negative impact on the development of intrinsic motivation in students. If the goal becomes an external reward,  students may develop a Pavlovian response to working not to get better at something but strictly for the prize.

 

So, while praise is clearly better than reprimands and punishments, we all need to remember that for student competence and mastery, praise needs to be constructive and instructive and not only focus on effort.

 

Joe

 

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When teachers use more praise and fewer reprimands in the classroom, it seems to help students stay on-task and behave better, according to a new study.

Researchers found that there was no magic ratio of praise to reprimand that worked best. Instead, they found a "positive linear relationship" between the two. 

There is a body of research that finds praise can be an effective way for teachers to produce better behavior and academic performance. This is particularly true when teachers' praise specifies and describes the behavior.

But research contains a lot of caveats on the practice of praise and feedback, too. 

It’s important that teachers praise students' competence, rather than their natural ability. 

Alfie Kohn, who writes a lot about motivation, points out that praise can undermine intrinsic motivation by leading people to work for praise itself. 

Researcher John Hattie zeroed in on praise and other forms of teacher feedback in his book Visible Learning: Feedback. For Hattie, many teachers think more feedback, and better feedback, will improve their students' learning. But the practice needs to be more rigorous than that.

"When teachers spend hours and hours writing comments, if there's no feedback providing concrete steps for the students to improve, students will argue themselves blue in the face that they never received anything," he said.

"The key question is, does feedback help someone understand what they don't know, what they do know, and where they go? That's when and why feedback is so powerful, but a lot of feedback doesn't—and doesn't have any effect."

Praise and feedback can also come into play as teachers work on cultivating a "growth mindset"—the belief that intelligence can be developed—in their students. Carol Dweck, who's known for her work to define growth mindset, said that one of the most common misunderstandings about growth mindset is that it's about praising students' effort. But praise is only one slice of that work, she said.

"Students need to try new strategies and seek input from others when they're stuck," Dweck said. "They need this repertoire of approaches—not just sheer effort—to learn and improve."

Effort is "a means to an end to the goal of learning and improving," Dweck wrote. "Too often nowadays, praise is given to students who are putting forth effort, but not learning, in order to make them feel good in the moment: 'Great effort! You tried your best!' It's good that the students tried, but it's not good that they're not learning."

The growth-mindset approach, she said, is designed to help children "feel good in the short and long terms, by helping them thrive on challenges and setbacks on their way to learning." When students are stuck, teachers can recognize what they've accomplished so far, but also help them move forward, by making comments like, "Let's talk about what you've tried, and what you can try next," Dweck wrote.