Using Precise, Positive Praise in the Classroom

For teachers, it’s easy to feel like you’re giving students the kind of praise that helps them grow. You might see students smile when you call attention to their correct answers or feel like you’ve really built a relationship with a student because you acknowledge how great they are at math. While that kind of praise might make some students feel good, it might not be the most effective way to help students make progress and feel seen. In some cases, it might actually leave some students feeling frustrated when they aren’t the subject of your attention.

But with a few key changes, your praise can actively support your whole class in meeting expectations, strengthen your relationships with students, and encourage student progress.

HELPING STUDENTS MEET EXPECTATIONS

When you give a class direction, sometimes a student isn’t following because they’ve chosen not to. This could be a student who has learned they can get wanted attention for doing the wrong thing, and this kind of action can be especially appealing to students who struggle academically and feel like they don’t get praise for their performance. However, when you focus your attention on those students not meeting expectations, you not only miss the opportunity to celebrate those who are, but also take away that student’s opportunity to learn that they can get praise for doing the right thing.

Instead of immediately correcting the student who isn’t following directions, you can use praise to help them, and the entire class, understand what is expected of them and reinforce the fact that you see the effort all students are putting in.

For example, instead of saying, “Rachel, you should be getting started on question one” and drawing negative attention to the student, you can use your praise to reinforce the directions while also giving the class reminders of how to get started: “I see Rachel looking back at her notes for a reminder of the problem-solving steps.”

These two small pieces of positive praise have nothing to do with the students’ academic ability, but instead are focused on behaviors that every student in the room can replicate. The student who was waiting for negative attention might actually try to get started after hearing those ideas, and you as the teacher can make an impactful shift by calling positive attention to that student when they do. In my own classroom, I saw this work time and time again as students recognized that they could get praise without needing to be the first student to find the right answer to a problem.

Sometimes, a student isn’t following the directions you gave because they didn’t hear or understand what you asked. Positive praise like this supports those students too, since they get to hear the directions reframed. Plus, when they hear a specific student’s name, they can look over and see what that student is doing to get themselves back on track. Over time, I found myself repeating directions or correcting individual students far less, as I was able to rely on praise to reinforce my expectations.

When getting started with positive praise like this, it is helpful to think about a few specific shifts in how you praise students:

• Rather than saying, “Great job, Rachel,” try “Rachel is using our strategy of drawing a diagram to get started on question one.”
• Rather than saying, “Rachel is already done with the problem set,” try “Rachel is checking her work after finishing each problem.”
• Rather than saying, “You’re so smart, Rachel! You got all three questions right,” try “Great job showing your work on each of those questions, Rachel. I could see you working really hard to get your answers.”

HELPING EVERY STUDENT FEEL SEEN

Positive praise can be a powerful tool for building relationships with students, but when used only on certain students and their academic performance, praise can leave other students feeling discouraged, disengaged, and left out.

Think about a student who is struggling in math class: If every class period they have to hear their teacher give praise to the student who gets every question right on the homework, they can start to feel like they’ll never get the positive attention they want. If getting every question right doesn’t feel possible, they can feel like their teacher doesn’t care about them or even notice the efforts they are putting in. This is why praising replicable behavior and ensuring that your praise is equitable are crucial.

To do this, I always aimed to give three pieces of positive feedback with each transition during a lesson. For example, when it was time to move from guided practice to independent work, I would give students the direction to move on to the next thing and then give praise to three different students. I would repeat this throughout the entire lesson, every lesson. I may not get to every student each day, but over the course of a few days, I would.

As I gave praise, I would put a little check mark next to the student’s name on my clipboard, which I held or set on my table in front of me while teaching. This helped me keep track to ensure that I was not repeatedly praising the same students while leaving others out. This meant that every student would feel seen, as I actively recognized the effort each student was putting into class.

To make the positive praise even more meaningful, you can share it with a student’s family. I would aim to make at least two positive phone calls home per week to build my relationship with my students’ families and with my students, as they would be so excited to hear that I had called home with good news. Because I was already tracking positive praise and actively looking for things to highlight, it was easy to then make these calls and share what I’d seen.

By intentionally using positive praise, you create a classroom where every student understands what is expected of them, and every student feels capable of being recognized for something good.