Modeling these behaviors within the classroom eventually becomes seamless with practice. Giving effective praise to children involves using the three steps—showing approval, describing positive behavior, and describing how using the good behavior they displayed will help them and others. Praise can be effective and meaningful or ineffective, leading to fear of failure or dependency on external validation. That’s why it’s crucial to understand the difference between effective and ineffective praise and how to apply them as an early childhood educator. Studies show that teachers who regularly praise children in their classrooms develop better relationships with them. Doing so can also build a child’s self-esteem and confidence and promote a love of learning.
Praise, when done right, gives leaders and parents the opportunity to enhance the resilience and performance of others. First, however, you need to avoid the traps that can weaken the impact of your praise. Ineffective praise focuses on a person’s traits (“You are so smart!”) or only the outcome (“You did it!”) but leaves out the process, strategy, or behavior that led to the success. For praise to be effective it must be timely, specific, and sincere. When we focus on the effort the child puts forth and draw attention to the process she is using, we provide her with a model for how she will navigate challenges throughout her life which is a byproduct of effective praise. Praise can be a powerful motivator when you balance it with constructive feedback.
Improves Classroom Management
Implementing positive praise into classroom activities can be as simple as restructuring a writer’s workshop, which gives students an opportunity to develop as a writer. Remind students that they are writers and help them navigate the process. Effective praise is a behavior management technique you can use regularly. According to the study mentioned above, when educators implement effective praise, it can also reduce disruptive and off-task behaviors. Negative reactions to praise can sometimes occur in the classroom.
Finally, effective praise can promote a love of learning in children. When young children receive positive feedback about their efforts, they’re more likely to be engaged and motivated to learn. It’s essential to praise them not only when they provide a correct response but also when they try. Research has shown that effective praise can help improve student performance and increase engagement in the classroom. Praise should focus on the effort or progress made by the student rather than simply praising them for achieving a certain goal; this encourages risk-taking, innovation, creativity, and perseverance in the classroom. As a teacher, you can set the tone for this kind of culture by establishing an environment that is conducive to praise.
“Constructive feedback is not about ticking a box; it’s about lighting a fire within the student to pursue excellence,” shares Michelle Connolly, a seasoned educational consultant with over a decade and a half of classroom experience. Consistently applying these strategies for praising effort and progress is effective in all realms of education and personal development. To determine kids’ praise and reward preferences, survey your classes at the beginning of the school year. Ask if they prefer receiving acknowledgements via private or public oral communication.
Utilise tools such as progress charts or a ‘star of the week’ display to visually commend students, making praise a tangible element of the classroom. While young children respond well to regular and effusive praise, a 1987 study suggests that students in late elementary school and higher grades are able to discern when compliments are overly laudatory. In fact, inflated compliments can actually degrade student effort.
- “Authentic praise requires observation; it’s about acknowledging the struggle behind the success,” advises Michelle Connolly, with her extensive classroom experience.
- To determine kids’ praise and reward preferences, survey your classes at the beginning of the school year.
- Even more prolific than praise notes were the approaches to peer praise called positive peer reporting and tootling.
- Saying “You’re a natural artist” doesn’t explain what the child did well.
- Likewise, addressing classroom disruptions can hinge on your communication strategies.
But it’s not enough to simply say “good job” or “great work”; effective praise should be specific, sincere, and timely. For QI 3.1, 86.11% of studies met this QI by including demographics about both the adult and student (i.e., delivering BSP to peers) interventionists. However, only 63.89% of studies met QI 3.2 by providing sufficient information about the training of both interventionists. Some authors provided adults and/or students with a script to ensure fidelity of all implementation steps of the peer praise intervention—McHugh et al. (2016) even included procedures for rehearsing the script with feedback. Lum et al. (2019) is one example of many where authors assessed and reported fidelity of the training steps to ensure researchers remembered to execute all training steps with all interventionists. A few authors, including Wright (2019), even reported training integrity with IOA for researchers training teachers and teachers training students.
But sometimes, written praise gets left by the wayside in favor of verbal recognition. Both have their place — but nailing how to write great praise is a key skill that all managers and employees can, and should, develop. Praise is a powerful expression of gratitude that can nurture relationships, improve well-being, and activate learning. Being intentional in how we use praise versus corrections/constructive feedback can make all the difference (both personally and professionally).
Data Availability Statement
More research shows the profound effects of meaningful praise on students’ mindset, motivation, and personal and academic development. Below are three research-based benefits of effective praise for students. As you implement effective praise in your classroom regularly, you’ll likely see more positive behaviors from your preschoolers. Using software like brightwheel’s daily activity report encourages communication with families. You can use it to share photos and videos of fun activities or just let them know about something positive that happened during the day. Either way, brightwheel makes it easy to keep families informed and strengthens the home-to-school connection.
For example, Harry et al. (2023) and Barahona (2010) did not read tootles aloud to the class but instead publicly posted all tootles on a bulletin board after class where students could read them the next day or gave them to students to keep, respectively. Teachers in Ray (2019) did read all tootles aloud, and it is possible the teacher in Cihak et al. (2009) read all tootles aloud during the 20 min allotted at the end of class, but it was not explicitly stated. In McHugh Dillon et al. (2019), students typed tootles into computer stations that immediately displayed them on an interactive whiteboard for everyone to read. In these cases, which happened to have the largest effect sizes for academic engagement, all students were not only able to read the praise intended for them specifically but could read all tootles given by any student.
In a seemingly transitionary time of researchers shifting focus from PPR to tootling, two studies compared PPR to tootling. More analyses are therefore needed to determine how PPR compares to tootling and how effective peer-delivered praise is, generally. On a questionnaire administered soon after, the students who heard intelligence praise were more likely to believe the fixed view of intelligence than those who heard the effort praise.
Even with the shift to tootling, which allowed for classwide student recognition from peers, it was surprising that most students in tootling studies who were praised by peers on a tootle slip probably never knew it. In almost all tootling studies, only 3–5 tootles were read at the end of the tootling period, class, or day, followed by all tootles being counted and the group reward tracker updated. What happened to the tootles after the few were read aloud was not reported in studies except for Thoele (2024), who sent tootles home after the group reward was met. Typical procedures therefore appear to be missing the important opportunity of letting all students hear or read the praise that was intended for them. It should have been a quick and easy step for teachers or a student leader to at least distribute tootles to the recipient if there was not time in the day to read them all. There were some exceptions to this in tootling studies, however, where all students were able to receive their peers’ praise.
It is easy to understand that a teacher would want to encourage this student, but whether or not praise will backfire in this situation depends on whether or not the student is sophisticated enough to understand the unspoken message behind praise for poor work. Research shows that younger students generally just take praise at face value, but older students (middle school and beyond) are sensitive to deeper meanings (Barker and Graham, 1987; Meyer et al., 1979). To understand the message that praise might carry to a middle- or high-school student, first consider how you typically react to poor performance in others. Imagine that one of your fellow teachers has been asked to write a proposal to a funding group and has done a poor job.
Why Consequences Alone Don’t Change Student Behavior
We might check the worship box at church and somehow think we’re good for the week. And all the while, with souls distant and cold, we sing words, we listen to music, then we go home. Finding out what workers want most in a job and an organization can help companies improve attraction and recruitment strategies. This element of engagement and performance might be one of the greatest missed opportunities for leaders and managers.
This approach shifts the tone from directive to empowering and collaborative. Six years later, I ran into Michael in a university computer lab, and his eyes lit up. He told me that his mother would be attending his graduation that spring from an educational psychology master’s program. When he thanked me for inspiring him, I marveled at how a few simple words on a summer day elevated every subsequent interaction I had with Michael.
Since technology is not going anywhere and does more good than harm, adapting is the best course of action. We plan to cover the PreK-12 and Higher Education EdTech sectors and provide our readers with the latest news and opinion on the subject. From time to time, I will invite other voices to weigh in on important issues in EdTech. We hope to provide a well-rounded, multi-faceted look at the past, present, the future of EdTech in the US and internationally. Here are some strategies to help you make praise a regular part of your teaching practice. Differentiate praise based on the student’s individual needs and abilities, and use different forms of praise, such as verbal, nonverbal, or written, to suit the individual student.
A similar comparison can be made in another PPR study, Moroz and Jones (2002), as well as in tootling studies such as Wright (2019). We therefore suggest readers interpret BC-SMD effect sizes with caution and with overall CEC study designation in mind. This is in alignment with Maggin et al. (2017) recommendations, who also applied BC-SMD effect size estimates in their meta-analysis of single-case research design group contingency studies.
Trusted by millions of educators and families and backed by a dedicated support team, brightwheel strengthens family connections and ensures seamless operations with reliable performance and robust security. With brightwheel, you’ll spend less time on admin, more time with children. Some students may thrive on being praised in front of the whole class. Other students may be uncomfortable being singled out, even if it’s for a good reason.
Gold-star junkie that I am, I was once grumbling to my mother about the fact that some extraordinarily praiseworthy effort on my part had gone unremarked. My mother wisely responded, “Most people probably don’t get the appreciation they deserve.” That’s right, I realized — for instance, my ThisRomance Reviews | 4.5 TrustIndex | Hellopeter.com mother! Whom I certainly don’t give enough praise for everything she does for me. Praise is something virtually every church does to open their services—yet, when was the last time you heard a series of sermons on praise?
Research has shown that predictability is an important variable in understanding the effect of rewards on motivation. In one classic study (Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973), preschool children were either rewarded for drawing with markers (with an attractive “Good Player” certificate) or not rewarded. Of the children who were rewarded, some were told in advance that playing with markers would earn them the reward, whereas others received the reward as a surprise. (Naturally, the three groups of children were studied separately.) One week later, all of the children were given the opportunity to play with markers, among other activities.