High-Leverage Practice 8: Social/Emotional/Behavioral

I am going to discuss High-Leverage Practices as mentioned on the CEC website organized around four aspects of practice. I hope you will join in the conversation!

“HLP8 - Provide positive and constructive feedback to guide students’ learning and behavior.”

Everyone likes positive feedback. This can be given verbally or nonverbally. I know many students that can’t get enough praise but it has to be sincere. It is always nice to know when you are doing a good job. When my students do the correct thing, I tell them that I noticed that they did the action and I smile. Some of my students have trouble understanding body language is this is helpful to tie the positive words with a smile. With a token economy, it is easy to give tokens when the students exhibit correct behavior.

The hardest thing is to give constructive feedback which many students (and adults) may see as negative feedback.

I think it is important to give feedback on the actions and not the person. When you direct it at the person, the person quickly becomes defensive and the feedback no longer becomes constructive.

For example, if the student has gotten a math problem wrong, I start out by saying that I see he has worked hard on it but I see a place where something happened to cause the wrong answer. Then I ask him to tell me how he worked out the problem so we can find the spot that caused the problem. At no point am I saying how wrong he is or make him feel defensive. I want him to see that we will work together to correct the problem.

I also think constructive feedback can come in the form of questions.

·      What went wrong?

·      Why did it go wrong?

·      What is something different that can be done to try to make it right?

·      If you were helping someone else, what would you tell them to do in order to help them not to have the same results you did?

If a student corrects their work, I think it is important to give positive feedback for not giving up and for correcting their work. Many times I’ve had students get frustrated and want to give up so they tell me to just give them a bad grade. It takes a few times before they learn that giving up is not an option in my classroom.

How do you give positive and constructive feedback? Please share.

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash