Praise’s magic reinforcement ratio: five to one gets the job done.

In anticipation of the end of school holidays and beginning of the new school term I’ve been busy preparing. As a beginning teacher I’m continually developing my ability to support positive behaviour in the classroom. Whenever the positive reinforcement debate is raised in a large forum there are usually strong opinions on both sides of the topic. I personally have experienced a marked difference in positive behaviour in my classroom when I have intentionally increased behaviour specific praise (naming the positive behaviour) in my classroom. I am looking at how I can further improve and capitalise on this success for next term. I attended a professional development seminar last term and finally found some down time to catch up on reading some of the resources. I found this article “Praise’s magic reinforcement ratio: five to one gets the job done” by Flora (2000) enlightening. 

I have heard the opinion or question several times that if you increase extrinsic rewards such as praise that students’ intrinsic motivation will decrease or they will become reliant on praise. I found Flora’s (2000) summary of Rawson’s (1992) study particularly interesting:

“Significant gains in intrinsic interest were found for reading, math, social studies, science and for general interest in academics. …The following school year 69% of the participants were reported by their teachers to be “doing markedly better in class” (p. 283). These results conclusively refute the myth that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation. Reinforcement, including contingent praise, increase intrinsic interest.”

It was interesting to see how many different sphere’s of human relationships had been found to benefit from the 5:1 ratio of five approvals to one disapproval. I found Flora’s article thought-provoking as I came to realise the importance of the five approvals in moderating the negative effect of a disapproval. But also the importance of one disapproval to five approvals to keep the approvals meaningful and valuable. This article reinforced something that many of us already know and that is that non-specific praise e.g “good job” is not nearly as valuable as specific praise e.g. “You used an appropriate scale, great work”.

Flora also mentions the importance of varying words of praise. Here is a link to 101 phrases of praise (The Incredible Art Department, 2010) there are some fantastic suggestions here such as “Keep working on it, you’re improving” and “It’s such a pleasure to teach when you work like that.” But also a few doosies like this one that I think sounds more like an insult “You’ve got your brain in gear today”.

I’ve created a visual cue poster to help remind me everyday to try to aim for five approvals to one disapproval. I plan to put it up the back of my room where I will see it constantly but where it is out of line of sight of my students. You can access my poster here Five approvals to one disapproval visual cue poster.

References:

Flora, S. R. (2000). Praise’s magic reinforcement ratio: five to one gets the job done. The Behavior Analyst Today. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Praise’s+magic+reinforcement+ratio%3A+five+to+one+gets+the+job+done.-a0170112823 

The Incredible Art Department (2010). How to Praise Your Students. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://www.incredibleart.org/files/praise.htm

Spelling Practice

Spelling is an important literacy skill for all subjects at every year in school. PowerPoint presentation animations can be a useful tool for getting students to practice saying and spelling new words when they are starting a new topic. Here is an example of an automated spelling PowerPoint presentation I’m using with my Year 9 Science class.     List 1_Spelling_Practice_Sound
We have just started a unit on sound and light. This presentation contains our first ten spelling words and I like using this style of automated spelling presentation at the beginning of a lesson to help familiarise students with new terms and how to spell them.

If you like this presentation and would like to use your own word list you could download it and change the words the animation will still work. If you’re interested in how to create the animation this page is helpful.

Great learning and teaching doesn’t just happen – resources for the first days of school.

Photograph: Alamy, 2010.

In one week students across Australia will be beginning the new school year. Right now teachers across the country are preparing lessons and classrooms for these students. As I meet people in my everyday life they ask me what I do for a living. When I say I’m a secondary teacher most cringe “I couldn’t do it, the way kids ….” they then proceed to tell me about some negative perception they have about student behaviour. The fact is that we rarely see good news stories in the media about students or teachers. It is true teaching isn’t easy, but it’s also not as bad as it gets portrayed. The majority of students are generally well behaved the majority of the time.

With good pedagogy in both the form of curriculum and behaviour support many instances of poor or inappropriate behaviour can be avoided. This takes planning, patience, and consistency. The beginning of the year is a crucial time for planning how the classroom is going to operate and creating a learning environment that supports positive behaviours.

At this time of year I am focused on two main types of planning:

1. Content lessons – the curriculum, and
2. Establishing, teaching and reteaching expectations and routines for positive classroom behaviour.

Teaching, reteaching and re-enforcing with students how to behave is crucially important. It isn’t enough to tell them my expectations and expect compliance. I believe explicitly teaching behavioural expectations and routines is just as important as explicitly teaching the content. It can seem like extra work but I end up losing more time that could be used on the curriculum if I don’t spend time helping students learn how I want them to behave even in high school.

I have many resources I use to help me prepare for teaching my students how I want them to behave and to establish our classroom culture and routines. Here are a few of my favourites.

1. The First Days of School is a book that is an amazingly comprehensive resource for creating and sustaining the classroom culture you want packed full of reusable and downloadable resources.

Image: Better World Books, 2014.

2. Solution-Tree has some great visual posters to assist students learn desired behaviours with reproducibles for Classroom Management and Behaviour.

Image: Solution Tree, 2014.

My favourite category is Classroom Management for Academic Success it includes posters on :

• Paying Attention,
• Working With a Partner,
• At the Attention-Getting Signal, and
• In-Seat Transitions (When Given Directions to Begin a New Activity).

The Solution-Tree also has some surveys to help with getting to know students (follow this link and scroll to the bottom to access surveys relevant to your year level).

 

3. I like to review teaching videos of how exceptional teachers set the culture of their classes. These are my two favourites from the Teaching with Bailey series.

Teaching with Bailey – Positive Teaching

Bayley on Behaviour – Tough Love

Getting more from the Smart Board – building activities.

I was very excited to create my first interactive activity for Smart Notebook 11 this week. I love Smart Notebook I’ve been using it for about six months now with the interactive whiteboard. My favourite feature is the “Show/Hide Screen Shade” it allows me to control what the students can see on the board so they don’t go too far ahead. I find often students want to copy down everything that’s on the board. Using this tool I can limit what they can see. Allowing us to dig a little deeper and encouraging them through discussion to engage with what they are learning. When we are ready to move on it’s quick and easy to reveal a little more of the board. It’s like the days of using overhead projectors with the bit of paper or pencil case covering the bottom of your overhead transparency. Only no changing transparencies every 10 minutes in Smart Notebook I just extend the page when I’m creating a lesson and my page can get quite long. Long enough for one lesson anyway.

I’ve been wanting to learn how to unleash more of the power of the smart board. I’ve been using it for very basic stuff, I liken it to having a smart phone you only use to make phone calls on.

I took the plunge this week and created an interactive activity for one of my classes it was really easy, if I knew it was going to be this easy I would have started using the activity builder feature sooner. Above is the tutorial video I used to learn how to build an activity.