Using Teacher-Written Praise Notes to Promote a Positive Environment in a Middle School

ABSTRACT

Teachers in 1 middle school learned about the positive effects of writing praise notes to students, which is 1 component of a positive behavior support. The authors intended for this procedure to promote a positive school environment and reinforce the appropriate use of social skills. Also, the authors instructed the teachers to use a direct instruction model to teach social skills lessons during 1st-period classes and praise students when they effectively demonstrated these skills. The authors analyzed the data to determine whether students receiving praise notes were less likely to receive an office discipline referral (ODR). The data revealed a significant negative correlation between the number of praise notes and number of ODRs that students received, indicating that as praise notes increased, the rate of ODRs decreased. The authors provide several hypotheses for this relation.

KEYWORDS:

• positive behavior support
• praise
• schoolwide intervention
• teacher-written praise

Acknowledgments

This study was funded in part by U.S. Office of Special Education Programs Grant No. H324C030124. Benjamin J. Young and Ellie L. Young contributed equally to this article.

Notes

1. One Web-based article that could be used to educate teachers and administrators about the steps for delivering praise is titled High Rates of Positive Responses, available from http://www.usu.edu/teachall/text/behavior/LRBIpdfs/Hrates.pdf.