Here’s a tip to get a disinterested student back on task quickly. Like any classroom management strategy, it won’t work with every student every time, but it is nonetheless powerful and a great tool for your classroom management toolkit.
We all know how powerful praise can be as a classroom management tool. My personal opinion is that, when used correctly, sincere and sincere praise is one of the most effective strategies educators possess to control students’ mood and increase motivation in lessons. This advice is a novel way of using the ‘proximity praise’ principle.
Proximity praise is based on the ‘ripple effect’ in which positive feelings from praising individual students who are trying or being good spread or ‘ripple’ around the room, and other students receive the message that if behave in a similar way, they too will receive praise. We can multiply the power of this effect with a novel praise idea someone suggested in one of our live classroom management courses. It’s called ‘In Praise of the Wiper’. It’s very simple, but obviously needs a brief explanation…
Let’s say you have a student (we’ll call him ‘Damien’) who isn’t working as expected. The idea is to subtly but repeatedly praise the students sitting on either side of him – ‘Kyle’ and ‘Kieran’ – for their work and/or behaviour. If Kyle and Kieran are friends with Damien it will be even more effective, but it works well even if they aren’t. This is how he could go…
“Hey Kieran, you got it. I honestly didn’t think you’d answer that question; absolutely brilliant, good to watch you learn.”
“Let’s take a look at yours, Kyle…you’ve really improved. You’ve got that part right, well done. Now how could you improve this part and go to the next level?”
A few minutes later…
“Thanks for throwing that away, Kyle. By the way, I saw that movie you talked about the other day last night, it was so much fun, thanks for suggesting it.”
“Very good Kieran. I like what you have done there. I am very happy with you two, you are working very well, thank you.”
See how it works and where the name ‘In Praise of the Wiper’ comes from? Continually engaging with Kyle and Kieran in a positive way, Damien’s head goes from side to side wondering what his two neighbors have done to get all this attention. Students generally like attention, especially if it’s positive, and by NOT paying attention to Damien, but giving it to his neighbors, we’re taking the power of proximity praise to the next level.
