Step 5: Provide strong reinforcement to students engaging in expected behaviors

As students practice engaging in the expected behavior, it is important that they receive feedback on their performance. When students are engaging in the expected behavior accurately, the classroom teacher should provide behavior-specific praise to acknowledge this. Although you can learn much more about behavior-specific praise in the Low-intensity strategies: Behavior-specific praise module, what is most important is that teachers provide positive, verbal feedback for specific behaviors (e.g., “Joe, you did a great job of quietly pulling out a book to read while your friends finish their worksheet”) as opposed to general praise (e.g., “Joe, great work!”). It is also important during this training phase to provide students with what Colvin et al. (1993) called “strong reinforcement.” In other words, we want to provide reinforcement (e.g., behavior-specific praise) at a higher rate or of a higher quality (e.g., providing tickets in addition to behavior-specific praise) than is typical in that setting. The goal in doing this is to ensure that students receive a greater level of reinforcement for engaging in the expected behavior than they previously did for engaging in the challenging behavior. If you have some colleagues who need resources to clear up myths or misunderstanding about reinforcement, you might also connect them with the module Understanding the Hows and Whys of Behavior to Support Change: Universal Reinforcement System.