Virtual Teacher

This is an excerpt from my book All Behavior is Communication: How to Give Feedback, Criticism, and Corrections that Improve Behavior. This book is now available on Amazon . 1.       As a rule, teachers and parents should criticize only problems that the child can solve. Criticism is a tool to make children aware of something that they did poorly. 2.       When criticizing children, use more observations , that is, what you see, hear, or can touch and make fewer evaluations. An evaluation involves making inferences about the things that we observe. 3.       Use more observation language , that is, concrete information that contributes to the child’s learning, and less evaluative language of the kind good/bad, right/wrong, or correct/incorrect. 4.       When we criticize a student, we need to make sure that we are criticizing the child’s actions, not the child’s cha...

On my last blog post, “ Improving Children’s Compliance- Part 1: Kinds of Commands ,” we learned about the three most common kinds of commands: the initiating command, the terminating command, and the mixed command. With an initiating command , we start behavior; with the terminating command , we end behavior. The mixed command aims at, first, terminating the behavior that we do not want, and then start a new behavior, or initiate the specific behavior that we want. (To read this blog post in full, click on the link at the bottom.) Another way in which we can analyze commands is in terms of both their efficiency and compliance rate; most specifically, distinguishing between the beta command and the alpha command . Details of each kind of command follow. Forehand and McMahon developed a list of five beta commands , or commands with lower efficiency and reduced compliance, that is still relevant today (As presented on Walker and Walker, 1991): 1.       ...