Increasing and maintaining rates of teacher praise. A study using public posting and feedback fading.

The team worked with three special-education teachers in one school.

Each teacher got a small chart on the classroom wall.

At lunch the researcher wrote the teacher’s morning praise count on the chart.

After two weeks the researcher stopped giving verbal feedback and only posted the number.

Later the chart was removed to see if praise stayed high.

The study used an ABAB design: baseline, posting, return to baseline, posting again.

Praise rates doubled when the daily count went public.

Rates stayed high even after the researcher stopped talking to the teacher.

When the chart was taken away, praise dropped, but it rose again as soon as the chart returned.

After the final fade, two of three teachers kept their new high rate for the rest of the year.

Perrin et al. (2016) later used the same wall-chart trick with residential staff.

They added weekly goals and saw data-collection accuracy jump, showing the tactic travels across jobs.

Justus et al. (2023) swapped the public chart for a $3 hand counter.

Teachers quietly clicked each behavior-specific praise; rates still doubled, proving self-monitoring can replace public posting.

Petscher et al. (2006) mixed prompting with self-monitoring and then faded prompts.

Their aides kept running token economies correctly after supervisors stepped back, echoing the fade-and-maintain pattern seen here.

You can lift teacher praise in one lunch break.

Print yesterday’s praise total, tape it by the door, and walk away.

After two weeks, stop talking about it; the sheet does the work.

If you need even less setup, hand the teacher a counter and teach a quick self-count habit.

Either way, you get durable gains without forever supervision.