Daily Assignment: Daily Assignment #99: Pause, Prompt, Praise

Pause, Prompt, Praise is an effective strategy for supporting students who are struggling with a particularly demanding task.

PAUSE: student stops working on the task and talks to the teacher about the difficulty he/she is having.

PROMPT: the teacher gives the students strategies to implement.

PRAISE: when the student succeeds with the strategy/strategies praise the student for their efforts.

“Pause, Prompt, Praise.” If a student is struggling, pause to discuss the problem, then prompt with specific suggestions to help her improve. If the student’s performance improves as a result, offer praise.

Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement by R. Marzano, D. Pickering, & J. Pollock, ASCD, 2001

A variation of this strategy would be for the teacher to...

Pause next to the student. Sometimes just having a teacher stand near by will trigger a connection for the student. It also sends the message that you believe in the students ability to work on the task alone.
If the student continues to struggle...

Prompt by giving simple clues. If the student is still struggling increase the level of clues.
Examples:

what is the picture is of?
read the start of the sentence/ end of the sentence and lets see if we can work it out.
read on a little bit more and we will come back to it and see if we can make sense of it.
Looking at the picture and what is happening around this page, what could the word be?

Pause between questions to give the student time to process and apply the strategy.