HIGH-LEVERAGE PRACTICES IN Self-contained EBD and Alternative Education CLASSROOMS

From Correction to Connection:
Strength of Celebratory Feedback
Alongside Constructive Feedback

Episode Description

This episode focuses on providing positive and constructive feedback to guide student behavior. Manny shares how behavior-specific praise goes beyond simple affirmations by naming exactly what students are doing well and why it matters, helping them understand expectations and build lasting skills. The conversation highlights the importance of giving both the "what" and the "why," ensuring students aren’t left guessing about unclear or inconsistent standards.
Heather and Manny discuss how staff can identify and clarify expectations, using feedback to create a roadmap for students and ensure consistency across different learning environments. They also emphasize the power of feedback to build rapport, support skill generalization from resource rooms to general education settings, and set both students and staff up for success. Ultimately, the episode underscores how intentional, specific feedback fosters growth, strengthens relationships, and helps students internalize positive behaviors.

Key Points and Takeaways

  • Behavior-specific praise helps students understand not only what they did well but also why it matters, giving them a clear roadmap for future success.
  • Vague feedback like “good job” can confuse students, while specific feedback builds clarity and consistency across subjects and settings.
  • Staff benefit from reflecting on the expectations behind their praise, ensuring that students receive consistent messages and know the exact target behavior.
  • Clear, constructive feedback fosters skill generalization, helping students carry positive behaviors from resource rooms into general education classrooms.
  • By acknowledging student progress and explicitly naming improvements, educators build stronger rapport and set both students and staff up for long-term success.
Podcast Guest

Manny Huecias, RBT

Manny Huecias is a school-based behavior technician specializing in social, emotional, and behavioral challenges experienced by elementary-aged student populations as well as augmented instructional design. He has been a pop-up virtual learning facilitator and avid volunteer in his local network who brings a practical, systems-aware perspective to supporting complex students and the adults doing their best to help them. Outside of his professional work, he has been a special needs intervention summer camp counselor and an active youth leader in his church. Manny is a Registered Behavior Technician with college coursework in education and psychology.
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High-Leverage Practice #8:
Provide positive and constructive feedback to guide students’ learning and behavior.
The purpose of feedback is to guide student learning and behavior and increase student motivation, engagement, and independence, leading to improved student learning and behavior. Effective feedback must be strategically delivered and goal-directed; feedback is most effective when the learner has a goal and the feedback informs the learner regarding areas needing improvement and ways to improve performance. Feedback may be verbal, nonverbal, or written, and should be timely, contingent, genuine, meaningful, age-appropriate, and at rates commensurate with task and phase of learning (i.e., acquisition, fluency, maintenance). Teachers should provide ongoing feedback until learners reach their established learning goals.
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They can't know what's working if you're not telling them this is working; it's going in blind. And the student has no roadmap for this anywhere in the future.

Manny Huecias

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Host: Heather Volchko

Guest: Manny Huecias

This week, we're talking about High-Leverage Practice number eight: providing positive and constructive feedback to guide students' behavior. So Manny, I know for you and a lot of your on-site consult work, you're doing a ton of this, you're constantly modeling this for staff so that then students can, you know, really understand what is expected from their staff in your absence. So, for you and your practice, what does this look like?

For me, this HLP is about being clear with the students, what you're giving them praise for or correction for. Not just saying ‘good job’ or ‘don't do that,’ but giving them the actual information they need to work on, what you're working on right now, via the praise. So give them the what and the why.

Yeah, I think it really is that both and. Right. Like you need to know what you're doing, but if you don't know why, then it's just following blind mandates, which rarely go well for our students. But if I understand why, that's great. But if I don't understand what it is that you then need for me because of that, well, now I might be on board, but. But I still don't know what the target is.

Yeah, I mean, I had students who received their main reinforcers of getting praise or attention from a staff member. So I've had students trying to figure out, after they got a good job doing like a math assignment, why they're not getting a good job, you know, with subjects they aren't struggling with, science or math or whatever is their worst subject. And then they get an A on a test or an assignment or whatever, move on to the next, and they're not getting that. So then the student has received feedback, but they haven't received ‘It's because you're struggling with this subject, but you're acing all the other subjects. But like, also kudos to you for that.’

So it's like they're kind of getting almost like mixed messages, is what you're saying. And then they're trying to make sense of it, but then they never really know, like, what that target is and if they're even hitting that kind of like seemingly secret target.

Yeah, kid can't work on what they can't know. They can't know what's working if you're not telling them this is working; it's going in blind. And the student has no roadmap for this anywhere in the future.

So, how do you help staff spell out what that roadmap is? Because I know sometimes we're working with staff who, even when we ask, like,’ what are your expectations?’ We get kind of a, ‘oh, good question. Like, I hadn't thought to that level.’ Like, it was just like, be quiet, do your work. But when we ask for a little bit more specificity, I know some of the staff I've worked with can sometimes struggle with that. So how do you walk our adults through trying to figure out what their expectations may be so that then both we and they can communicate them well to their students?

So, especially when I'm in classrooms with those vague, maybe rules, expectations, et cetera. When teachers give me that, like, I have no clear list in my head or anything. There was one staff member I was working with. It's like, cool. I'm gonna sit back, watch every time you say, ‘hey, good job’ or something to the kid, and I'll ask you, ‘Hey, what was it in this moment that the student was doing that you gave them that praise or that feedback?’

And then start parsing out those statements based on, what does this mean as a whole? Let's group them, let's do whatever. To put them in broader categories. You know the schools with the PBIS programs that have the like, be safe, be respectful, be responsible. So what did the student do? Great. That goes on there. And you can use that as guiding examples for your students as well. Like, what does this mean? This is specifically what I am looking for. Or I have seen.

That's really smart. Because then you're just catching what the teacher is naturally doing throughout their day. And then you're somewhat quantifying, did you mean this or this when you provided this feedback? Because, yeah, you're right. As I'm thinking through, you're talking about that. I think I've done that with staff and didn't even notice that I was doing it. But yeah, sometimes we'll catch them and they're like, wait, no, that's not what I meant. And it's like, oh, interesting. Because that's just kind of how you engaged.

And so it is a bit of a check for us as adults to make sure we are even putting out into our classrooms what it is that we are interested in having our students engage in? I'm curious, as you've done that, have you had any staff who have had any ahas, as you're basically collaboratively building those expectations based on their, you know, kind of in-the-moment classroom performance.

Not necessarily having these soft ahas that didn't make sense after going through some of the broad categories, they fit in. I did have one staff member realize that their expectations for certain students were either higher or lower. Whether that was because I work a lot with one-on-one cases when I'm not supporting classrooms as a whole. And we have high expectations because we know our students can do. But sometimes they're higher than the expectations we have for the rest of the classroom.

Like they're higher than what we have for the whole classroom. So I have had a staff member like, ‘Oh yeah, when you're putting these two exact things side by side, but here you're holding X student to a higher degree.’ But this, you gotta bring that so that everyone's doing the same thing. So that at least everyone has the same baseline.

You're right. I mean, how many times have we been working with students who are trying to either access more general education time or increase like either access general education to begin with as they're progressing out of more restrictive placement or if they're just trying to increase the amount of time that they have access to general education? Either way, you're right. Like a lot of our staff can sometimes hold those students who are trying, you know, the ones that we're working with, trying to help them engage in general ed to a higher standard than the kids who are already there. And then that's used as kind of that gatekeeping to say, like ‘Nope, you're not ready yet.’ When in reality, if we put a lot of our students who you know have done the work through a lot of that more intensive programming, a lot of times they're showing up with more skills, they're more regulated, they're better at asking for help. Like they've got some of those skills, honestly, to a higher degree than some of the students that are just naturally kind of camping out in gen ed.

Yeah, no, I agree, but I think what we've done with the students we've worked with is we've given them that again, direct positive feedback and praise. And because it's, I don't know if we necessarily hold them to a higher standard in their resource room, self-secluded rooms. I think it's that we are able to slow down and explain, explain the general standards, what they look like, and then give them the praise for it that they deserve, or the hey, you know, you got really, I've done this with like, ‘you got really close to being safe. What are we not going to do next time? Cool. Yeah, we're not going to run with scissors down the hallway.’ But that's where the gen ed teachers may just have been safe and not realize that they're holding that kiddo to the standard of don't run with scissors in the hallway while only telling them that, hey, you weren't safe.

Yeah, but I think you're talking about just that intensive instruction that can happen outside of the general education classroom. I mean, I know we've worked with teachers to start embedding some of that tier-two direct instruction around. Okay, so what is it that I expect? And, you know, maybe it's using champs to break down, like, my explicit expectations, because then I need to teach. What does it look like to raise my hand and wait for help? Or what does it look like to have a certain conversation level? Right. So there's some, like, direct instruction that comes with that. But then it is that ongoing direct feedback that it is like, constructively building those skills with those students toward meeting, you know, understanding and meeting those expectations, and in those more intensive, you know, programs, then that's sort of like, it's a must-do. It's just part of programming.

So then we're just trying to progress. Okay, you've learned it here; you can do it here. Can you, you know, follow that through over into other places? And can we help your staff notice that and also give you those feedback points when you're engaging in the same behaviors that you've learned in a more intensive program in less restrictive settings?

Yeah. So I think it's because regardless of where the student is, whether it's gen ed or in their intervention room, resource room, we give them behavior-specific praise as well. Not just like academic praise, but behavior and behavior-specific praise on the things that the students do in a way that they could either continue building on the praise and feedback you gave them, or they could use it as a reference, you know, as they're considering punching another student for cutting them in line. Yeah. Just so they can use that as a guide or use that for, like, ‘people liked it when I did this here. People will like it when I do this here.’ Whether that's the ‘I'm freaking out in this classroom, in this gen ed classroom, where I'm gonna freak out in this resource room’ and then remembering some of the students I've worked with do the breathing exercises or like, the ‘cool, we're gonna pull ourselves back for a moment,’ like, ‘we're gonna do the whole point, pinch the air,’ and at the end it's like, ‘dude, okay, great. Love the fact that you know you took a step back. Love the fact that, you know, you balled your hands up and kept them to yourself. Maybe next time, let's work on not cursing under our breath at another student, another classmate, another teacher.’ That was specific to what that kiddo was doing. And that'll translate whether they're in line in the lunchroom, or they're in line in the library, or in line for the class store.

Yeah. I mean, you, I've watched you do that so well with students and with staff explicitly calling out, like, new skills that they're trying and like, how those are showing up in their practices. So, for you, when you look at behavior-specific praise, what counts? Like, what is actually going to count as behaviorally specific praise in your practice?

Yeah. So that would be anything from, ‘dude, you waited so patiently for the teacher to call on you. That's hard. When you're excited, that's awesome.’ Or when the kid comes in and they don't want to do their work. But then they start doing it, you know, 5, 10, 15 minutes through it after some coaching, and at the end of that. Like, ‘dude, you weren't feeling it at the beginning, but you stuck with it and finished anyway. Like, good job pushing through it. It's a slog. Let's see if we can do this again tomorrow and finish stronger, finish earlier, like, beat the rest of the class’ or like with some of the older kids when I've been in the high school or the middle schools, and it's the, ‘dude, thanks for not blowing up when I told you to put away your phone. Like, that was great. Bonus points if we can keep it in our pocket the whole time tomorrow.’

I love that these examples that you're giving are not just what they're doing, but you're also kind of talking about how they're doing it and you're talking about it in comparison to either how they did or didn't use those skills before, or if there's kind of like this time boundedness or you're setting up almost like a goal for them, how you know they could show up the next time that you know that skill may need to be used. There's so much specificity in that feedback that you're providing them. 

But it's that specificity that gives them that goal, that gives them that marker of I did this well or I could work on this. Whether it's in the praise or in the feedback. And I think you can't have a functioning anything without giving proper feedback, whether that's staff to students, staff to staff, it just doesn't function because then everyone's going blindly.

Yeah. And I think you are building rapport as you're then noticing their progress or the baby steps that they are taking in that direction, or you're acknowledging how this time was different from a former time. I mean, that's just building rapport to say, ‘oh, you see me more than just the things that I'm not doing,’ which then, oh, my goodness, like, that has opened so many opportunities for you with tough kids who, like other staff, have maybe not had, you know, as as much success with, but even just because you've leveraged that behavior specific praise and you've shown that in comparison to their own former performance, now all of a sudden, like, you see them, you see them as a human, not just, you know, honestly, the reasons that we may be there to support them.

Yeah. And one of my favorite things that I specifically do as I'm, like, trying to fade out, as I'm trying to get the student to do or display various behaviors or replacement behaviors with staff members is like, ‘hey, this is my friend, so and so, like, you know, today, I know we've had issues with blank in the past, but, like, he's been doing so great for the last few days. Like, you know, we started here, now we're here.’ And I will make sure that the student is also hearing me tell that to other staff members, because that sets in my mind the baseline for the staff members of, like, here's where we're at from here on up. We're also going to give him praise anytime he goes down from here. We're going to give that, ‘hey, you slipped down a little. You know, you did this instead of this. But we're going to try again tomorrow.’

I love that, like, you're setting up your colleagues for success by leveraging behavior-specific praise with a student so that the staff knows where that barometer is, what they can expect, and they can continue to acknowledge that and continue moving forward, but also to maybe not hold those incredibly high expectations because the kid's not quite there yet. That's really, really smart.

Yeah. it’s: ‘hey, this kid's great. We're here. We started here. This is our ultimate goal.’ And like, nine times out of 10, the kids standing next to me like they're Buzz Lightyear. Like, yep, I'm a big kid now. 

That's so good. Well, honestly, Manny, I know you do this all the time. I've watched you leverage all kinds of both positive and constructive feedback to students of all ages in all kinds of settings, as well as with the staff that you work with. So thank you so much for taking some time today to share what this High-Leverage Practice looks like for you and your practice.

Yeah, no problem. Have a good one.

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For me, this HLP is about being clear with the students, what you're giving them praise for or correction for.

Manny Huecias

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Feedback is one of the most powerful tools in a teacher's arsenal, serving not just to correct mistakes, but to guide student learning and behavior in a way that boosts motivation, engagement, and independence. When done right, feedback can lead to remarkable improvements in both learning and behavior. But here's the key—it has to be strategic and goal-directed. It's most effective when students have clear goals, and the feedback they receive directly helps them understand where they need to improve and how to get there. Whether it’s verbal, nonverbal, or written, feedback should always be timely, genuine, and meaningful, tailored to the student’s age and the phase of learning they’re in—whether they’re just starting to grasp a new concept or refining a skill they’ve already learned. The goal is to keep providing feedback until the student achieves their learning objectives, ensuring they stay on track and continually progress.

There’s a widespread myth that high rates of positive reinforcement can somehow damage students’ intrinsic motivation or that it simply doesn’t work. In reality, positive reinforcement is all about ensuring that when a student’s behavior is followed by a reward—something that matters to them—the behavior is more likely to be repeated. Just like with academic skills, to help students master social behaviors, teachers need to give specific, timely feedback.


When students make errors in social behavior, it’s crucial to guide them towards the right behavior by pointing out the social skill they should have used. For example, if a student displays appropriate social behavior, feedback should not only acknowledge their effort but also tie it back to classroom expectations.


The notion that students should always be intrinsically motivated is a bit unrealistic. Intrinsic motivation happens when an activity is inherently rewarding, like playing a favorite game. However, many tasks, like writing reports or solving algebra problems, aren’t naturally exciting. Instead, special educators should use rewards or recognition, to encourage students. The goal is for students to engage in challenging tasks not because they find them intrinsically motivating, but because they understand that completing these tasks will lead to desirable outcomes, like extra free time or praise from parents. This approach helps students develop self-regulation and recognize the value of their efforts beyond immediate enjoyment.


The High-Leverage Practices (HLPs) aim to identify essential techniques that are so crucial that every teacher should integrate them into their daily routines. While all 22 HLPs are valuable, some stand out for their foundational importance and their role in supporting other practices. One such practice is HLP 8: Providing Positive and Constructive Feedback. This practice is so central that it appears in both the Social/Emotional/Behavioral domain and the Instruction domain. This dual presence underscores its fundamental role; feedback is essential for both teaching and behavioral management. 


Effective teaching and behavior management cannot occur without quality feedback on student performance. It’s through this feedback that students and educators gain vital insights into whether their performance meets expectations. Mastering the art of swiftly assessing student work, whether it’s correct or incorrect, and delivering thoughtful, specific responses is a key skill for any teacher. This approach not only guides students toward improvement but also ensures that both academic and behavioral standards are being met.


When it comes to enhancing student behavioral outcomes through feedback, the approach a teacher takes can make all the difference. Effective feedback starts with positivity and specificity. For instance, saying "Great job raising your hand and waiting to be called on!" not only praises the behavior but also clearly identifies what was done right.


But feedback should also focus on the process rather than just the person. Instead of telling a student, "You are so smart!"—which centers on the individual—the emphasis should be on the effort and strategies used. For example, "You worked really hard on that math assignment and used excellent strategies to solve those problems" highlights the process and encourages continued effort.


Instructive feedback is equally important. This means guiding students with specific information about what they did well or what needs improvement. For instance, if a student answers incorrectly about what sounds should be heard while lining up, a teacher might say, "We are quiet when we line up for recess to show respect for other classrooms." This helps reinforce the desired behavior and provides clear instructions.


When addressing errors, corrective feedback is more effective than reprimands. Instead of simply saying, "Stop talking!" which can feel punitive, a more constructive approach would be, "Remember, during independent reading time, we need to read quietly to ourselves and avoid talking to our neighbors."


Feedback should be contingent on observing the target behavior. For example, praising students for their effective teamwork when they are actively participating in a group activity reinforces the behavior. It’s crucial that feedback is timely, given close to the observed behavior to maximize its impact and help students integrate desired behaviors into their routines.


Additionally, the tone of feedback matters—sincerity is key. Avoiding sarcasm and jokes helps maintain a respectful and supportive environment. Tailoring feedback to accommodate students’ ages, learning histories, cultural backgrounds, and preferences ensures it is received in the most constructive way.


Lastly, as students progress through different learning phases, feedback should adapt accordingly. Whether they are just beginning to acquire new skills or working on maintaining and

generalizing them, the type and frequency of feedback should match their current stage of learning to support their continued growth.


To truly support teachers in mastering the art of effective feedback, school leaders need to take a proactive and hands-on approach. Start by offering targeted instruction, professional development, and coaching focused on the different types of feedback and their applications. This training should empower teachers to use feedback effectively in diverse classroom situations.


But supporting teachers goes beyond just providing resources and training. It’s essential to model the feedback process by offering constructive feedback on their implementation practices. This not only enhances their ability to use feedback effectively but also ensures that their approach is aligned with best practices.


Another valuable strategy is to identify and leverage the expertise of those teachers who consistently excel at providing effective feedback. By integrating these skilled educators into peer coaching systems, you can create a culture of excellence and shared learning within your school.


Furthermore, fostering a collaborative environment where teams and staff members set goals related to feedback use is crucial. Regular check-ins and accountability measures can help sustain this focus and ensure that everyone is making progress towards more effective feedback practices. This ongoing support and collaboration will ultimately drive greater fidelity in feedback implementation and, in turn, enhance student outcomes.


Confusion often surrounds terms like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, reinforcement, rewards, and praise—sometimes intentionally by authors promoting specific theories, and other times unintentionally by educators trying to do their best. To effectively teach skills to mastery and ensure they are maintained and generalized beyond the school day, it's crucial to understand and apply specific positive feedback, along with corrective instructional feedback when mistakes happen. This straightforward but powerful approach is fundamental to both academic achievement and social success. By integrating precise feedback into the learning environment, educators can significantly enhance their students' ability to learn and apply new skills effectively.

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