An attention-seeking misbehavior is a mild, recurring behavior that a student knows is unacceptable, but engages in as a way to get teacher or peer attention. Chronic blurting out, excessive helplessness, and tattling are examples that may be attention-seeking in nature. The strategy that is most likely to "correct" attention-seeking behavior is planned ignoring.

With planned ignoring, you reduce or eliminate the attention a student receives for engaging in misbehavior, while concurrently giving the student frequent attention when he or she is not engaged in misbehavior. Here are suggested steps for implementing planned ignoring:

Explain that because you have such high expectations for the student's ability to manage this behavior, you are not going to give reminders or assign consequences.

You need to demonstrate to the student that responsible behavior results in attention. Therefore, shortly after the student begins behaving responsibly (one-two minutes for elementary students, five minutes for secondary students), give the student attention.

It is essential to provide at least three times more attention to positive behavior than to negative behavior—especially when you are using planned ignoring. If the student does not experience lots of attention when behaving responsibly, he will simply step up the severity of misbehavior until you cannot possibly ignore him. You must praise this student frequently and give him lots of noncontingent attention.

There are three main types of praise that teachers most often use: personal praise, effort-based praise, and behavior-specific praise. Two of these three are found to be more effective than the other.

This type of praise tends to focus on natural talents or skills that come easily to students, rather than the effort they put in or the techniques they use. For example, a teacher might say to a student, “You have such a beautiful singing voice!” Research has shown that this kind of praise may backfire. When students feel their abilities are outside of their control and just part of who they are, they may think they don’t have the ability to improve.

This is especially true of struggling learners who aren’t as confident in their abilities and skills. Personal praise can make students less willing to risk trying new things for fear of revealing just how little talent they think they have.

This type of praise emphasizes what students can control. Think back to the student with the beautiful singing voice. The student likely worked hard to learn the difficult key changes in a song or to memorize the lyrics. The time spent and the strategies used are within the student’s control.

That’s why effort-based praise, such as “I am so impressed at how hard you worked to sing that song without the music and lyrics in front of you,” is more empowering than “You have such a beautiful singing voice!”

This type of praise lets students know what they are doing correctly. It’s an evidence-based classroom management strategy that focuses on providing specific feedback to describe your approval of student behavior. To give behavior-specific praise, you clearly tell students what they’ve done correctly. For example, if you have a student for whom organization is an issue, you could say, “Nice work getting your homework out of your homework folder first thing this morning.”

Both effort-based and behavior-specific praise genuinely acknowledge your students’ efforts and achievements. When your students feel that you’re honestly showing approval and telling them what they did well, they’re more willing to continue to work hard and look for effective strategies to overcome obstacles.