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Educators are busy, and it can sometimes feel like there is only time in the day to address the highest level concerns. What can fall by the wayside are opportunities to call out the positive and recognize all students when they are doing well.

Here are 3 big reasons why you should include positive feedback to students and families to improve overall student outcomes: 

1. Build Powerful Relationships with Parents‍

Family engagement is a huge factor in a student’s success. No one knows students like their families, and so they are powerful partners as educators work towards positive outcomes for students.

However, families can feel overwhelmed and powerless if every calls from schools focus on the negative. When parents receive a more balanced review of their child’s performance, including positive feedback, they can build a relationship with the school and work together towards students' academic and social-emotional goals.

2. Motivate Students to Do Well

‍Positive recognition for every student can make a huge difference in their overall performance in school. A student who is disruptive or academically behind may feel like their positive efforts go unnoticed, so they have nothing to lose when they don’t apply themselves or miss class. 

When students are aware that good news gets communicated, they then have a stake in their academic growth.

3. Reduce Referrals within the School ‍

Recognizing when students are doing well encourages them to stay focused in class and drops referral rates at your school. When students are able to spend more time in the classroom, it improves academic outcomes and builds a more positive school culture.

Communicate Classrooms Wins Easily Using DeansList ‍

By automatically adding positive communication into your routine practice, you spend less time reacting as a disciplinarian, and spend more time proactively pursuing your goals for the year. 

It also gives you the opportunity to catch any behavior issues while they are still small, so they don’t become disruptive in the future.  

Up until now, gathering and reviewing student attendance and behavior data has been a time-consuming task. As a result, actively communicating classroom wins to families has naturally taken a back seat to all the other responsibilities that teachers and administrators have. 

Here are a couple of ways schools have used DeansList automatically alert families of positive behavior: 

• Grow community values: sending an alert to families at the end of each week if 80%+ of students' recorded behaviors have been positive
• Incentivize positive behavior: highlighting the privileges students can qualify for in the Weekly Reports sent to their family 
• Recognize positive behavior every day: sending an alert to their family through the Family Portal app when you "catch" a student doing something well
• Keep families updated on student progress: sending an alert to their family when they have a day with no negative behaviors/referrals
  

DeansList is a student behavior tracking platform that makes it easy to gather the data that matters to your school in one place and communicate with parents painlessly. 

We know that teachers and administrators have a lot on their plates, so we’ve made it easy for you to access student data and send weekly reports to parents through text, email, or a printed report. On top of that, we launched The DeansList mobile app to make all this possible on-the-go! 

Click here to find out more about how Dean can help you track your data effortlessly,  improve your family engagement efforts, and ultimately help students achieve success.