This document discusses strategies to address "helpless handraising" behaviors in elementary school students. It defines helpless handraising as repetitive requests for teacher assistance during lessons that prevents students from paying attention or working independently. The workshop recommends (1) using brief, step-by-step feedback and prompts to guide students, (2) focusing feedback on future steps rather than past mistakes, and (3) assessing strategies through monitoring individual student behaviors over time to reduce dependency and build independent learning skills.

1. Classroom Discipline
Workshop: Helpless
Handraisers
Counseling 810: Sasha Albrecht

2. What is “helpless
handraising?”
•Pattern of handraising for extra help during classroom instruction time
•Not all handraising is “helpless” handraising- defined as helpless when
repetitive & not simply clarification or verification
•Average number of helpless handraisers per class: 5-6
•Average amount of time devoted to each handraiser: 4.23 minutes
•While the rest of the class remains unsupervised and potentially off task
•Amount of time effective to tutor?
•Behavior positively reinforced with attention from teacher
•Generally the students who were “clingy” in lower grades, need to adapt
methods to not look like a “baby”
•Clingy behavior can refer to any behaviors in which the child is overly
dependent on the teacher. For this workshop, we will focus specifically
on asking for teacher assistance on classroom tasks or projects.
•Learned helplessness: no need to pay attention to lesson if they can have one
on one help from teacher

3. Target Population
•Kindergarteners
•Reverse “clinginess” in
younger years to disrupt
development of chronic pattern
of learned helplessness
•Build independence!

4. “Common Sense”
Corrective Feedback
•Show the child how to do it,
check for understanding
•Reinforces helplessness
•Produces cognitive overload
•Multi-step tasks require
long-term memory
•A lot of work compared
to short-term memory
(total recall)

5. Simplifying Corrective
Feedback
•One step at a time
•Brief and clear prompts
•Examples of common openers:
•“Show me where you are having
difficulty,” “You did a good job with
the colors, but now let’s look at the
shapes,” “(sigh) Okay let’s see
here…” “Okay let’s go over this
one more time,”
•All error based! Why focus on
something you don’t want the
student to repeat?

6. Steps for Corrective
Feedback
1. Take a relaxing breath
2. Take another relaxing breath: this time looking at the task – what has the
student done right so far?
3. Evaluate: what do I want the student to do next?
Feedback:
Praise (Only use the first time you help a student): Describe what the student has
done right with simple, declarative sentences (focus & review)
Prompt: Safety phrase “The next thing to do is…” (simple & avoids error focus)
Leave: Before student carries out prompt – feedback is for learning, not attention

7. Additional Tips
• If lesson plan includes graphics, follow the
same ideas: simple, step-based
• Reduce the duration of the prompt
(more time for the rest of the class!)
• For younger students: omit words from
diagram (reduces confusion)
• Teach to all modalities the first time around
• Say (“Let me explain…”)
• See (“Watch as I…”)
• Do (“Now you do it.”)

8. Assessing Effectiveness
Immediate:
•Student performance on task (accomplished with or without teacher help?,
what kind of teacher help?)
•Number of “clingy” or “helpless” behavior incidences
•May be helpful to record number of incidences prior to implementing
intervention – as a class total and per each individual student
•This is a time consuming and distracting process… may use a short
time interval (e.g. one week of observation)
Long-term:
•Number of incidences of helpless handraising in higher elementary school
grades (e.g. 3rd grade +)
•Compare to previous years
•Analyze on a year to year basis for trends in overall school behavioral
changes

9. Summary
•Clingy behaviors in early elementary school grades leads to
helpless handraising in later grades
•Eliminate needy behaviors early on before they become
established patterns
•Can combat helpless behaviors by building independent learning
skills (Praise, Prompt, Leave)
•If effective, will reduce amount of time spent one-on-one tutoring,
while optimizing the time that is spent tutoring
•Will also increase the amount of time available for classroom
instruction & monitoring