All Behavior is Communication: How to Give Feedback, Criticism, and Corrections that Improve Behavior is an education and teaching book by Carmen Y. Reyes, The Psycho-Educational Teacher. The topic of this innovative guide is simple yet powerful: what teachers say to children (the words we use) influence the way students perform. Feedback and criticism that convey high and positive expectations influence positive performance, but feedback and criticism that constantly remind children of their low performance and/or recurrent behavior problems reinforce the same low performance and behavior problems that we want to extinguish in the first place. Teachers make the difference, that is how powerful our words and messages are. Therefore, if we want to change children’s disruptive and/or apathetic classroom behavior a first step would be to monitor, and if necessary change, the messages we send to students. All Behavior is Communication: How to Give Feedback, Criticism, and Corrections that Improve Behavior explains these three speech acts in detail and presents ways in which teachers can use language that is supportive of children and that inspires children to be the best they can be. This informative guide is an excellent resource for teachers, school counselors, and those parents with an interest in child guidance skills.
My teaching career includes more than twenty years of experience as a sel-contained special education teacher, resource room teacher, and educational diagnostician. My classroom background, in New York City and my native Puerto Rico, includes 10+ years teaching emotionally disturbed/behaviorally disordered children, students with a learning disability, or with low cognitive functioning. I have a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Puerto Rico, and a master's degree in special education with a specialization in emotional disorders (Long Island University, Brooklyn: NY). I also have extensive graduate training in psychology (30+ credits). I am the author of 50+ books and articles in psycho-education and in alternative teaching techniques to help struggling learners. My publications are available on my free blog, "The Psycho-Educational Teacher."
