Put students into a cooperative activity and listen closely to what happens when one of them does something well. Usually, it's one of two things: silence, or a flat "good job" tossed out without anyone really looking up from their work. Rarely does a student say something that actually tells their teammate what they did well — or say it like they mean it.
That gap matters more than you think. Encouraging and praising teammates isn't a soft extra in Cooperative Learning — it's a regular, essential part of well-run cooperative activities. And the research on praise itself is clear about something most classrooms get backwards: how students praise each other changes what that praise actually does to their teammate's motivation and confidence. Left untaught, students tend to default to the least effective kind of praise there is — and that default carries a real cost, one we'll come back to shortly.
Why this belongs in a Cooperative Learning classroom
You already know the four PIES principles that structure a well-designed cooperative task: positive interdependence, individual accountability, equal participation, and simultaneous interaction. Alongside these, Johnson and Johnson's research on Cooperative Learning also identifies another essential element that sits right alongside PIES: social skills — including the specific ability to encourage and praise teammates' efforts.
The research is blunt about one thing in particular: this skill does not appear on its own just because students are placed in a group. They have to be explicitly and systematically taught, the same way you'd teach a grammar point or a reading strategy. Students who've never been taught how to encourage a teammate generally can't do it well — not because they're unkind, but because nobody ever showed them what it sounds like.
That reframes praise from a "nice to have" into a genuine prerequisite. A cooperative task can be beautifully structured — clear roles, positive interdependence, individual accountability all present — and still fall flat if students don't know how to support each other verbally while they work. Teaching praise explicitly isn't a detour from Cooperative Learning. It's part of building the foundation it depends on.
Why the type of praise matters more than you think
This is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where most default classroom praise quietly works against you.
Psychologist Carol Dweck's research draws a sharp distinction between two kinds of praise:
• Person praise — praise aimed at a fixed trait. "You're so smart." "You're a natural."
• Process praise — praise aimed at effort, strategy, or persistence. "You tried three different ways until it worked." "You didn't give up when it got hard."
They sound similarly kind. They are not equally useful. Dweck's research — tracked from toddlerhood through school performance years later — found that children who received more process praise developed a stronger growth mindset: the belief that ability can be built through effort. Children who received more person praise were more likely to develop a fixed mindset, avoid challenges, and give up faster after a setback, because struggling suddenly threatens the "smart" label rather than being a normal part of learning.
Left to their own instincts, students overwhelmingly default to person praise when praising each other: "You're so smart," "You're really good at this." It's the easiest thing to say and the first thing that comes to mind. Which means, without any teaching at all, peer praise in a cooperative classroom tends to reinforce exactly the mindset you don't want — quietly, with good intentions, every single lesson.
This is the harm we flagged earlier. Person praise doesn't just fail to help — it actively works against the resilience Cooperative Learning is trying to build. A student repeatedly told "you're so smart" starts to treat intelligence as the thing on the line every time they attempt a task. When something goes wrong, the logical conclusion isn't "I need a different strategy" — it's "maybe I'm not smart after all." That's a much harder place to recover from than a strategy that simply didn't work. Students praised this way become more likely to avoid genuinely challenging tasks (since failure threatens the "smart" label), give up sooner when they hit difficulty, and compare themselves to peers rather than to their own past attempts. In a cooperative task specifically, this plays out as students protecting their reputation within the group rather than taking the kind of risks — offering an uncertain idea, attempting the harder role — that cooperative learning depends on.
What actually makes praise effective
Decades of research on teacher praise — going back to Brophy's foundational 1981 review — converge on the same two requirements, and they apply just as much to student-to-student praise as to teacher praise:
1. It has to be specific. "Good job" tells a teammate nothing about what to repeat next time. "You explained that really clearly" does. Specific, behaviour-linked praise consistently outperforms generic praise because it names the exact thing worth doing again.
2. It has to be genuine. Praise only works as reinforcement if it's perceived as sincere. Empty or constant praise stops meaning anything — students learn to tune it out.
Put those two principles together with Dweck's process-versus-person distinction, and you get a simple, teachable target: specific, genuine, effort-or-strategy-focused praise — not generic, not empty, and not aimed at fixed traits.
Two structures worth borrowing (and adapting)
You don't need to invent a system from scratch — two frameworks already used widely in feedback research give students a simple shape to follow. Both are usually built for written peer feedback on work, but they adapt well to spoken praise during cooperative tasks too.
Two Stars and a Wish
Students give two specific positive comments (the "stars") and one constructive suggestion (the "wish"). The research behind this strategy is strict on one point: a star has to be specific. "Good work" is not a valid star. "You used three different words instead of repeating 'nice'" is.
TAG
- Tell something you liked
- Ask a question
- Give a suggestion
Both frameworks give timid or lower-confidence students — including EFL/ESL learners who may lack the language to praise freely — a scaffold to lean on instead of a blank page.
For younger or lower-level language learners specifically, the "ask a question" or "wish" steps may need to be simplified or dropped altogether at first. Teaching genuine, specific praise is already a big ask — layering constructive criticism on top too early can overwhelm students who are still finding the words for the positive half.
A peer praise phrase bank for young EFL/ESL learners
These are deliberately simple — built for learners who need the language as much as the skill. All of them push toward specific and process-focused, not generic or trait-based.
Noticing effort and strategy (the core category):
- "You tried again when it was hard."
- "You didn't give up."
- "You found a good way to do that."
- "You listened carefully to your friend's idea."
Noticing a specific contribution:
- "You explained that clearly."
- "I understood it because you said it slowly."
- "You helped [name] finish their part."
- "Your idea helped our team."
Noticing teamwork behaviour:
- "You waited for your turn."
- "You asked [name] what they thought."
- "You said 'let's try it together.'"
What to avoid teaching as a default:
- "You're so smart" / "You're the best at this" — person praise, not process praise
- "Good job" / "Nice" on their own — too generic to tell a teammate what worked
Making it stick
Telling students these phrases once won't be enough — Cooperative Learning's own research is clear that social skills need modelling, practice, and reflection (the "group processing" step), not a single introduction. A few ways to build that in:
- Model it yourself first. Use specific, process-focused praise when you talk to students, so they hear the pattern before they're asked to produce it.
- Give sentence stems, not a blank instruction. "Praise your partner" is vague. A visible phrase bank or sentence-starter poster gives students something to actually reach for.
- Build in a reflection moment. After a cooperative task, ask: "What's one specific thing your partner did well?" This turns praise into a habit rather than a one-off instruction.
- Praise the praise. When you hear a student give specific, genuine feedback to a teammate, name it — the same way you'd want them naming what their teammate did well.
Teaching students to praise each other well isn't a soft add-on to a cooperative classroom. It's part of what makes the classroom genuinely cooperative in the first place — and, done right, it teaches students something that outlasts the lesson: that effort, not fixed talent, is what's worth noticing.
References
- Brophy, J. (1981). Teacher praise: A functional analysis. Review of Educational Research, 51(1), 5–32.
- Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
- Gunderson, E. A., Gripshover, S. J., Romero, C., Dweck, C. S., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2013). Parent praise to 1- to 3-year-olds predicts children's motivational frameworks 5 years later. Child Development, 84(5), 1526–1541.
- Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (2009). An educational psychology success story: Social interdependence theory and cooperative learning. Educational Researcher, 38(5), 365–379.
- Kamins, M. L., & Dweck, C. S. (1999). Person versus process praise and criticism: Implications for contingent self-worth and coping. Developmental Psychology, 35(3), 835–847.