September 15, 2010 – The Teacher Giveth and the Teacher Taketh Away

I have not yet had the experience to really set a behavioral management system in the classroom on my own yet, officially. I have tried various techniques but I have yet to find one that sticks yet. I am fond, however, of “the prize jar”. A simple jar of educationally relevant goodies (bright and color pencils, eraser ends, pencil grips, mini note pads, mini rulers, sticky notes, crayon boxes, mini work books, etc.) that the students get to pick from if they were well behaved during my small group or pull-out instruction lessons. I would always tell them that if they did not behave or do their work in my class, I would take away their chances of picking from the prize jar.

This prize jar reward system worked well last year, but this year I was having more difficulty with using the reward of the prize jar to keep behavior manageable. I would offer the reward of the prize jar before instruction but when a student behaved in a way that distracted from the lesson or was inappropriate for school I would tell them they had lost their reward of pulling from the prize jar and I would always get the same reply “I don’t care”.

This pattern would go on for the same group of students. Day after day they would behave in a manner inappropriate during instruction and they would lose their reward, and no change would occur in their pattern of behavior, so after a week, I decided to be the one to change. At the beginning of the lesson, I let every student in my small group pull from the prize jar explaining my expectations of them (again, there’s that word!) and that if they could not conduct themselves appropriately during the lesson, I would take their reward away (generally what I would tell them at the start of every lesson, however this time they had the tangible feel of their reward, it was no longer something intangible for the ones who had never gotten the chance to have a reward conceptualize on their own).

And it worked.

When a student began to act in a way inappropriate for class I would warn them that they would get their reward taken from them and they would correct their behavior not wanting what they already had taken away from them. Rarely I have had to take away a student’s reward and place it back in the jar, as students do not want to lose what has been given to them, which is beyond the reward but my faith in the students that they will control and monitor their own behavior with the knowledge of what it is like to physically have a privilege taken away from them. I am still working the kinks out with this behavior management system (having students taking a reward every day can be expensive, the price of the items I fill the jar up with everyday! Maybe I might just use stickers, or maybe a school store where they can buy items using sticks/beans/marbles?) but I think I have a general idea of what I may use when I have to use a behavior management system that will need to work with an entire classroom.