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October 6, 2014

Three Ways to Use Rewards in a Classroom

This one is for you teachers. Someone asked me to share more about how I used class points in my classroom, so here’s a post covering all the details on the various rewards systems I had going on in my class! It’s going to sound a little complicated, but I actually had three different reward systems in place to shape student behavior: raffle tickets, team points, and class points. They each served different functions and helped keep me (and the kids) happy. They also added an element of excitement and fun to our daily life!

One important thing is that I found ways to minimize the effort and cost for me while maximizing behavioral outcomes for my students. If rewarding my students became expensive and/or troublesome, it would not be sustainable. So even if you already have systems in place, hopefully this gives you some ideas on how to make it easier for yourself throughout the year!

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September 15, 2014

Check yourselves! Easy as 1-2-3The Trick

Here is a supersimple handy dandy trick that teachers and parents will love. I know we all have our own methods for getting the whole class’s attention– ring a bell, xylophone, Marco-Polo, “If you can hear my voice, clap once…” and so on. That’s cool. If you don’t use any of these, you should try it! It’s great for quickly getting your students’ attention so you can give the next instructions or just move on.

Sometimes, however, we don’t necessarily need to make the kids stop what they’re doing or make an announcement. Sometimes, the class is just antsy or fidgety or chatty or SOMETHING and you just feel this crazy vibe in the room. Maybe it’s the day after Halloween, or maybe it’s nearing the holidays and the air is just bursting with too much excitement and they have trouble concentrating. Or maybe it’s just a normal afternoon, when the students’ focus is off and we’re all ready for an afternoon nap.

Or maybe it’s Friday. Oh, Fridays.

So far, I’ve shared with you ideas on how to get an individual student’s behavior in line using graduated consequences. What I’m about to share is an idea for the times when it’s not one or two or five students, but your whole class that seems to be driving you nuts. It’s simple. Just say these two magical words: Check yourselves!

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August 17, 2014

re it.If you lead a group of kids anywhere, they usually walk in clumps. This is fine if we’re trekking about on a field trip or headed out to the playground, but when we need to go from point A to point B in an efficient, orderly way, we need lines.

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July 22, 2014

Another system of consequences 1

I’m a firm believer in consequences. Children should know that certain undesirable behaviors will result in consequences, and well, you can read my detailed thoughts on that topic here.

Have you read that post? Because if you have, then you’ll probably agree with me that it’s pretty long, and not the easiest thing to implement. I really do believe it can be extremely effective, but it takes a thoughtful plan and a lot of consistency, and I’ll be the first to admit that consistency can be hard!

Maybe you’ve been with me for a while and you read that post back in May, and now it’s July, and you’re thinking, “Oh man. I totally meant to try it, but… well, the end of the school year came… and graduations… and summer camps… and Grandma’s… and vacation and… ah what summer is half over?! It takes too much planning and now it’s too late…”

No, no, my friend. It is not too late.

Maybe that was too big of a project and you weren’t ready to commit to something so involved. Okay, no problem. I am still all for the cause of parents training their children up, so I have an easier alternative for you. It is still very effective (I wouldn’t share it otherwise!), and I’m honestly not sure why I didn’t share it with you sooner. Maybe because that post was already 23 pages (…size 12. Times New Roman font. Without the pictures. Yeahforreal.).

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June 5, 2014

How to Shape Childrens Behavior
Several years ago, I was asked to give a talk to Sunday School teachers at church on how to discipline children. My first thought was that I didn’t want to talk about disciplining children. Disciplining children implies that they’re misbehaving, but misbehaviors can be caused by a lot of things, not the least of which is the teacher’s inability to teach well. (I’m pretty sure I could talk for hours on that topic alone, but I’ll save it for another time.) Sure, every child has their weak moments, but there is a whole lot that a teacher can do to help students compose themselves respectfully and responsibly.

I find that the smoothest path involves anticipating and preventing misbehavior in the first place. If that ship has sailed, though, this is the next one you want to get on. Sometimes children come in with certain habits and behaviors and you need to proactively help them to work them out. Maybe it’s a girl who throws a tantrum every time something doesn’t go her way, or a child who has a habit of talking back. Perhaps it’s a small but persistent matter, such as getting a boy to tuck in his chair or keep his desk area tidy.

As a teacher, it can mean training your entire class to execute various procedures well, such as walking to and from the carpet area quickly, quietly, and ready to focus as soon as the transition is complete. I’ve worked with children on all of these and more, and have found that our success generally depended on my consistent execution of a few key skills. Yes, my execution. It’s not completely up to the child to improve himself. You can’t just tell a kid to “be better” or “stop doing that” and always expect her to know how to do it. You need to actively work with them to shape their behavior and help them grow as individuals.

In a series of posts, I have shared some of my experiences in shaping children’s behavior. Big or small, whole class or individual, there were a few key patterns that began to emerge in my behavior-shaping process. I constantly fine-tuned it over the years, and grew increasingly confident of my ability to effect positive change in children.

True, I have not actually shaped the behavior of my own children yet, but I really think that all these years as a teacher have given me a leg up to that end. Actually, one of the biggest reasons I wanted to be a teacher was to garner experience and wisdom from my career in order to enhance my effectiveness as a parent. So here’s a glimpse of what I have learned, for all you parents out there who didn’t get to spend eight years working with hundreds of kids before having your own. I hope to share some of the highlights of what I’ve learned over the years with you so that it may benefit you as you parent and teach children.

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May 24, 2014

This post is part of my series on How to Shape Children’s Behavior.be consistently consistent 2Over the course of the last eight years, I’ve learned a lot about teaching. One thing I know for sure is that if you don’t have students’ behavior in check, you cannot teach as effectively. Children thrive in an environment where they know where the boundaries are and are able to respect them. Some kids need more help developing this ability than others. That’s where we come in.

Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read some of my other posts on setting clear expectations and laying out a graduated system of consequences. Now it’s time to follow through with these new behavioral structures. The beginning is probably the most formative time as your child feels out just how serious you are about holding them to your stated expectations and following through with the stated consequences.

It’s likely that you will soon experience the first few pokes and pushes as they subconsciously explore the new system(s) you’ve set up. This beginning period is definitely one of the most important times to consistently reinforce the boundaries with the consequences you have set forth. However, all your work will be for naught if you don’t continually show that the boundaries are still where you said they were—day after day, week after week, month after month. I know this all too well, because I watched all of my behavioral structures collapse again and again when I first started teaching. 

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May 7, 2014

This post is part of my series on How to Shape Children’s Behavior.

This post is long. I thought about splitting it into three parts, but each section builds on and relies on the rest, so I decided to keep them all together. Thanks for reading!

The other day, a parent asked me for advice on appropriate punishments for their child’s misbehaviors. I don’t think he was thinking too hard about word choice, but it’s a single word that can make a big difference.The way we think about consequences versus punishments has huge implications for how we parent and raise our children. Any person who cares for children needs to know this: every parent, every teacher, every daycare provider.

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April 21, 2014

This post is part of my series on How to Shape Children’s Behavior.

Rewards and BehaviorWhen I was in teacher school, I remember someone telling us that it’s best if students are intrinsically motivated do things. The idea was that children should just naturally want to improve for the sake of improving or gaining mastery, and that they should not require external forces or rewards to motivate them. We were even told that, as teachers, we should avoid phrases like, “I really like how Eric is sitting quietly,” or “Thank you, class, for beginning your work right away.” If we phrased things like that, students might start behaving well to please you, the teacher.

Oh dear.

Honestly, I never really figured out how to tap into the intrinsically-motivated angel in every child. True, most students entered my class with a strong personal desire to do their best and try hard at everything, from academics to behavior. Every year, though, I’ve had at least a couple of children who would probably rather eat dirt than write a paragraph, or who would wreak havoc at recess if there were no consequences. When attempts to appeal to the self-motivated child within failed, I resorted to the next best thing I could think of: offering rewards. I’m not gonna lie, it works like a charm.

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April 10, 2014

This post is part of my series on How to Shape Children’s Behavior.

I think I’ve had about six or seven headaches ever in my life. Last night, I had my eighth. My head was growing foggy and I grew frustrated as I tried to wrap my head around how to explain my method for shaping children’s behavior. Every time I started a new paragraph, there would be some small but crucial concept that I felt the need to explain first. As I branched off and my explanations and illustrations grew, I would run across yet another concept I felt compelled to cover more thoroughly. This kept happening and before I knew it, I had spiderwebbed out of control and lost track of my initial direction. Headache, I tell you. I lay on the couch in despair. This was harder than any writing assignment I’d ever had in college or grad school, and that’s saying a lot.

fried brain resized2

I couldn’t just go back to post one and continue, skimming over these other essential points. It would be like trying to teach the algorithm for long-division without ensuring that my students were fluent in subtraction, multiplication, and a host of other concepts first. It just wouldn’t be right. Sure, I could spit out the step-by-step directions, but it would not mean anything or be nearly as effective if we didn’t first have a good foundation of fundamentals.

I am trying to teaching something I think is really important here. In the last several years of working with children, I always had this feeling that I had something really useful to share with the world. I’m thrilled that I finally get to do that! However, while I’ve been trying to frame it as “a few important lessons,” I’m realizing it’s more like a whole unit. I had envisioned starting off this series with an introductory overview, followed by a handful of detailed posts. After bouncing ideas around with my husband, however, I’ve decided to revamp my approach. I’m going to start with the fundamentals, and then put it all together in the end. That’s actually how my first two parenting/teaching posts on A Better Way to Say Sorry and Preventing Misbehavior came about in the first place. I had been trying to write up other posts when these two ideas came up, and I realized they merited their own posts.

This next post is completely appropriate, given the conclusions I arrived at last night. Instead of shallowly touching on several big concepts in one post, I will focus on one thing at a time. And today, the topic is exactly that: teach one new thing at a time.

Teach one new thing at a time

If there is something you want a child (or anyone) to learn well, follow this advice: teach just one new thing at a time. If it’s a new procedure, use familiar material. If it’s new material, use a familiar procedure. As a teacher, this played out in many different ways for me. When I wanted students to learn a new vocabulary activity, for example, I used simple words they were very familiar with to teach it to them. This way, students could focus on learning the new activity without fumbling over what the words meant or getting frustrated with how to spell them. Once they grew comfortable with this activity, I could turn it around and use this now-familiar procedure to teach them new vocabulary words. If I had given them new words and a new activity at once, it would have been a frustrating experience and neither would have been learned as well.

New procedure, familiar material

Teach one new thing at a time is an effective principle for teaching anything new—a new skill, new content, a new procedure. For the purpose of this series, I will apply it to teaching good behavior.

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