As I visit other classrooms in my main placement school and observe the various teaching styles of our talented school staff, I have become quite interested in the systems of rewards for positive student behavior. In our school, there is an established reward system that all classrooms are expected to follow as a "standard" form of reward. Most teachers I have spoken with have chosen to supplement this system with a rewards program of their own as well. The school wide behavior program is a ticket system where students are given a small slip of blue paper (called a "Cub Paw") for making excellent behavior choices. The students write their name on the "ticket" and put it into a bin or basket in their classroom. The teacher then draws names from this basket at the end of the day or week and are rewarded with candy and prizes for "winning."
My Cooperating Teacher only uses the standard, school wide reward system. She doesn't do any additional rewards, because she believes they can become expensive for her as a teacher, or distracting for students. At the beginning of the school year, getting a ticket was a huge motivator for our Kindergarteners, and as the year has progressed I notice that it continues to motivate good behavior. Our students love candy and little toys (marking pens, erasers, fancy pencils, etc) and will do almost anything to get them. I see these rewards being given for completing assignments, good attitudes, helping another student, or even picking up trash off the classroom floor. While it is wonderful that students are eager to be helpful and well behaved, I am concerned about the motivation for this behavior. My concern comes from observing students express that they won't help friends, finish work with effort or pick up the floor unless they are instantly rewarded with a ticket. For example, the teacher will say to the students, "I will be coming around to each student to make sure that you have remembered to write your name at the top of your paper." Students will then respond, "Will we get a cub paw for it?" If the teachers answer is yes, the students get excited and quickly comply. If the answer is no, the students grimace and make no effort two comply. What is this teaching our students?
Wow, interesting to see this as a school-wide culture practice. On the one hand I think the uniformity takes the pressure off individual teachers to come up with something really 'clever'. On the other hand I'm curious about the variations you've seen from classroom to classroom. Really quite interesting to think about this though. Don't feel I've heard about this in class discussion for whatever reason. If you brought i up and I failed to hear it, I apologize. But if the topic comes up again, please consider sharing more about the uniformity and the deviations in this system.
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