Frequent Positive/Negitive Rewards
Will this improve the behavior of "THAT" student?
PURPOSE: Improve Behavior of Struggling Students
We all have "THAT" student in our classroom that just doesn't seem to respond to rebukes from the teacher. So through collaboration with my peers and advice from teachers I put together a simple experiment. I choose a student (Little John) struggling to pay attention to the teacher and focus on his work in my 2nd grade classroom. I asked him about different thing in the classroom that he liked, enjoyed, or wanted, in order to construct a leveled reward system. Some of these things were rewards the teacher already had in place for "regular" students, and were fairly easy to attain. However these thing always seemed to be out to reach or unattainable or Little John. So he just wouldn't try.
METHOD: Ways to Motivate the Student
I used a system of tick-marks to record Little Johns' behavior, good or bad. I would inform him every time he was getting a tick-mark. I constantly gave him goals to work towards and informed him when he was getting close to achieving them. Here are some of the goals he worked towards for a day/week:
5 tick-marks = move his pin up
10 tick-marks = pin moved and brag-tag
15 = pin moved and treasure box
20 = pin moved and lunch with teacher
RESULTS: Did it work?
Yes......But, it was a LOT of work. It was worth it in the end though. For the most part his attention was focused on whatever the task was that I put in front of him. He still struggled at times and would be pretty devastated when he got a tick-mark on the "not so good" side of the board. I believe that at least some of the behavior was derived from the child's desire to have the attention of the teacher, some was from lack of skill or knowledge in subject are/matter, and some to do with ADHD. Whatever the reason after a lot of one-on-one and a bunch of positive reinforcement he responded in a mostly positive manner and for that I am very proud of my Little John.