Classroom Incentives

Today is Tiger Ticket Tuesday...even though it is actually Wednesday (no-school day Monday pushed our week off a bit).  This essentially means we try to flood our students with Tiger Pride tickets to try to increase their positive behaviors.  Every Tuesday our fearless Tiger Pride leader reminds us of ways we can promote positive behavior in our classrooms and throughout the school and then reward the students with tickets for the weekly drawing.  Normally I am very bad about doing this regularly, but I do try to make a conscious effort to give out more tickets.  Wearing them on my lanyard seems to be helping, but inevitably I am just not in the groove of remembering to reward good behavior with tickets.

Today, I made it my goal to reward students who were on task with their work time.  As I reflected yesterday on my concern over productivity, I tried to see if I could encourage good work skills by giving students displaying those skills with tickets in an attempt to encourage other students to copy the good behavior.  My entire first period class did wonderfully and I reward them with tickets, but I found myself getting side tracked throughout my class periods with helping students and not remembering to give out tickets like I should have.  By the end of the day, I was back to shushing students and trying to get them to work quietly, when I should have handed out tickets and in a way bribed the students to behave.  It is something that I am sure could work, but will take some definite focus on my part to remember to give out the tickets.

These Tiger Pride tickets have often gotten me wondered about why we are rewarding students for doing things that they should already be doing.  Schools have changed so much that required or expected behavior has to be coaxed from students instead of it being automatic.  I can remember when sitting still, paying attention, and working quietly was how it should be an anything else was unacceptable by everyone involved.  Now, I find myself having to bribe students to behave and rewarding them for behaving.  In a ways I suppose I have to look at the tickets like an incentive to work in the classroom just like a paycheck is the incentive to work at your job.