As with most teachers and teacher candidates, I am very interested in what I can do as a classroom manager to produce positive behavior in my students. After reading the chapter on positive behavior for our cooperative group learning project, I found ideas that have worked for many teachers. Of these, the one I really think will work and have seen in action while in high school was the idea of responsibility training. Responsibility training is the idea of having an incentive program for students in the classroom that uses rewards and bonuses for students when they follow the rules and guidelines, but also has penalties and take-away items when the students do not follow the rules set forth for them.
When I was in high school, my freshmen World History teacher was great with this concept of responsibility training. The idea was that if we as students would work well in the group setting and get work completed we would get to "experience history" for thirty minutes at the end of every week. However, as the week went on and we as students did not follow the rules we would lose time by chunks of five and sometimes ten minutes to the thirty we were allotted at the end of the week. As students we were responsible for holding each other accountable and making sure everyone did their work and stayed on task. You did not want to be the person that kept the class from the "experiencing history" lesson at the end of the week. For example, a lesson would consist of lining the desks on either side of the classroom and having trench warfare for ten minutes with paper balls and then discussing the strengths and weaknesses, as well as what we experienced to what the people of history experienced. It was a great reward to have at the end of the week, but was also not fun when we did not get that reward for whatever reason that may be.
I think positive classroom behavior is important, but as the teacher we have to find a way to encourage positive classroom behavior. This is not something that all students learn on their own, so as the teacher I must encourage this development.
I absolutely love this! I hope that I will be able to do something similar to this and help make history fun for my students. It is a wonderful idea to bring it to life like your teacher did because so many students view history as boring and irrelevant.
ReplyDeleteIt's key that the teacher had something to offer that was valued by the students, was content related, and actually sounds like it brought some relevance and depth to the class. This is an ideal type of reward.
ReplyDeleteI think your World History teacher had a great method. In my practicum Mr. Martin takes away points when students are out of hand, especially when they work in groups. I think his class could benefit from having him ADD ON something fun to the class and then subtracting from that rather than just taking away points from their overall grade. This system is in a way made up of using rewards but NOT focusing on rewards. Seems like a good balance.
ReplyDeleteThat would be so much fun, never got to do that in high school. Were there ever issues with students not caring about experiencing history and bringing the experience down for the rest of the class?
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