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Back-to-School Classroom Management: Are You Working Smarter or Harder? [Episode 158]

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Overview of episode 158:

One of the biggest struggles as a teacher, especially when you’re new to the profession, is managing your classroom. With so much going into classroom management, the main component being student behaviors, you want to find ways to keep students motivated and exhibit positive behaviors in your classroom. And one of those ways is through class rewards. So, in today’s episode, we’re sharing how to make your back-to-school classroom management system work in your favor and not against you.

Whether to give students rewards in a classroom has always been up for debate. While we’re not here to share whether it’s right or wrong, we do discuss the time of year reward systems are effective, their impact on teachers, and which type of reward is more motivating to students. When planning your back-to-school classroom management system, teachers often implement rewards right away, but we caution against that idea. Instead, we share pointers on how to use rewards deliberately in order to be more effective. 

Being able to manage your classroom, build relationships, and acknowledge students for their positive behavior is an important part of the classroom community, and rewards can help establish that. But before your back-to-school classroom management system includes class rewards, consider your purpose in using them and the type of reward you’re offering to best motivate your students.

Highlights from the episode:

[00:48] Today’s morning message: Which school supply, besides pencils, causes your biggest teacher headaches? 

[05:04] Reasons why you don’t need to start the year with a reward system.

[09:30] Unpacking the problems with rewards.

[11:46] Counteracting the problem of vague criteria.

[18:18] Today’s teacher-approved tip for using surprise and delight for team building.

Resources:

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Read the transcript for episode 158, Back-to-School Classroom Management: Are You Working Smarter or Harder?:

Emily  0:37

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’re talking about all the ins and outs of class rewards and sharing a teacher approved tip for bonding with your new students.

Heidi  0:48

We start our episodes with a morning message, just like we used to do at morning meeting in our classrooms. This week’s morning message is which school supply, besides pencils, causes your biggest teacher headaches? People have big feelings about their supplies, it turns out, and we had almost 100 comments on this post.

Emily  1:08

It’s almost as if your student supplies cause a lot of problems all day, every day. Tanya can’t with the scented glue sticks and Bobby JoJo upped the sticks with scented scissors. Who is responsible for this? I need names.

Heidi  1:24

That shouldn’t even be a thing.

Emily  1:26

Adrian and many, many others sing the sad tale of the expo markers such a pain. Becky’s headaches come from the extra fun supplies that parents send that weren’t asked for. And Emily adds she specifically doesn’t appreciate the huge packs of markers that don’t fit anywhere. But Shelley solves these problems by saying, if she didn’t ask for it, it goes home, which I think is the way to handle it.

Heidi  1:51

I did something similar and said that it had to be kept in the backpack, because I didn’t want to be the one to spoil the joy of the new supplies. They were so excited. I just like, oh well, you have to keep that in your backpack. We don’t have room here. And then within a day or two, somehow I always ended up left at home because they didn’t want to carry it around.

Emily  2:08

I remember my first year teaching, I had a little guy that came with all these extra fancy supplies his parents had bought, and I was freaking out, and that’s what you told me to do. You were like, tell him he has to keep it in his backpack. And that solved the problem.

Heidi  2:21

That’s a perk for having their desk turn around. There really is no place to put it. So it’s true.

Emily  2:27

Lots of teachers have big feelings about the mini pencil sharpeners that result in shavings left all over the floor. Yeah, don’t do that to yourself. And Rachel, Denise and Andrea all said headphones.

Heidi  2:41

And as several teachers mentioned, and I think we can all agree, we hate the off brand supplies. The cheap glue stick that doesn’t stick, the waxy crayons that won’t color, and those pencils that break as soon as you sharpen them, because, like, the lead is broken all the way through the pencil. This job was hard enough without cheap supplies, making everything take twice as long.

Emily  3:01

I saw someone on Threads the other day asking, Why do I have to buy these special pencils? And everyone’s like, it’s Ticonderoga, and you have to buy them because they are far superior. And like, a little while later, that person came back and said, Okay, clearly I misunderstood. There was a reason I will honor that. We need all parents to do that, please.

Heidi  3:22

Yes. Well, like just, we’re not putting this on here because we have stock in T pencils.

Emily  3:22

Exactly. We’d love to hear your school supply woes over in the teacher approved Facebook group.

Heidi  3:37

So many people are starting back tomorrow. Happy first day, Eve.

Emily  3:43

And the rest of you have probably been back for a while. Hopefully you’re getting into the groove of things, and your bladder training has paid off.

Heidi  3:51

Today, we are suggesting one thing you can do to make these early days of school a little easier.

Emily  3:57

And that suggestion is an easy one. All we want you to do is abandon your reward system.

Heidi  4:04

Are we crazy? Maybe, but stick with us. I think a lot of teachers start off with rewards on day one because they’re worried. Classroom management is tricky. A lot comes at you fast, and having a reward system can feel comforting.

Heidi  4:18

You might not know what you’re doing, but you know that once your class earns 15 good citizen points, you can have an extra recess. But in the end, all you’re doing by starting the year with rewards is watering the grass during a rainstorm. It’s a lot of time and energy for minimal benefits.

Emily  4:35

And let me jump in here with our caveat anytime we talk about rewards, which is that we are not referring to any students whose specific learning plan calls for a reward system. We are talking about the type of thing like, if you earn 50 smart bucks, you can come to the movie party at the end of the month.

Heidi  4:53

In most cases, unless you already know that you have a lot of severe behavior problems in your class. And if that’s the case. I’m so sorry. You likely do not need to start the year with a reward system.

Heidi  5:04

And let’s talk about why that is. One reason is that starting the year with rewards means you are rewarding behaviors that kids will do without an incentive.

Emily  5:14

Kids want their teachers to like them, even those kids who go about showing that in the most unlikable ways. If kids know they don’t have to earn your love by acting a certain way, they’re more likely to behave without an external reward because they feel like they belong.

Heidi  5:29

All of those affirming and training activities from your ATTABOY goals pay off. Think about the difference in messaging between if we can walk to the computer lab without talking, we’ll earn a party point, and we’re going to walk to the computer lab without talking. If we have a hard time with that, we’ll try again, because I know we can do it.

Emily  5:48

In the first situation, we’re offering external rewards for a task that most students are willing to do intrinsically. It’s like giving an adult a sticker chart for brushing their teeth. Clean teeth, for most adults, is enough of a reason to brush No stickers required, and for most kids, getting to the computer lab without having to turn around and try again, is enough of a reason to walk quietly in the hall.

Heidi  6:12

There are some good things that come with rewards, but decades of studies have shown that rewards can have negative effects on motivation when they are tangible, if earning the reward is tied to vague criteria, and if the reward is offered beforehand.

Emily  6:29

And those are just the problems for the students. Let’s talk about how rewards impact teachers. If I give Corbin a smiley ticket for quietly getting his math book out and turning to the right page, I likely have two goals. I want Corbin to know that there are benefits to following directions, and I want the other kids to get the hint that there are benefits to following directions. I’m hoping they’ll see that Corbin gets rewarded for doing the thing I asked, so they’ll start to follow directions too.

Heidi  6:58

Now we have a problem where we’ve launched a system that requires infinite rewards in order to generate student cooperation. But those rewards are not actually creating cooperative students. They’re creating reward seeking students.

Emily  7:13

Not only that, but a smiley ticket seems pretty cool in September, but by November, nobody cares anymore. So what do we do? Do we give them two smiley tickets for taking out their math books? Do we have to switch smiley tickets for party points?

Heidi  7:27

We end up feeding the system in increasingly motivating ways to get the same outcomes. That’s not giving us any less work. We’ve just switched managing behavior for managing a reward system.

Emily  7:40

And we have no way of knowing if that reward is actually making our behavior management easier, because we just threw smiley tickets out there without a clear goal.

Heidi  7:49

The reality is that most students have the skills they need to meet your expectations without needing to be rewarded. And while kids are excited to earn rewards, they aren’t going to be excited by behavior Bingo or fun time points all year long.

Heidi  8:05

So what you end up doing is burning through your ideas really quickly, and then when you get farther into the school year, and inevitably, more behavior problems crop up, the incentives are old, so you’re left scrambling to come up with something totally new.

Emily  8:19

But despite how it may sound, we’re not anti rewards. That’s because rewards do work to shape behavior, if big if, you’re deliberate about how you use them.

Heidi  8:32

It’s been about a year since we’ve talked about this, so we will forgive you if you have forgotten. But our teacher approved behavior management plan is held up by three pillars. The first pillar is preventing behavior problems from happening. The second pillar is handling the problems that still crop up. And the third pillar is predicting when your regular classroom management plan won’t be enough and how to boost your regular management with rewards.

Emily  8:57

Rewards aren’t necessarily good or bad, they are just tools. You can use any tool in negative ways, but that doesn’t mean you should never use it. You just have to be a good judge of when to use it.

Heidi  9:10

If you go back to Episode 103, we talk about when you might want to use rewards, but today we want to share some pointers about how to use them. And the word we are focused on today is deliberate. If we want rewards to make our classrooms run more smoothly and make our jobs easier, we have to use them deliberately.

Emily  9:30

We can start by unpacking the problems with rewards. We mentioned that they only work in the short term, and they decrease motivation if they are tangible, if there’s no clear criteria for how to earn them and if they’re offered beforehand.

Heidi  9:45

Let’s dive into handling the short term problem. Since any reward loses its appeal after a while, we want to be deliberate about only using them in the short term. That means you don’t need to start the school year with a reward system in place. Yes, you probably want to use rewards in December and at the end of the school year and any other time your kids are likely to be squirlier than usual.

Emily  10:09

Save rewards for when you really need them to make your job easier. Think about what a relief it would be to introduce a reward system in December and suddenly find your class really focused on working quietly two weeks before winter break.

Heidi  10:25

That would feel like you won the teacher version of the lottery, partly because it’s a delightful classroom surprise, and partly because you won’t get any actual money.

Emily  10:33

Now let’s talk about the types of rewards we use. Ideally, we want to avoid tangible rewards like treats and little toys. They are motivating, but besides the cost, they are more detrimental to intrinsic motivation than other types of rewards are. So skip those in most cases.

Heidi  10:52

But not in all cases. Some students with high needs rely on tangible rewards, and that’s okay. We are meeting our kids where they’re at.

Emily  11:01

Also tangible rewards are great motivators for tedious tasks. If the district required some sort of pointless, boring assessment, I had no problem offering my kids a treat or a trinket for their cooperation. I don’t need them intrinsically motivated to complete a 45 minute pre test. I just need them to do it.

Heidi  11:20

Alternatives to treats or trinkets might be a class party, watching a movie, choosing where to sit for a day, getting to do an assignment in marker, bringing in a show and tell item, choosing the game for morning meeting, and literally anything else your students find motivating.

Emily  11:35

Okay, we’re saving our reward systems to use in the short term and motivating kids with a variety of rewards. What can we do to solve the problem of vague criteria?

Heidi  11:47

We counteract that by offering a clear path for what earns the reward. Depending on what your class needs there are a couple of ways to do this.

Heidi  11:55

Let’s say you’re going to have a substitute teacher for the next three days, and you want your class to behave. So you’re leaving a reward system where the class can earn puzzle pieces. If the puzzle is complete when you return, they’ll earn flashlight Friday. Whoo. In order to make this successful, you need a posted list of choices that earn puzzle pieces.

Emily  12:17

This is the sort of thing you could make on your own, but you’ll get more student engagement if you have your students help make the list. Just try to keep everything you add to the list positive and generally applicable. Saying kids can earn a puzzle piece if everyone remembers the rules at recess is more useful than saying they earn a piece if no one climbs on top of the slide or no one argues over the basketball.

Heidi  12:40

Creating a list of positive behaviors is one way to tie your rewards to a level of performance. Another way is to select a specific behavior goal. If your class is struggling with so many things that listing them all would take too long, or if your class is struggling with one area in particular, you might want to tie your reward to a single behavior goal.

Emily  13:02

For example, maybe your class causes problems in the hall or can’t work without chatting to their neighbors. If those situations are creating issues, targeting them with a reward system might be exactly what you need.

Heidi  13:15

Just make sure that your measurement of success is something actually in your control. For example, if you’re targeting hallway behavior, maybe your class can earn a tally mark toward their bring a stuffy from home reward if you can make it to specialty classes without anyone talking. That is clear and specific, and it’s easy for kids to know if they met the goal or not.

Heidi  13:35

What’s trickier is rewarding the class if they receive a compliment on their behavior from a passing adult. Maybe you won’t pass another adult, and if you do, there’s no way to guarantee that they will compliment your class. So that’s kind of a frustrating way to earn a reward.

Emily  13:50

It’s much more motivating for kids if the reward is tied to outcomes they can control, which raises the question, what do you do when you forget to give the reward? And if you’ve tried to manage a reward system before, you know it happens quite a bit, right?

Heidi  14:06

The teacher cannot possibly see what is happening everywhere at once. Plus, there are generally so many good things happening in the classroom that you would spend all day rewarding if you recognized every single positive choice.

Emily  14:20

Kids can get resentful if they’re expecting rewards that don’t come. So one way to counteract that is to shift our if then rewards to now that rewards.

Heidi  14:30

This comes from Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. And I know we have mentioned his book Win, but I’m not sure if we’ve talked about Drive before. Neither of these are specifically related to education, but they do have a lot to say about education, and they have lots of important takeaways for teachers.

Emily  14:48

If then rewards are the standard classroom reward, if everyone finishes their math page before two, then we’ll have five minutes of free drawing time. If then works great for immediate results, and it’s a good way to make sure something gets done. But it does have drawbacks with suppressing intrinsic motivation. Lack of long term sustainability, and increasing the amount of work required by the teacher to maintain those rewards.

Heidi  15:14

A pivot from if then rewards is now that rewards. Now that everyone got their math page done so quickly, we can have five minutes of drawing time. The surprise factor of now that rewards solves a couple of problems. First, when kids know their actions will receive a reward, it creates a link in their minds that the action isn’t worth doing unless it’s rewarded. We want to avoid that. And second, the teacher doesn’t have to remember to reward students every single time.

Emily  15:44

How this might look in the classroom is, you have your class discussion about what sorts of behaviors are to reward, then you tell students that sometimes, when you see those behaviors, it will earn them a punch on their punch card, or whatever your reward is.

Heidi  15:59

Now you’ve taken some of the burden off of your shoulders and increased student interest by using a variable reinforcement schedule, if you remember that from college, if you don’t know when something will happen, you are more interested in seeing if it will happen, kind of like playing a slot machine, and that keeps your rewards more exciting.

Emily  16:19

But like all tools, it’s important to know when to use now that rewards. If then rewards are reliable if you need to get students on board with something quickly, use if then. If you’re targeting a specific behavior, like not blurting out, start with, if then rewards, and then try transitioning to now that rewards. If your students have a lot of behavior issues start with if then. Just remember that the goal is to help students grow to a place where the rewards aren’t necessary.

Heidi  16:49

And before we launch any reward system, we want to intentionally consider all the variables and how they can best support our students. If that sounds overwhelming, don’t worry, we have got a tool to help you out.

Emily  17:02

Even though it’s only September, you might want to check out our December teacher survival kit. It’s all in Google Sheets, so it’s easy to edit. One of the tabs is specifically for planning out when and how to use a reward system. You can use this form to plan any reward system, not just your December rewards.

Heidi  17:03

I’m really proud of this page. It helps you narrow in on why you want to use rewards, what you want to get out of them, how best to structure your system, and what your next step should look like. As I was developing this, I did a lot of digging to see how other people were structuring similar pages, and I couldn’t find anything that was close to this at all. As far as I know, this is a Second Story Window original idea.

Emily  17:47

So grab it and get ahead of the game. You might not need a reward system in September, but you might want one the week before Halloween. In the show notes, you can get the link to the December kit, which includes the reward system planner.

Heidi  18:00

If tomorrow is a regular Tuesday for you, we hope you have a very Happy Tuesday. And if tomorrow is your first day of school, we are wishing you the very best year yet.

Emily  18:11

We’d love to hear how your Tuesday went and how you handle rewards over in the teacher approved Facebook group.

Emily  18:18

Now let’s talk about this week’s teacher approved tip each week we leave you with a small, actionable tip that you can apply in your classroom today. This week’s teacher approved tip is use surprise and delight for team building. We love talking about surprise and delight. Tell us more about it, Heidi.

Heidi  18:34

Well I’m bringing this up today because one of the most frequently cited reasons for starting the school year with a reward system is that it builds class unity. And that might be true, but it also might not be doing that at all. In order for a reward system to promote class bonding, you have to know that every kid was participating because they see value in the effort, and not just to make their teacher happy.

Heidi  18:59

The bonding part of a class reward is the reward part, so why not skip to the fun? Instead of earning the reward, offer it to your kids as a gift of surprise and delight, simply because you like them. Enjoy a short movie and some popcorn, or do silent reading outside one day. That will do much more for building relationships than earning tally marks that might get them the exact same reward.

Emily  19:24

And while we were talking about surprise and delight, I saw Target has their cute Halloween ducks on sale. Our teacher approved tip in episode 114 was to use a rubber duck for surprise and delight. Some teachers do this all year long, but it would be so much more impactful if you use it for a month here and there during the year.

Heidi  19:44

And if you want an excuse to buy the cute seasonal ducks from Target, this is it. This is your moment. So how this works is that each day, a student finds the duck on their desk, and they are the lucky duck for the day. The lucky duck gets some special privileges and responsibilities. And then the next day it moves to someone else.

Emily  20:02

So if you want to try this for October, grab the ducks now, especially before they’re all gone from the Target stores.

Heidi  20:09

To wrap up the show we are sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

Emily  20:14

I’m giving extra credit to the Skylight calendar. You’ve probably seen it around. It’s a digital family calendar and organizer that’s like a touch screen that can sit on your counter. I wasn’t sure we would really use it, but I decided to grab it for summer so that my babysitter would know where everyone needed to be each day. But honestly, it’s been a game changer.

Emily  20:35

Chores have been going so much better now that the kids can easily see their list and check it off on the Skylight. It’s easy for me to think of something one of the kids needs to do and then add it to the Skylight from the app on my phone, which happened just this morning. I was working, and I’m like, oh, one of the kids needs to do this when they get home from school, I can hurry and add it on the app.

Emily  20:56

And it’s helpful for all of us to be able to see what the family schedule is for the day or week. They have some other features, like meal planning that I haven’t totally utilized yet, but I’m excited to. It is a splurge, but definitely has helped me with carrying the mental load of parenting.

Heidi  21:12

And I don’t know what I clicked on on Instagram, but suddenly my whole feed is just full of ads. And I was thinking, Oh, do I need that? No, it’s just me. I don’t need it, but it’s so pretty.

Emily  21:23

Just today while I was driving children around, I was thinking in the car like I wonder how teachers could use the Skylight in the classroom. So if I come up for with a way to do it, I’ll let you know if you need an excuse. But if not, for sure, it should help you at home. What are you giving extra credit to, Heidi?

Heidi  21:39

Well my extra credit makes me sound 85 years old. Nothing new here, but I’m giving extra credit to Dr Scholls sneakers.

Emily  21:50

Very demure.

Heidi  21:53

I wanted some slip on sneakers to wear around the house, and my criteria for these sneakers were that they have built in arch support and if they cost less than 100 and you would think those would not be hard to find. And in the past, it has not been hard to find. But I guess we’re not in slip on season, or, I don’t know what, but I couldn’t find any anywhere.

Heidi  22:11

The Dr Scholls came up, and I said, No, because come on. But they’re only 50 bucks, so that felt like an affordable risk, and I have been wearing them for a couple weeks now, so they’re all worn in and I am pleasantly surprised. They are as comfortable as my old Danskos  were, and they are half the price. Wow.

Heidi  22:29

Yeah, I think they would make comfortable teacher shoes. If you have found that your feet are sore now that you’re standing all day. I will say I think they run a little narrow. I don’t normally need a wide size shoe, but these have felt a little bit tight. I’m hoping they’ll stretch, but otherwise, no complaints, and a great price.

Emily  22:47

Oh, awesome.

Heidi  22:49

That is it for today’s episode. Be deliberate about planning and using your reward systems and use surprise and delight for some beginning of the year class bonding.

More About Teacher Approved:

Do you ever feel like there’s just not enough time in the day to be the kind of teacher you really want to be? The Teacher Approved podcast is here to help you learn how to elevate what matters and simplify the rest. Join co-hosts Emily and Heidi of Second Story Window each week as they share research-based and teacher-approved strategies you can count on to make your teaching more efficient and effective than ever before.

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