Classroom Management Win!

I just wanted to start off this week by saying how grateful I am for all of the kind words of encouragement and awesome advice in response to my last post. Sometimes teaching can be overwhelming, but I am so thankful to have the support of such a wonderful community of teachers!

One of the suggestions I received from a few teachers is to look into using the app "Class Dojo". On this app, you can add your class roster. Each student gets a monster that can earn or lose points throughout the day, for good behavior or bad behavior respectively.

I started exploring the app this past weekend. It comes preloaded with a handful of behaviors. When you press a student's monster, you can either give 'positive' feedback or 'needs improvement' feedback. Some of the behaviors under positive are 'on task', 'participating', 'working hard' and 'teamwork'. Each of the positive behaviors earns one point. The 'needs improvement' behaviors include 'off task', 'disrespect', 'bullying' and 'talking out of turn'. Each of these behaviors makes the monster lose a point. What I really like is that you can add your own behaviors to the list. For example, a big problem in my classroom is having a bad attitude so I was able to add that behavior to needs improvement. On the other hand, I wanted to add 'good attitude' to the positive behaviors in order to encourage this disposition.

Not only can you keep track of student behavior daily with the app, but it also stores the certain behaviors that resulted in a gain or loss of points. I like that feature because I want to be able to go back and talk with my students about their behaviors in class, whether positive or negative.

You can also invite parents to the app, so that they can see how their child is behaving in class. For parents that want to stay connected more often, this is an awesome feature.

I started yesterday morning by explaining "Class Dojo" to my first graders. They were excited to have a monster, and, of course, they love anything that appears to be a game! Immediately, I noticed a difference in their behavior. We talked for a while about what they would have to do to earn points, and when we started doing our Daily 5 (Reading) centers, my first graders were more focused and stayed on task for longer. It was like a miracle! It's amazing that such a small thing can make such a big difference.

I have a behavior chart in my classroom and students earn tokens each morning depending on what color that they ended on the previous day. At the end of the week, we have token drawing to earn prizes. So if a student behaves well, they have a better chance of winning. But I think that they liked this better because it was very concrete and had a physical reward at the end of the day instead of having to wait all week.

I also usually struggle to get my students to participate in group activities. I love being able to provide a motivator for participating! Most of my students were eager to participate with the knowledge that they would earn a point for it :)

Throughout the day, obviously, there were some students who lost points for certain behaviors, but overall we had a pretty good day! My students were constantly asking about how many points they had; at the beginning of the day, I told them that if they earned 10 points by the end of the day, they would earn a prize (fun pencil or eraser, little notepad, etc.) (thanks for the suggestion, Becky!). My students were excited about trying to earn the points needed and it kept them on their toes all day.

Sometimes, I try something that will work for a couple days and then it will lose its effectiveness. I'm crossing my fingers that "Class Dojo" keeps producing such wonderful results!