Incentives to Increase Learning and Positive Behavior!

Funded Dec 21, 2019

We are using the incentives that we received for our "classroom store" so that the students can exchange their green character counts tickets for different incentives every month. The amount of tickets that each student earns each month determines how many incentives they can get from the "classroom store." Since the students saw the new incentives, I noticed that each month the students are earning more green character counts tickets than before. This is because they have been more motivated to work harder participating in class, doing classwork and homework. Other students are also working harder to improve their behavior, which has also helped them to improve academically. Overall, the incentives that we received have increased the effectiveness of my rewards system. The first month that I opened the "classroom store" students were very excited to exchange their green character counts tickets for different incentives. One students made a comment as she was exchanging her tickets. She said, "We should spend all of our tickets so we can get what we want from the store because we are working very hard to earn our tickets." This showed me that students understand and value the reward system that I implemented.

When the students saw the boxes from Amazon, they wanted to know what was inside. When I explained to them that inside the boxes were incentives for the "classroom store" that were donated to us, they were very surprised that we were getting free incentives. After I explained a little bit about DonorsChoose, it made more sense to them. Then, they asked me to open the boxes to see what was inside, they were very curious. When I started showing them the different incentives that were inside the boxes, they were very excited and they all had a big smile on their faces. As they saw the different incentives that they liked the most, they were making comments such us, "I'm going to get that!" or "how many tickets will that cost?" Since they saw the incentives, I could see their happiness of having new incentives in their "classroom store."

My next steps for my students on this project has been the implementation of ClassDojo. Students earn points on ClassDojo based on their behavior, participation and classwork. Since parents have access to ClassDojo, they can see how many points their child earns every week. I'm using this point system in addition to my rewards system to keep motivating my students to increase their learning and their positive behavior. For this reason, every week we check how many points every student earned on ClassDojo. And the student/s that have the most amount of points can choose an incentive from the "classroom store." They really like getting a "free incentive" from the store without having to spend their green character counts tickets.”

With gratitude,

Ms. Maldonado