From June 30, 2021
First off, there is validity to tracking behavior data - it is how we understand if what we are doing works - but there is no need to make things so complicated. Here's what I don't like: multi-leveled reward systems that look more like an Amway sales pyramid.
You and I both know that intrinsic reward is much more effective than extrinsic anyway, so why put so much effort into some positive behavior system? Ten reward tickets gets you a piece-of-junk reward that companies sell by the gross. Ten such rewards earns the recipient a larger award. With 100 points, a recipient gets a special privilege. When the class accumulates 1,000 tally marks, there will be a special activity. And every month, if you haven't made anybody angry, you can have yet another special classwide activity. This is not to mention that at the end of each semester, there will be a drawing that, really, nobody knows how to be eligible or how the winners are picked.
Most of this doesn't result in positive behavior. It only makes the teachers who excel at party planning happy. Really, once again, I am not a party planner. It's not the job I was hired for. No, I'm not trying to be a stick in the mud; I'm just saying, I'd like to make my class special on more than one day a month. I would rather integrate these types of special activities into my daily schedule. To stop everything and call it special gives the impression that the other days are not.
I can use the time better. I can encourage my students to make a better culture without having to navigate some complicated chart some of schoolwide trinket-ice-cream-movie-relay-race pyramid of rewards to satisfy teachers' need to feel like they are doing something that is supposedly research-based. Fact: just because something has been reduced to an acronym does not mean it is research-based or effective. Another fact: even if it is research-based, that doesn't mean it will work in my classroom.
You and I both know that intrinsic reward is much more effective than extrinsic anyway, so why put so much effort into some positive behavior system? Ten reward tickets gets you a piece-of-junk reward that companies sell by the gross. Ten such rewards earns the recipient a larger award. With 100 points, a recipient gets a special privilege. When the class accumulates 1,000 tally marks, there will be a special activity. And every month, if you haven't made anybody angry, you can have yet another special classwide activity. This is not to mention that at the end of each semester, there will be a drawing that, really, nobody knows how to be eligible or how the winners are picked.
Most of this doesn't result in positive behavior. It only makes the teachers who excel at party planning happy. Really, once again, I am not a party planner. It's not the job I was hired for. No, I'm not trying to be a stick in the mud; I'm just saying, I'd like to make my class special on more than one day a month. I would rather integrate these types of special activities into my daily schedule. To stop everything and call it special gives the impression that the other days are not.
I can use the time better. I can encourage my students to make a better culture without having to navigate some complicated chart some of schoolwide trinket-ice-cream-movie-relay-race pyramid of rewards to satisfy teachers' need to feel like they are doing something that is supposedly research-based. Fact: just because something has been reduced to an acronym does not mean it is research-based or effective. Another fact: even if it is research-based, that doesn't mean it will work in my classroom.
