Prize drawings for good behavior...a PBS strategy.

Near the beginning of this school year, my placement school had an inservice workshop about Positive Behavior Systems (PBS). In the workshop we learned about what PBS is and isn't, as well as what it takes to implement PBS. They showed us some great examples of what other schools have done, and different activities to improve overall student behavior.

After listening to it all, I thought that I could implement at least one of the strategies that they mentioned. The strategy involved giving more attention to those students who exhibit positive and acceptable behavior in the classroom. In doing so, you can emphasize recognizing the students who do act appropriately, and minimize the attention that you may normally give the students who act inappropriately. I know that I was definitely giving too much attention and spending too much time on those students who did not follow the rules. So, what I decided to do was reward the students who did act appropriately each day. In one particular class, we give daily points for being on time to class, prepared, on task, and respectful of the teacher and other students. If the students earned their full amount of daily points each day, I put their name in to a drawing. At the end of the unit, I decided to hold a drawing and the students could win a variety of prizes. So, the incentive was to earn the full amount of points each day to get more chances at winning, and anyone who got their full daily points everyday would automatically win a prize.

I let the students know the parameters, and had a nicely decorated jar for all of the names to go in to. At first, some of the students that that it was stupid (did I mention that these students are freshman), but quite a few were very excited about winning a prize. This class is very competitive, so I figured that they would like doing something like this. It did end up helping their behavior in this class, and they enjoyed the activity. It was something different and gave some of the students something to look forward to. Anyone else tried something like this?