Swimming With Good Character
This year has been a challenging one for me. I have many students in my classroom who have behavioral issues as well as students who “clash” with each other. I was spending a lot of time dealing with behavioral issues and I realized that the students who were always doing the right thing, were often neglected. In order to highlight and reward positive behaviors in my class I decided to change the classroom behavior plan to positive rewards instead of consequences. I spoke with the students about my idea, and we worked together to come up with a plan for how students could work to earn privileges for doing their personal best (we call this our “Bingham Best” at the school-Bingham Farms Elementary). The class came up with a list of privileges that they thought would help motivate them. The class used the current way of tracking behavior; fish in a tank drawn on the white board, and turned it completely around. The results were amazing!