Fun Friday is a way to motivate students to display good behavior throughout the week in order to receive a preferred activity on Friday as a reward. This is often more effective than taking away recess, which leaves teachers dealing with hyperactive students who were not allowed to run off extra energy because of being disciplined.

Fun Friday can be as simple and short as an extra half hour of free time spent doing one or more different choice activities. This could be game time, extra recess, computer time or other ideas that the students come up with.

If some students have not earned a chance to participate in Fun Friday, they could be required to sit at their desk and read or keep their heads down.

Like getting a new idea each week? Send in your ideas to keep them coming!

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So for your first idea – Mystery Student

During times of the day where behavior needs to be improved upon (walking in the halls, lunch, reading groups, etc.) watch the students for one who is following the rules and expectations and doing a great job. The students should know that you are watching for a mystery student. Then, after the class period is over or whatever time frame you chose to watch for the mystery student during, there should be a reward ceremony to publicly announce who the mystery student was.

A twist on the mystery student is to choose a mystery piece of trash at the end of the day and which ever student manages to pick up that particular piece of trash again receives public praise and perhaps a small reward (a new pencil?) for finding the mystery piece of trash.

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The first step in establishing student discipline in a private tutoring setting is to set clear boundaries.

While you may not set clear rules like you would in a class, the boundaries need to be clearly communicated. In order to do this, you need to have specific behaviors you are looking to see in the student and acceptable alternatives. Here are some of the examples from my time as a private tutor.

First, I provided the parent with a list of expectations, separated into two sections:

What You Can Expect:

• I will work with your children individually, and work to foster in them a love of learning.
• I will provide a daily progress update for tutoring sessions that includes information on what we did, what I observed, and what you can do at home to help continue what we are working on.
• I will keep all information regarding your family and your child confidential
• I will provide make ups for scheduled sessions that you are unable to attend in cases of illness or emergency.

What I Expect:

• I expect you to be prompt in bringing your child to sessions.
• I expect you to be prompt in picking your child up from sessions.
• I expect your child to be respectful and to try.
• I expect you to call me no later than 30 minutes prior to a scheduled session if you must cancel.

These are vague and do not set clear boundaries for the students but it did make the parents aware that I expected the child to be respectful and willing to try, which provided me with a starting point.

More specifics of how I expected each individual tutoring session to go included:

1. Student would respond to me when spoken to or asked a question – I used a lot of humor to build a rapport with the student.

2. Students should ask questions when things do not make sense – this was an important lesson some of my students needed to learn, and I made a big deal of being excited about questions because that gave me something to teach!

3. Students should avoid negative words/comments. This was something I taught and reinforced at each session.

4. I expected students to do what I told them to. Honestly, I never questioned the fact that each student would just DO what I instructed them to do. If the student didn’t/couldn’t, I prompted them to ask whatever question he/she had and treated the situation as if I hadn’t done my job well enough yet, because when I had taught it properly, the student would be able to do it.

I incorporated these expectations into each day and each lesson. Students quickly became accustomed to these expectations.

In addition, one last point about teaching proper behavior – I used a ticketing system with my students. I had a ledger with each child’s name at the top of a new page. During the lesson, I would award tickets (find a roll of raffle tickets at any party store) for the things I wanted to see. For example I would give a ticket for:

• Coming in with a smile/positive attitude.
• Asking a good question.
• Trying (especially when the try failed).
• Telling the truth, etc.

At the end of the session, (for a one hour session) I added the tickets up and entered them into the ledger. I always ended 5 minutes early so that the student could then “shop” in my store. Everything in the store was bought at the dollar store and labeled with an amount of tickets.

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Here is one of my favorite:

Want more great ideas? Check out Energizing Brain Breaks.

Give brain breaks a try in your classroom and see how the students respond! Did you try one you especially liked? Tell us about it!

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3. Why Students Misbehave

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Take Advantage of Nice Weather as a Motivator

When motivating students to behave in class as the weather warms up, often the most effective strategy is to go outside. Some ideas include:

1. Come up with activities that can be completed outside (active games and scavenger hunts are great options).
2. Reward good behavior with extra recess
3. Offer an extra class period outside given a set of requirements met.

Focus on Beneficial Life Skills

While the mandated curriculum is important to follow, once the standardized state testing is completed, it is a good idea to shift the focus of lessons to why students need the information. Making the information geared towards life skills will help students stay motivated and will often change the tone of classroom instruction in such a way that discipline problems from spring fever can be minimized.

Remember during these final weeks of school that patience is important. Training students to become life-long learners is as important as any individual lesson so remember to take advantage of every teachable moment in the classroom.

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3. Q. How do I Motivate My Students?

When praising a student, it is important to be as specific as possible.

• “Excellent handwriting!” is praise that will encourage more neatly written work.
• “Good question” thanks the student for participating and provides great opportunity to further learning.
• “I like the way you….” tells the student exactly what he or she did well.

The more specific the praise, the more sincere it is to the student and the student in turn knows exactly what he or she is doing well.

Does this mean that saying “good job” is bad? Not necessarily. Let’s take a look at when it would be appropriate to say good job to a student.

When praise is appropriate but time is short, good job might be an acceptable statement. For example, after a student gives a presentation to the class, a teacher might say “nice presentation, Sam” and turn to the next student in line. Specifying one thing that the student did well during the presentation might put undue stress on the next student, so a generic well done is appropriate.

Anytime when specific praise might complicate the situation, general praise is useful. For example, if a student has done something that helps prevent embarrassment for another student, a simple thank you is less intrusive than a more specific praise.

Finally, when praising a student for accomplishing a task, such as finding an answer in the text, the general praise “good job” is appropriate. This tells the student that the teacher is pleased when it is not necessary to tell the student exactly what he or she has done.

Read more about praising students.

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Have a conference with the child prior to setting up the behavior plan and explain that there will be a plan targeting this specific behavior problem and that as the child improves his behavior, you want to provide rewards. Allow the child to provide input into what rewards he will receive for proper behavior.

Guide this conversation so that it does not turn into a pot of gold situation where you can’t assign homework or some other important aspect of learning. It is also vital that every reward is agreed upon by both the teacher and student and that those rewards are the only ones used on the behavior plan. Otherwise the plan will fail because the student will not find the rewards motivating.

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Seating Chart

The seating chart has a huge impact on the classroom management strategies of a teacher. While the actual seating arrangement is based more on the teaching style of an individual teacher than on the management strategy in place for students, there are two things that are important to keep in mind:

1. All seats need to be positioned so that each student can clearly see the teacher. To ensure this, the teacher can take a moment to sit in each seat.
2. All seats need to be positioned so that the teacher can quickly reach each student at a moment’s notice to handle any academic or behavior problem that may come up.

Classroom Decorations

It is very important to have the room decorated appropriately for students. The posters and other decorations aid in boosting student enthusiasm, increasing student motivation and reinforcing academic skills and concepts. At the same time, though, it is important to not overdecorate a room. Too much decoration can overstimulate student’s and cause them to become distracted. An important rule of thumb for decoration is to ensure that there is blank wall space around each decoration. If in doubt, take something down.

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I have had a problem with my fourth graders being too talkative during lessons so I tried the silent lesson and it worked wonderfully! What I did was plan an entire lesson with lots of visual and tactile aspects. I also wrote the rules on the blackboard:

1. No talking!
2. Work together
3. Write down any questions you have
4. Anyone who remains quiet receives 10 extra minutes at recess

I included that last rule about 10 extra minutes at recess in order to motivate the students to stay quiet. I realized afterward though that I may not have needed to because they found the entire lesson as a game!

This lesson got them involved and focused on learning without focusing on chatting with their friends. I repeat the silent lesson at least once a month as a great exercise for my lesson planning skills and to remind my students that they can enjoy school even without talking to their friends!

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