Motivating Students

Motivating students can be tricky. Teachers want to positively motivate the students to learn, but too many rewards are not good for any age. If you offer students too many rewards they don't learn to enjoy school simply for the joy of learning. Learning can be made fun and should be encouraged even when there is not an external reward. Children need to learn that learning in it's self is it's own reward. Giving rewards to often can also cause the students to only work if they are going to get rewarded. I have found that the younger students need more positive reinforcement and more external motivation. I feel like we live in age that offers too many choices and far too many rewards for students just to try and get simple things accomplished. Not every behavior or action should be rewarded. Students need to learn that there are expected behaviors that are required simply because they make the world a safer and more productive place. Finding the fine line line between extrnal motivation can certainly be hard.

Behavior Problems

Behavior problems occur for a variety of reasons. A few of the most common are boredom and testing the limits of the teacher. Students also seem to do better when the classroom has a  predictable set of rules and structure.I am working with children that are in first grade and we have a fairly wide age range in our classroom there are children that are just turning 6 as well as children that are going to turn 8 over the summer. The biggest problem that I have seen are students that talk too much and and students that resist getting their work complete by fidgeting at their desk or disrupting others. In this class there is a behavior notebook that is tied to the classroom behavior board. The behavior board is made up of soccer balls with each child's name on one and you are either in the send off zone (green expected behavior) The hat trick zone (purple above and beyond excellent behavior) or in a five minute time out (yellow behavior had 3 warnings) or on the bench (red behavior 3 more warnings needed after moving to yellow, a note is headed home). Each child receives 3 verbal warnings before they are moved from green where they start each day to yellow. We use the notebook to keep track of who has been verbally warned and how many times they have been warned through out the day. There are also 2 students in the class that have individual behavior goals and behavior charts that help keep them on task. Those students have a harder time staying on task so their goals are broken down into smaller areas in order to help us monitor behavior and keep them on task more effectively. I think that these measures help to keep the class running more smoothly. Seating is also arranged to make sure that the students that tend to talk a lot are not sitting by their friends or other students that talk as much. These kids also have a constant schedule so that they know what to expect and that helps a lot.