Student Motivation Saturday!

I feel like such a bad blogger this week. I'm not sure if it was the *last* inservice day of the year, or the crazy winter weather this week, but it has just been super long. Monday feels like weeks ago. I haven't posted much this week, although I have been reading up on everything it just feels like I have had a case of the blogging "blahs" this week. What better though, than to link up with one of my best blogging buddies to get back into the groove of things?

Currently I am taking two graduate courses (and drowning in the last of the semester projects, yuck!) One class is a practicum based course on interventions. Throughout the last several weeks, each of us in the class has had to choose a target student and behavior that we wanted to change or decrease the occurrence of. I thought I would share a few tips/tricks that have come from this course.

If using a sticker chart don't have a set amount of stickers that have to be earned during a specific time period (morning/afternoon or whole day). If a student is having to earn 10/12 possible stickers throughout the day for their incentive/prize, and by noon they have only earned 1; the student already knows they won't be getting what they want so why would they want to try?

Instead still have the goal of earning 5, 10, whatever amount of stickers, without the time frame. Maybe the student has a really rough morning, a better afternoon and earns a few stickers and the next morning if they earn a few more they can get their prize then.

If you have a student who is displaying several behaviors that are undesirable; it's often easier to work on one thing at a time. Think about the behaviors that are being displayed. If there is something that is being done that affects the safety/well-being of others, that one is obviously where you'd need to start.  Otherwise take a look, start with the big behaviors and work your way down. (Special education teachers are one resource in your building. They can help you figure out what's triggering a behavior (antecedents) and what the student is getting from the behavior(s) (consequences) this information can help you redirect these behaviors).

With incentives give choices. We talked often in class how incentive menus really seemed to help several of our students. Some of the choices were teacher made, but some were left to the student. Whenever the tasks/behaviors achieved the student had the ability to chose what they wanted/wanted to do; our target student's bought into the interventions more freely when they were given a choice.

These were just a few of the topics that seemed to come up throughout discussions and tweakings of our interventions. Maybe some of these ideas will help you with some of your students, or maybe these ideas could help out with collaborative planning in behavior interventions.

Be sure to be on the lookout later this week with another linky that Joanne is involved in: Peace, Hope, Love, and Kindness coming this Thursday. You can link up with her, the Collaboration Cuties, or Ideas by Jivey. A wonderful idea considering all of the sadness and tragic events that have occurred this week!