heart of heartlands lessons

Poor student achievement is often attributed to lack of motivation and rewards are given as an attempt to increase that vital motivation. Reward systems are one of the most effective ways of establishing a positive classroom environment. They promote good behaviour and incentivise students, however it can become difficult to constantly find new ways to praise students or find time to follow through with rewarding them.

With the stresses of school life, it’s easy to lose track of behaviour issues. We try hard to give praise when it’s due and quickly monitor any sanctions by following the Values for Success policy, we have worked hard to embed here at Heartlands.

Embedding a solid rewards system in school has many advantages, including:

• Appropriate behaviour: students conforming to appropriate behaviours when rewarded either intrinsically or extrinsically. As a PE teacher, I often rely on the same students to offer to carry equipment out or to help collect in the equipment after lesson. I’m still surprised by the reluctance of some students in their willingness to help. I love the volunteer cards that we use at Heartlands, as it gives me the opportunity to reward those students who are always keen and eager to help.
• Increased motivation: Students showing interest and raising their participation in the everyday classroom tasks, responsibilities and learning.
• Joyful student incentives: motivating students to be more productive because this creates a feeling of pride and achievement. Being successful makes you happy.
• Boosting self-esteem: every success story helps students to become more self-confident. They are proud and also encouraged to achieve another successful result.
• Completed homework: the National Association of School Psychologists suggests that reward systems help motivate students to complete their homework. It’s rather shocking to think that without rewards, many students will not complete it.
• Improved results:rewarding students encourages and endorses school effort. This leads to improved outcomes for students. As teachers, we often use rewards to achieve appropriate behaviours; however, we also see many students on a daily basis who always do the right thing. They are always on time, always do their work, always answer questions - how many of those students do you give merits to? I have experimented with some rewards’ techniques which have led to some improved performances with my Year 10 Sports’ study groups. During theory lessons, I often leave the register up on the projector and make an effort to actively add merits for those students who write the correct answers, work hard independently, ask thought provoking questions or challenge other students’ answers. It has certainly encouraged students to work and motivated them to work hard, hence improving their last AFA results.

Staff at Heartlands strive to be fair and consistent, and this has been demonstrated by the high number of merits that have been given to students since the start of this academic year. With a new 1,000,000 merit target for the year, students and staff have a shared goal to achieve. We are well on our way to achieving the target having already reached 361,383 merits so far!

Rewarding students, and therefore positively reinforcing desired attitudes to learning, home learning and progress and achievement, should feature heavily in every staff member’s actions. The general practice of classroom management and the Pastoral team, involves many rewards given to students individually or collectively on a regular basis. Some of the ways we reward students at Heartland’s include:

• Recognising success with acknowledgement, shown through verbal, written and tangible praise and rewards by all staff both in and out of: lessons.
• Classroom and corridor displays showing students’ work – celebrating achievement of all student groups.
• Certificates of recognition in House assemblies, whole-school assemblies and celebration assemblies.
• Texts/emails and phone calls home when students reach a specific number of merits.
• Motivational target setting between students and staff.
• Annual whole-school celebration of achievement events.
• Termly Tutor Group pizza parties or equivalent to reward attendance and achievement.
• Raffle prize draws to reward attitude to learning - zero demerits.
• Termly reward trips for positive attitude to learning.
• Weekly raffle draws to reward attendance.
• 100 % badges with focused reward weeks for these students.
• Merit pins - student achievement and conduct celebrated through House assemblies.
• Inter-house challenge rewards and the awarding of the Sports Day Cup and House Champions for merits and attendance.
• Volunteer cards.
• Character cards.

I know how many hours teachers work, I also know that a phone call can take three minutes. If every teacher allocated 15 minutes a day/ a week to calling parents with good news, the impact could be tremendous. In the long list of priorities for teachers, communicating good news is usually not at the top. But if we tried it, just for a week - try calling the parents of a few students (and maybe not just the challenging ones - they all need and deserve these calls) and see what happens. The ripple effects for these students, the class, and the teacher might be transformational.