From the Inbox— Another great way to manage your class while increasing engagement!

Dear Reader,

Today I wanted to share with you another activity that I do in my classroom to help maintain my classroom while increasing student engagement.

It's called the Class Scoreboard and it's an idea I adapted from Whole Brain Teaching and Fred Jone's Preferred-Activity Time.

In the front of the room, I have a scoreboard with two columns and as many rows as I have classes.

The first column is labeled "Profe" and the second column is labeled "Clase."

Then each row is labeled by the periods I teach. For example, this year I teach periods 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, so I'll have six rows each labeled with a period.

I award points to the "Class" side for completing lesson activities without any issues. For example, I generally have 4 parts to a daily lesson: warm-up, song, word-of-the-day, and whatever the main event is. After each activity, if the class as a whole completed them without me having to remind them of the rules, to stop to quiet them down, etc, they earn a point. If not, I earn the point.

I also award points for any type of behavior I would like to continue in class. If I see kids helping each other, I'll give a bonus point, if we had no cell phone use in class or no bathroom passes, I'll give another bonus point. If a kid pushes themselves extra hard or answers a really hard question, I'll give another bonus point. You get the idea.

On the contrary, for any behaviors I would like to stop immediately, I put the points in my column.

It's a competition between me and the students.

At the end of the week, I add up all the points the students earned and subtract the points that I earned and add that number to the running total— the bank— for the year.

Each class can save up their points for "prizes and privileges" based on my award sheet. The sheet changes every year because I poll my classes to see what they want. I then put the prize sheet together and assign points values to each one.

You can see an example of one of my prize sheets here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TgLfDal8dZaT97Ay8ERF8x7kSLSBAVte/view

When they choose a prize, I deduct the total from their "bank."

Yes, some classes can have a negative bank balance. When this happens, I look for opportunities to give them bonus points to get them caught up. I might say, if the class can stay quiet for the next 5 minutes or if we can get through the next activity without any issues, I'll give you 5 bonus points. This works well and keeps the class from low morale.

Since I've implemented this scoreboard, my students work hard to earn the top prizes and can get quite competitive. They'll tell me when they think they should earn bonus points. It's a lot of fun.

What do you think? Have any of you a similar system? How's it working for you? Let me know in the comments below!