Behavior Management Strategies for Middle School
Weekly Incentives Help Motivate Students and Decrease Misbehavior
Jun 1, 2009
Managing middle school students can be a daunting task. Teachers either react to student misbehavior or anticipate potential problems. Proactive, positive methods of behavior management, however, increase motivation, improve behavior, and increase student achievement. Team-oriented, weekly incentives help students remain on task and focused.
Classroom Team Organization
Grouping students into teams shifts individual responsibility to more of a group effort. Teachers can hold students individually accountable, but the team organization forces students to be responsible for others as well. Teachers can also strategically place under-performing students with higher students to accommodate cognitive diversity in the classroom. Clusters of four or five students further allow students to assume different roles on a team based on their abilities, strengths, and personalities. Using team organization ultimately helps students communicate more effectively with each other and understand their individual responsibilities as part of a whole.
Behavior Management Strategies
One particularly effective behavior management strategyinvolves daily point building to receive a weekly incentive on Fridays. This method, called FUN FRIDAY, allows teams to work together toward a common goal. Each day, groups receive a predetermined maximum number of letters for meeting the teacher's expectations. For example, if Team A follows a procedure correctly, such as entering the classroom and setting up for the lesson, the group receives an "F" for its effort. As the week progresses, the team's letters add up until Friday, at which point the teacher recognizes the teams who get the incentive. Teams that do not spell FUN FRIDAY by the end of the week receive an alternate assignment.
Weekly Incentives
Teachers can use multiple incentives for teams that meet their weekly goal. Popular incentives include the following:
- Game time: Mancala, Clue, Monopoly, Chess, Checkers, etc.
- Computer privileges
- Outdoor recess
- Teacher led games
- Movies
- Snacks
As teachers learn the likes and dislikes of their students, they can more effectively motivate them to meet various expectations. Some teachers find a popular incentive and consistently offer it to the successful teams. Other teachers alternate the incentives to accommodate their students diverse interests.
Clustering students and holding them accountable as a group helps students communicate with each other more effectively. Some students, however, simply do not possess the necessary social skills to be successful in a team. At first, these students will cause their groups to lose the weekly incentives. While successful teams participate in their incentive time, teachers can use the downtime to help the less successful groups understand why they did not achieve their goal. Using a circle format, teachers can facilitate a meaningful discussion and, hopefully, initiate short-term goal setting for those groups that did not receive the incentive that week. Ultimately, teachers can use the team format and weekly incentives to teach the necessary communication skills for effective cooperative learning.
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