Motivate Middle School Students
Creating an Incentive Plan for the Classroom
Success breeds success for middle school students. Teachers can engage all students by providing positive reinforcements that are frequent, simple, and easy to implement.
Success breeds success. High achieving students work hard at school and take risks. Their confidence is based on their own past successes and the security of probable future success. Teachers can reach all students from preschool throughout middle school by providing overt positive reinforcements. Simple, frequent positive reinforcements or rewards, are easy to set up and implement.
Rewards: Keep It Simple
An incentive system for a classroom full of different personalities and diverse talents begs for simplicity. The number of desired student behaviors and outcomes should be between two and five. Students will understand and buy into a basic system, and the teacher will follow through and implement it.
An incentive system is grounded in identifying target behaviors, target skills, and targeted content knowledge and application. Implementation is through a token economy.
Establishing a Classroom Token Economy
A token economy is where a student earns a token for a desired behavior, learning process or outcome. In effective token economies, students know which behaviors and outcomes warrant tokens, the values assigned to tokens, and the culmination of the incentive system.
The system needs a currency. Tokens that can be earned frequently, with opportunities during each class, and consistently work best. A few currencies are:
- Points
- Stickers
- Tickets
- Markers-beans, buttons, small rocks, jelly beans
- Play money
A culmination of the token-earning period needs a due date, rewards, and a basic cost structure. Simplicity is everything here.
Due Date or Earning Period
- End of the week
- End of the class
- End of the day
Rewards
- homework pass
- candy
- pencils and/or erasers
- teacher’s assistant for a week
- a few extra points added to an assessment
Cost Structure
- Student who has the most tokens: homework pass, extra points on an assessment
- 5 tokens = homework pass
- 4 tokens = teacher’s assistant
Target Behaviors
How are students to behave? Behavioral goals work wonders with restless middle school students. They need the required behaviors identified and explained to them. When a student exhibits a target behavior, he or she receives a token.
- Sitting in assigned seat immediately after entering
- Raising his/her hand before being called on to speak
- Listening assertively during instruction
- Helping a fellow student
- Accepting critique and direction positively
Target Skills
What are students learning how to do in a class? It is vital that students know clearly what they are learning how to do. An incentive given for a skill exhibited adds to the learning process and skill practice.
- Focused note-taking
- Meaningful discussion contribution
- Attentive lab work
Reward Content Knowledge
What subject area are students learning? Social Studies, foreign language, literature, or mathematical operations offer so much for students to learn and love. Demonstrations of understanding content need to be awarded.
- Independent summary of events leading to the Civil War
- Character analysis of an antagonist of a novel
- Solving an equation at the board
A realistic classroom reward system for middle school students is grounded in identifying target areas for students: behaviors, skills, content knowledge, and application. Middle school students need for the target areas to be overtly presented and explained to them at the onset of the system much like the rules of play for a game. The most effective means to carry out the reward system is through a token economy where a student earns a token for a good performance in a target area.
