Schools are a community, and teachers must work together to offer constancy to all students within the school environment. Students must be held accountable for their behavior anywhere on the school's property; not just their homeroom. At B.T.Washington, students only come to the art room 1-2 times per week. It is vital that students have the same expectations in the art room as they would have in any other place within the school. B.T.Washington has a system in place that they call the High Fives. Students are to "be respectful", "be responsible", "be there and be ready", "be safe", and "follow directions" in all locations of the school. There are rewards to following these five simple rules, and today marks one such occasion. At the end of each month, students that have earned themselves a set number of Gotchas get to attend a 45-minute trip to the Gotcha Celebration. Gotchas are paper tokens that student can earn daily be being recognized for their High Five behavior. This is part of B.T.Washington's positive reinforcement strategy.
I got to help set up the gym for the Gotcha Celebration. They were assembling new activities, and one of these was a Fishing for Prizes activity that needed a banner made of blue paper to represent water. The activity would consist of students using "fishing poles" to hang over the blue banner. Behind this banner would be a teacher and some prizes. When the fishing pole is hung over the banner, the teacher would put a prize on the end of the pool. I had about 10 minutes to put this together.
While the event was going on, I was in the art room. The students that had not collected enough Gotchas to be able to attend the event got to be in the art room watching different educational videos. While the videos proved to be entertaining, these students were not happy to be in here. Thankfully, Mrs. Smith was there monitoring the more naughty groups.
One thing that surprised me was that some of the students that had caused a lot of trouble over the last couple weeks were able to attend the Gotcha Celebration. Mrs. Carey and I discussed this can came to the conclusion that students that are sent out of the classroom to talk to Mrs. Smith, the school's discipline manager, should have the additional consequence of having to collect at least 5 more Gotchas than the medium the rest of the students have to achieve. For example, if the medium is 80 for the month of January and you were sent to Mrs. Smith twice, you would need to collect 90.
Friday, January 30, 2009
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