It's crucial to build students' confidence this year! Positive reinforcement and motivation are proven to have a tremendous impact on student performance. In a previous post, we outline some creative strategies to incorporate incentives into your lesson plans. Here are 100 more!

1. Plan a virtual dance party to celebrate everyone meeting this month’s time on task or mastery goals
2. Wear fun hats during your video lectures, vote for the best one and let that student pick a prize
3. End successful video lessons with a game, like “I Spy” with different colored items in the teacher’s background
4. Send personalized encouragement videos to students -- remember, students love feeling like VIPs
5. Host an in-person or Zoom lunch with students 
6. Incorporate online classroom games like Go Noodle
7. Make a class playlist of all your students favorite songs and play them during group work time
8. Take the time to chat about a topic that interests your class
9. Offer online peer reviews and office hours for older students
10. Share and shout out students who have earned Classworks badges, characters, and shields
11. Use kindness jar to keep tabs on students who help their peers or volunteer to lead discussions
12. Include fun videos, gifs, and images in your positive feedback messages with students
13. Let your virtual class out early (the timetable is more flexible than ever!)
14. Emailing parents with student congratulations, parents love hearing about their students’ achievements 
15. Share student’s My Scores page to parents, guardians and adults in their lives to build buy-in at home
16. Work with students to help plan and accomplish their individual goals
17. Set class-wide goals and monitor progress with the whole classroom community
18. Host a movie day! Have your students vote on a movie and stream it during class time
19. Go on virtual field trips to places you’re studying - ever wanted to visit The Smithsonian? 
20. Use breakout rooms for peer to peer collaboration 
21. Assign partner projects for students to build community
22. Teachers introduce students to their pet(s) and vice-versa
23. Allow students to use fun virtual backgrounds during lessons 
24. Model enthusiasm for learning
25. Provide high interest learning opportunities -- relate lessons to your students favorite topics. Check out Classworks Classroom Reading passages.
26. Offer opportunities for improving grades or catch-up work
27. Create scavenger hunts either online or in-person to teach about different resources and tools
28. Send shout outs to your students, too - not just parents!
29. Show students how to take ownership with different classroom roles and technology features -- Students can track their own progress using the My Scores dashboard
30. Highlight student strengths in group projects - assign each student a role or have them pick their own
31. Shift teaching from a book to applicable learning like teaching science with cooking
32. Play virtual games with Google Slides
33. Create custom assessments to practice key skills - check out our step-by-step guide
34. Give students an opportunity to show and tell what they value most about each lesson
35. Host unit/ theme parties with relevant food and beverages
36. Data track students growth and progress 
37. Offer students choice boards or menus on what they want to learn
38. Let students decide how they want to learn something ie books, internet, interview
39. Safely integrate social media into classroom projects when appropriate
40. Use pop culture topics for culturally relevant connections
41. Publicize goals to keep students accountable -- check out our bulletin board kit!
42. Have students create vision boards to align to their goals on programs like Canva
43. Give students time to reflect on goals and progress
44. Really emphasize the power of “yet” and having a growth mindset with younger students
45. Provide practical feedback on their goals and what’s going well for a student during your one-on-ones
46. Build in weekly time for feedback on students’ work so they can improve right away
47. Offer students check-ins at the beginning of class so everyone feels heard
48. Establish clear expectations and provide all the resources your students need to achieve them
49. Be inspirational - add inspirational quotes and photos into a lesson
50. Create a classroom vision board and have everyone contribute
51. Use collaborative culture norms for different classroom practices to set expectations
52. Host your own All-Star Contest! Celebrate students with the highest time-on-task above 80% mastery
53. Remind students to keep their eyes on the prize - whatever prize is relevant for your students at the time
54. Flexibility in ways to complete work and assignments - technology has made asynchronous learning a lot easier!
55. Let students act out examples and non-examples for the class
56. Share personal experiences and anecdotes with students so they get to know you more
57. Use varied types of technology for your lessons. For example, Classworks can be used on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
58. Establish routines for your class -- it’s easier to maintain good habits than to break bad ones!
59. Take a poll to see what your students want to be when they grow up. Then, connect subject matter to careers that interest them
60. Ask students to reflect on prior experiences and visualize their future goals, then draw them!
61. Check for understanding in different ways. One teacher has her students give a signal at various times to ensure they’re paying attention, kind of like Simon Says: “If you have questions about what I just went over, pinch your nose!”
62. Incorporate multiple learning styles, but don’t explicitly use them for select students. 
63. Create different classroom clubs or teams so students feel apart of a community
64. Group students dynamically rather than at random -- Grouping reports can help ensure that students change groups appropriately as skill mastery increases
65. Host a variety show for students to show various talents
66. Celebrate students heritage, values, and cultures with celebrations and projects
67. Gauge confidence levels of goals and tasks to provide adequate support for students
68. Shout out student success by their efforts
69. Read motivational stories from different cultures and backgrounds
70. Incorporate mysteries into your lessons
71. Discover new things together- if you don’t know, google it!
72. Students earn goofy time with you
73. Avoid going through the motions - try to keep each day fresh, you’ll appreciate this too!
74. Flip the order of lessons to keep students on their toes
75. Put on performances
76. Make yourself available for students
77. Have “Master” classes where students teach something they’re an expert on
78. Teach using units of study so content is related
79. Provide scaffolded reading material to build background knowledge
80. Create interactive notebooks together -- See a sneak peek of the Classworks Goal Tracker‍
81. Use accountable talk/ talking stems
82. Have a classroom pet (real or fake!) and have students take care of it
83. Let students take turns on being the “navigator” for presentations or screen sharing
84. Pull brain breaks throughout the day
85. Do classroom yoga to keep students active
86. Find books to explain and support the Why behind classroom expectations and norms
87. Ask for students favorite books and read them aloud
88. Teach cross-curricular lessons to peak students interests
89. Have pajama day for virtual students
90. Gamify lessons -- in Classworks, students have access to over 7,000 gamified activities for ELA and Math!
91. Find virtual tours for different careers possibilities
92. Take learning outside! Many schools have empty stadiums that are currently not being used.
93. Reach out to authors and people of interest to speak to your class
94. Give students tasks that keep them moving, like a Carousel Brainstorm activity!
95. Proudly display exemplary student work in your digital or in-person classroom
96. Celebrate differences and uniqueness among your students
97. Find and read a book that’s been turned into a movie then critique the differences
98. Play pictionary when learning new vocabulary
99. Visit your dollar store for fun prizes to create a grab-bag
100. Give students additional time to work on closing gaps. If you have Classworks, your students already have learning paths based on their most current assessment and progress monitoring data.