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