•Community Circle: Almost every morning, our class gathered in the back of the classroom where everyone takes a turn sharing their thoughts, opinions and experiences with our daily topic. The golden rule in having a community circle was to build a better sense of community in the classroom, where we mutually respect each other while they are speaking with attentive listening. Everyone was expected to participate actively, given one time to pass if they were not ready. We reviewed these rules at the beginning of every community circle, and although it was extremely draining at first to constantly remind the students about keeping these agreements, at the end we all grew to love and respect our class and everyone/everything that is in it. Towards the end, community circles in the morning were extremely awarding moments for all of us, where we were able to share something new about ourselves with everyone while playing games and simply enjoying each other’s company.
•Tribes: My master teacher first demonstrated the tribe system that our school uses, where the students are grouped together to work cooperatively as a tribe. Each member of the tribe was given roles such as tribe leader, hunter, storyteller, timekeeper, and scribe, and with these roles rotating every two weeks, it gave all the students a chance to be in the position of a responsible tribe member. Tribes were a great success in teaching the students responsibility and the importance of having to work together. Eventually we had to break some tribes up due to talking problems, but it was a great start in bringing our students together.
•Incentives: In the beginning of the year, my master teacher and I used a behavior chart system where the students flipped cards every time they misbehaved, and while it seemed to work at first, the attitude of the students never really changed from flipping cards. Not only that, but it seemed pretty embarrassing to go to the front of the classroom to flip cards and let the whole class know that you got in trouble, so we did away with the whole system and instead started to give out incentives for every little good thing that they did. Our major one was the ticket system where student earned raffle tickets for good behavior, attitude, grades & etc, and we celebrated each Friday with a raffle drawing. Tickets always, always got my students motivated and focused, but as it was quite hard to earn tickets, I noticed some students just gave up trying while others were earning up to ten tickets a week. This is when we came up with the stickers incentive chart, where the students are able to earn stickers (easier to earn than tickets) every time the teachers feel that they deserve a sticker. The anticipation and excitement of earning more and more stickers got my students definitely engaged, focused, and motivated more and more each day.
•Teaching Responsibility: As my students are in fifth grade, I truly wanted my students to feel responsible for their actions. Starting with a classroom contract that we all signed, there was direct consequence for times when they did misbehave, and I found having 1:1 “adult” conversations with students that cause trouble to be a valuable experience where the students and I both got to know each other at a deeper level, I understanding more about the reasons why they acted in such ways where the students were learning more and more about the expectations I have of them as responsible fifth graders. I remember always loving to imagine that I were a grown-up when I was in fifth grade, and I think my fifth graders also enjoyed having “grown-up” conversations with a real grown-up.
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