During my short practicum, I observed a bunch of different classes with different grade levels and something I was actively seeking out was a hard to manage classroom. I went to a few Workplace classes and Math and Science cores and one thing they all had in common was a "cool" teacher. It got me thinking about relationship building as a strategy to manage a difficult classroom. In one of the Math 9 classes, however, the teacher employed the use of "pride points" to get students to hand in their homework on time and behave a certain acceptable way adhering to her classrooms policy. This seemed to work really well for her; her students were the best behaved students, they would listen to her, hand in their work and be generally "good kids". It is important to note that the only reward these kids were getting was "points". When I was suddenly put in charge of another Math 9 class because their teacher wasn't feeling well and asked me to cover for her for 20 minutes, the kids saw this as an opportunity to cause chaos and i mentioned the pride points system to them as an extrinsic reward to get them to work on the assigned questions. Unanimously, the kids decided that this was a silly because there is no real reward at the end. Then I went around talking to teachers at this school trying to understand why this strategy worked for one set of grade 9's but it did not work for another set of grade 9's. I could be so that these kids had not yet experienced what it was like to get a pride point so they did not want to work for it, or it could be any other reason that I don't understand yet. So, for my inquiry project, I would like to research about effective classroom management strategies in a secondary math classroom with a focus on intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivators.
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