Rewarding groups?

[redskyatnight]

in DD's Y1 class the children are put into groups for organisational purposes (lining up, where they sit etc).

The groups get points for "good behaviour" e.g. lining up quickly without fuss, sitting nicely etc.

The groups with most points get 5 minutes extra play on Friday. This is of course a heavily sought after treat.

DD came home this week with a sigh and announced that her teacher had reorganised the groups and as she now has X in her group, bang goes any chance of winning the extra play.

further crossexamination conversation revealed that there are 2 children in DD's class who always mess about, their groups never get the good behaviour points and never win the extra play. In fairness to the teacher, she does mix the groups about quite frequently.

But ... I did wonder if it was a good idea to operate such a behaviour reward system when it seems that it is negatively weighted around the odd mis-behaving child? Especially since the children are all clearly aware of who they are. (X was not in yesterday, DD was thrilled about this as it meant her group got a point - this can't be good for X surely?)

I don't know but I would think the idea is to use a bit of peer pressure to get X and children like X to behave. The fairness of that depends on if X is actually able to learn to behave or if X has more serious problems.

thats life. the teacher moves them around so over the year it must equal out.

I would just take it as the teacher regularly shuffles the groups round. It must be really hard to get 30 kids to line up etc so I don't blame the teacher trying to achieve it using incentives .

What OddBoots said. Clearly the teacher has her finger right on the pulse, if she's swapping groups etc., and not leaving one group dis-incentivised all year.

In our school they do the same thing but on an individual basis. That seems fairer overall. It depends on whether it has been shown that positive modelling works. Ime it only makes the naughty child less popular.