Team points, spent by the team

I teach 24 forty-minute periods a week, and a new class of 16 to 22 students arrives at the door every time. With that much contact, routine has to carry most of the load.

The system

Points are awarded to teams for team behavior, never to individuals. When a team has earned points, the members decide together how to spend them. The design draws on Kagan's cooperative learning structures, and students sit in groups of four.

That makes it different from individual token systems such as ClassDojo. A student cannot cash in alone, so a teammate's behavior becomes the team's problem, and the pressure to fix it comes from peers and not from me. The mechanism rewards group cohesion and does not set students against each other.

The classroom culture

My classroom is casual but strict. The strictness comes from consistent routines, and not from rigid control. Students rotate through my room all day, so the routines have to be easy to learn and the same for every class.

Supporting students who struggle to stay on task

I adjust in response to what I see: attention span, task completion, and whether a student connects an action to its consequence. This is observation, not clinical assessment. I am not a diagnostician, and I do not treat it as one.

Tools around it

Ribbon Overlay, a desktop tool I directed Claude to build, tracks team scores over long stretches and runs over ebooks and slides. It is described on the lesson builder page. I also keep a personal lesson planner that accounts for holidays, the school schedule, the testing calendar, special classes, and regular classes at the same time.