Thursday, October 20, 2011

Class Dojo: Building Positive Classrooms in Realtime. UPDATE!


Previously, I had written about Class Dojo and its place in my classroom.  Over the past few days, my class has worked hard to re evaluate the behaviours they had chosen to work with in the classroom.  Previously we had negotiated 6 positive behaviours and 6 negative behaviours.  All of which are listed below.




Our Class Behaviours
100% Student Negotiated, 100% Student Owned.


Today, my students asked if we could look at the behaviours and write some new ones.  Nothing my students say to me surprises me anymore.  These are an amazing group of kids who I should have anticipated would want to re evaluate their behaviours.  It was simple.  I opened Class Dojo and navigated to the behaviour page and began to talk to my class about what they wanted changed.  Our discussions were deep and vast.  In the end we decided to change the wording of some of our already chosen behaviours.  We also decided that we needed to add another positive and another negative behaviour to suit the needs of our changing classroom.

My students decided they would add a positive behaviour called "Being Awesome."  To them, they felt they needed a behaviour that could be awarded to anyone in the class that completed amazing feats of awesomeness in the classroom.  Examples of this was one girls awesome dancing, or one boys ability to help anyone he works with without being asked.  To my class, the "being awesome" award was the holy grail of awards and those who earned it were allowed to wear a crown for the rest of the day all for being awesome.

We also added another negative behaviour "not working well."  My students thought it would be good to have a behaviour that made them work on trying to work well on every task they do.  I was proud of them for making the choice to add this behaviour.  Students owning learning is a powerful thing to watch and experience.  You can see our new behaviours below.




Our Class Re-Negotiated Behaviours
100% Student Negotiated, 100% Student Owned.


After our re evaluation of behaviours, my students were in a word inspired.  We have a deal that if they could keep their "circle" at 100% positive behaviours I would organise for each student to have an ice-block.  Well today my students did a powerful thing.  They worked together and earned 100% positive rewards.  I have never seen 26, 5 year old students so excited before in my life.  So tomorrow we are having ice-blocks at lunch time.  I have posted their behaviour awards for today below.  So heres a big congratulations to my class, we may not have 100% positive rewards everyday, but we work together as a community and we own our behaviour.  Click here to use Class Dojo in your classroom.  Trust me when I say, it amazing.




Our Class Report
Nothing was standing in the way of my students and their earning of positive behaviours.


2 Responses so far.

  1. Do your students view their avatars and the graphs showing the data about their collective behavior on a smart board? How exactly does this work?

  2. LachHull says:

    Thank you for your comment.

    I'm a student in Mr. Hull's class. We display all of our Avatar's on the class whiteboard when we work. This allows us to work as a class to make as many positive choices as a cohort as we can. It also allows us to work on our personal goals.

    We also use the ClassDojo Student logins to log into our own personal section of ClassDojo and see all of the points we have been awarded. (It's like our own personal sticker chart in a way). We also have the option of changing what our avatar looks like. We made a deal with Mr. Hull that we would use this feature to set personal goals with our families. My goal at the moment is to work better in group settings.

    I find that being able to set goals with my behaviour data accessible to me is great. We are able to make personal targets and visually track how we are going. It also helps us to build our classroom community together with a personal touch.

    Mr. Hull shows us the behaviour graph at the end of each session. This helps us celebrate the success we have each session and really look at the negatives that may have happened (if any) during a session and work as a class to see the best way for us to try again next time.

    Let us know if you need any more information. We are glad to share.

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