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Our ESL Toolbox: The Behavior Pinwheel

I don’t care how much you plan or how incredible your lesson plans are, classroom management can make or break your classes. Without being able to control your classroom, you are pretty much dead in the water. Thankfully, I have a simple, yet effective tool that worked well for me when I taught elementary school. While this can be tailored to fit a high school setting, I’m only going to focus on elementary school for this article.

When you are teaching kids, you quickly realize that small rewards and prizes go a long way. Think it’s juvenile to bribe students with candy? Think again. School is a regimented, scheduled place and kids usually love the simplest things that change their normal “day-to-day” activities. That said, the best thing I did for my classroom management was creating a system that rewarded kids for their good behavior by offering both daily and long-term “milestone” prizes.

Here’s what you do:

First, get yourself a piece of paper, make it a circle with 3 segments, cut it out, laminate it, and then cut the segments into their own pieces. Next, (if your board can hold a magnet) get some simple magnets and glue them to the back of each segment. You can use whatever color scheme you like, but I liked to use green, yellow, and red. Obviously, the green is for good, the yellow is for caution, and the red means you’re in trouble.

An example of my behavior pinwheel

Place your color pinwheel on the board, right in front of the class so it is as visible as possible. Next, tell your students the following rules:

  • Each segment of the wheel is worth 1 point
  • At the end of class, your class will receive points for however many segments are left on the board
  • Additionally, the class will receive 3 points if all of the segments stay on the board AND everyone will receive a piece of candy (or whatever prize you come up with)
  • Any time you break our classroom rules or misbehave, I will remove a segment
  • If all of the segments are gone at the end of class, your class gets no points for that day and your class loses 1 point from their total classroom score

So what are the points for? Glad you asked. Another component of making this tool work like it should is creating ongoing goals that your classes are working towards. I don’t usually like to make classes compete against one another, so I just come up with milestone prizes that each class is working towards separately. For example, if a class accumulates 50 points, they get to have a movie day or if they get 100 points, they get to have a pizza party for lunch, and so on. This overall point system is totally up to you, but don’t make things too unattainable. The key is actually allowing your classes to eventually achieve these milestone prizes, so make them prizes that you can live with.

After implementing this system, you will soon find that even the threat of you taking a piece of the pinwheel off the board is enough to get a lot of classes back under control.

As always, let us know if you have any comments or questions.

Cheers!

By Sean Tyler Sanders, M.Ed. from ESLspot.com