In Spring 2016, the PBIS committee (of which I am the chair) looked at the areas of concerns in the school and decided to tackle one area and dedicate ourselves to improving. The area we decided on was Hallway behavior. You see, we had universal hallway expectations hanging on the walls in the hallway (meaning every student follows these expectations, regardless of age, grade, or number of students in the hallway), but students weren't following them.
Scratch that.
Teachers weren't engaging with our students to teach/re-teach/remind them of the expectations.
Ouch. Sometimes the reflection in the mirror is mighty painful.
The PBIS committee decided to start using the Class DoJo app to give positive affirmation of hallway behavior. The goal is for every teacher to give out at least five DoJo points a week. At the end of each month, points are tallied and the class in each grade level with the most points for awesome hallway behavior is rewarded with a party at recess. A popcorn party, a hot chocolate party, a lollipop party, etc...
When I tallied up the October points, I also ran an average of how many points each grade level was receiving, because I thought the data would be interesting to study. It turns out we had a grade level that had an average of around 51 points per class, and we could compare it to a grade level that had an average of around 14 points per class.
HOLD THE PRESSES!
I know the classes that have the average of 14 are doing an AWESOME job in the hallway! I wondered what was keeping them from getting the positive affirmation that's conveyed when they receive a DoJo point. So, I looked at the data.
I started by creating a tally sheet to see how many points each teacher was giving out in the month of October. Turns out, we gave out a total of 942 points in the month of October, which was cool when you think of it meaning that there were 942 times that our students received positive feedback on following instructions.
However, the founder of Stout Nation (that'd be me) gave out 314 of those points.
Double ouch. The reflection I saw in the mirror wasn't very pretty. At all. I was gobsmacked that I had given out that high number of DoJo points.
After a long weekend of reflection (and eating a slice of two of Calm Down Cake), I decided that while 314 is a really big number, it's not the end of the world. I can absolutely justify why I gave out 314 points in October, but I'm not going to get into that on this post. Just trust me when I say that it makes total sense, and the reason isn't because I'm a crazy nice granny.
Catching kids for doing great things is in my DNA. Seeing the positive in a class full of tiny humans is one big reason why I think Stout Nation is such a positive experience FOR the tiny humans. If I come to work and have positive things noticed about me, then I want to come back and do more positive things.
Maybe in November I'll give out 315 DoJo points.
Or maybe not.
Gotta keep 'em guessing.