MANATEE — With a small bundle of gray tokens in hand, Williams Elementary teacher Michele Danowski was ready to start a counting lesson with her first-grade class.
“Who can tell me what day of the week this is?” she asked.
A couple hands shot in the air. As students answered her questions, Danowski walked around the group, randomly handing out the slips to students.
“I like how you are sitting so nicely,” she complimented a girl.
Those slips are important currency at Williams Elementary. They can be traded in for a lollipop, a shiny toy or lunch with the principal.
The goal: to encourage students to behave and to cut down on disruptions in class.
The premise is simple and not unlike training your pets — reinforcing good behavior through rewards or incentives. Educators call the concept “positive behavior support.”
“The key component is, if kids can’t read, we teach them to read,” said Pat Bernhart, Manatee schools’ supervisor of student services. “If kids aren’t behaving the way we want, we teach them.”
The method gained momentum in the 1980s and is now practiced in thousands of schools throughout the country. Gone are the days of corporal punishment so common for decades in U.S. schools.
In Florida alone, more than 500 schools are participating in a positive behavior support project headed by researchers in the University of South Florida. The project receives about $3 million in state and federal grants each year.
A dozen Manatee County schools, ranging from Williams Elementary in Parrish to the alternative school Horizons Academy, have signed up for the project.
Teachers and principals say it lowers the number of students being sent to the principal’s office or facing suspension and increases instruction time.
Proud to be recognized
Each school is allowed to tailor its own program based on the positive behavior concept. Each uses some sort of a token as currency that students can earn, save and turn in for a prize.
Students receive tokens when they show qualities such as respect or responsibility or honesty. Students are reminded of those values either daily or weekly through posters and assemblies.
At Williams Elementary, each of the school’s staff, including secretaries and custodians, has a bundle of the gray slips called “Wolf Howls” to dispense when students meet those goals, says assistant principal Barry Dunn.
Students can trade them in for goodies or other incentives such as eating lunch with their friends or being principal for a day.
“One thing we try not to do are trinkets and prizes like erasers,” Dunn said. “Kids out here in Williams have all that stuff. It’s time with adults, things that are meaningful to them.”
At Horizons Academy, where students from other schools are sent for discipline problems, the recognition proves quite valuable.
“It caught fire here,” said Assistant Principal Jeff Harris. “Most students haven’t been rewarded in the past.”
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