Korean Job Discussion Forums

[renzobenzo1]

What have you found to be the most effective punishment and reward systems in the classroom.......
Please state the student age group.

[Pak Yu Man]

Pain and pleasure? Hope you're not teaching kids,

[mateomiguel]

stickers. Little guys go crazy for stickers.

That goes for rewards.

For punishments, promise stickers in the future and then penalize them potential stickers if they mess up.

Put all their names into the English Box on the front on the board (which my students quickly edited into the English Castle) and promise that anybody whose name is still in the box at the end of the class gets 2 stickers. Anybody who speaks Korean gets their names taken out of the box, and no stickers.

A pack of stickers costs like 1,000 won and lasts for a good solid month.

[ttompatz]

Positive reinforcement of good behaviours and rewards for trying rather than just rewards for success.

Elementary kids, stickers work fine as one-offs in a hakwon setting.

In our public school they have sticker papers and accumulate stickers as rewards during the term and then convert them to School Money to spend in our English Cafe at the end of the term. It has worked wonders as a positive reinforcement tool for us.

We also use the reverse of the paper to collect points for successes in various ways - again a positive behaviour reward sytem.
200 points for a good test
20 points for each stamp for converstation time with the foreign teacher.
30 points for each completed set of pages in the step/jump book.
etc.....

[renzobenzo1]

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I teach middle and high school. It's easy to stop most kids from doing things through punishments but very, very difficult *to* get them to do anything using punishment as a motivator. Hence, rewards come in.

This is where it gets tricky. Many new teachers, such as myself a few years ago, use things like candy or stickers as prizes for completing work, being the first one to complete a task, or being the best at a task or game that requires knowledge. I now think this is completely the wrong approach. It merely teaches the more apt students to learn for the sake or temporary rewards while teaching the less apt that they're unlikely to get much reward for learning. These days I only use prizes if it's some sort of random game where anyone who participates has an equal chance of winning, or occasionally to a group that wins something together. Rewards in the form of little prizes simply will not work long-term and can often be counter-productive.

The reward that works best of all, however, is the reward of learning itself. It's extremely difficult, to be sure, to create the environment to make this happen in any sort of institution in Korea, but there are steps one can attempt. The best is to try to get what you teach included in some sort of graded curriculum. Then the students can feel both the instrumental motivation of studying for marks and the integrative motivation you can create by making English relevant to their lives. A good case in point would be my grade 1 and 2 MS students this year. For the first half of this school year they had a helpless rookie KET who was also my co-teacher, and for the second half of this year they have a great, experienced English teacher (who can actually teach them in English). The second term is still young but it's like they're not even the same students as before. Last term I could make them quiet and stop them from being unruly by making examples of trouble-makers with the threat of more sore knees, slapped hands, and confiscated items on the way. But getting them into the swing of a lesson and actually learning something substantial was such a struggle. There's nothing quite as depressing as trying to do a dialogue in two groups with only half the students participating. Now I hardly have to try because the students know what I'm doing counts towards their mark and the KET and I have a great sense of mutual reinforcement going on. Because the right kind of motivation is there, there�s been hardly any need to employ threats of punishment, either. Hopefully we can keep this up and I'm confident we can.

[Natalia]

My school occasionally has markets, and the kids earn 'dollars' to spend there through good behaviour and completing homework (and lose them for doing the wrong thing). That works wonders for elementary kids.

Older kids will do anything I want if I tell them they will go into the hallway if they misbehave (where a Korean staff member might see them). The ridiculous thing is they are scared of ANY Korean person in the hallway - even a passer-by who is not connected with the school.

[ESL Milk "Everyday]

I use candy, but I'm starting to hate it because the kids actually seem to get worse when I offer it. Anyway, I'm lucky because the way I'm set up I can pit whole classes against each other in tournaments and stuff, so that kinda helps bring a class together as one... other classes make great natural rivals.

I give out very few punishments... it takes a lot to get one, but I do give them out. They have mirrors in the classroom so I like making them look in the mirror... and then there's always getting them to put their arms in the air... and sometimes I combine them, but that's only when they've repeatedly done something really wrong after I told them not to... and I give warnings.

Also, if they're up out of their seats too much, I take their chairs away and they have to sit on the floor or stand for the rest of the class. It all sounds kinda cruel, but I don't get to sit down for the whole class... so why should they?

[icicle]