Topic 7

Comment posted 19 October 2019 on Julia Gale’s Blog

Hi Julia,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Class Dojo. I have only used it in the past for positive behaviour reinforcement as part of a whole-school approach to classroom management, and it was for teachers only so parents did not have access. I think that Class Dojo definitely has its’ pros and cons. One thing that I do love is its features that allow teachers to collect data on behaviour. Teachers are very good at collecting data on academic progress, but we don’t always do the same for behaviour. This feature allows teachers to look for patterns in student behaviours, recurring issues, students that may be flying under our radars and not receiving points, or even our own ratio of positive to negative feedback. If you haven’t used this feature before, there’s a post about it here: https://classdojo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203478695-View-Points-in-an-Organized-Spreadsheet#web

-Kayla
(Also, quick side note: Your link on iLearn for this post wasn’t working for me. I ended up using one of your old links and clicking around to get here).

Comment posted 19 October 2019 on Tanya Daley’s Blog

Hi Tanya,
Thank you for your detailed discussion on the effectiveness and ethics of Class Dojo. I enjoy reading your posts because I think we are cut from a very similar cloth!

Last year I managed to teach the whole year without a behaviour rewards system in a year 1 class. I was very sceptical, as I had been taught using Class Dojo and had used it for years. What I found that it was very difficult, to begin with, but after some hard work, my students were as well behaved as my previous classes, if not better. I am well and truly converted to intrinsic motivation and weaned off of Class Dojo!

Something else that concerns me with Class Dojo is how defeating it must be to those students with behaviour challenges (and their parents!) that constantly get negative feedback. I think for these kinds of students, Class Dojo will be ineffective as they will associate it with “getting in trouble”. My previous school mandated Class Dojo as a whole-school program, but it was used for rewards only. They had a separate system for negative behaviours which was a lot more low-key to avoid escalation. In my experience, publicly shaming negative behaviours is never a good idea and often results in even worse behaviour.