We all love rewards. We also like surprises. Here we present a three part strategy for considering how to develop an incentive program to encourage or nudge your students towards demonstrating the academic habits you want to see. We will do this through a case study.
Golden Ticket Case Study
Our leadership team decided that a key lever to improving student achievement for the year at our campus was to improve how students annotated questions. As a leadership team we shared principles for what made certain annotations effective but also allowed for departments to collaborate to determine what was needed to make annotations even more effective in their content areas. The process varied by department but each academic discipline had an aligned vision for what this should look like in their classes. Teachers were excited to roll-out their annotations because they believed in them and felt they supported instruction in their content area, versus a universal or general approach.
As a school we dedicated time every month for teachers to meet in departments, audit student work against rubrics and develop plans for how to continually improve the annotations done by students. We reached a satisfactory level by the winter but we knew this would not yield the necessary long-term results. Students knew what to do and how to do it but we needed a spark to bring back the energy from the beginning of the year.
Golden Tickets
We launched an initiative using Golden Tickets. These were small tickets that looked like this:
Part 1 – In Class Recognition
The tickets were printed on high quality golden paper to make them feel special. Teachers were issued a set amount of golden tickets each week to distribute to their students. This was a way for teachers to recognize excellent academic habits and it also was helpful for students to know that all teachers had an allocation to distribute. Some teachers made this a special part of their day and others used them in a more systematic way by distributing them based on their grading of submitted work. This was again a moment where teachers could take a tool (the golden ticket) and use it in their own way that also supported a school-wide initiative. This alone increased the amount of positive praise students received for their academic habits. School leaders were also allocated tickets to distribute during classroom walkthroughs and observations which, again, helped to center the entire school around the same academic habits.
Part 2 – (Almost) Everybody Wins
Students wanted the golden tickets for recognition but there were also other reasons. One reason was the whole-school prizes. On Fridays during lunch, students would be able to write their names on the tickets and submit them. Our team logged them and we had a list of all the students who had earned a ticket during the week. This was used for data monitoring but also it was used as a way to reward all students.
As students left the building on Friday afternoon, any student who had earned a golden ticket during the week, was eligible for a small prize. This was oftentimes a small piece of candy as they left the building. This was powerful because it was a reward that any student had a chance to earn and when everyone saw that basically the entire school was earning this prize it normalized the entire program as “just something we do here.”
Part 3 – Incentivize High Performers
We wanted to incentivize students working hard to accrue several golden tickets by demonstrating the desired academic habits in each class. In order to do this, we used the submitted tickets on Friday for a weekly drawing for larger prizes. These were often gift cards or something kids wanted that we could afford buying 4-5 of for the week. The more tickets a student submitted, the higher their chances would be of winning the raffle. This also added a sense of excitement to it all that we could have fun with on Friday afternoons.
Aligning rewards that enforce the habits you want to see across the school in a way that celebrates participation and adds excitement is a challenging balance to strike but once it’s achieved, the results are powerful.
Reflection Questions for School Leaders:
- What impact did the Golden Ticket program have on teacher engagement and buy-in, particularly in terms of reinforcing and recognizing effective student annotations?
- In what ways did the Golden Ticket program contribute to a positive school culture and sense of community, both in terms of student recognition and whole-school rewards?
Building a positive school-wide culture around ACT and SAT assessments is challenging and essential. This blog is part of a series, “10 Strategies for Building a Culture of ACT and SAT Success,” where we’ve outlined strategies to help school leaders. If you have questions or need support as you build a school-wide culture, please reach out to Thomas O’Brien at thomas@winwardacademy.com.
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