School Stickers delivers significant impact on teaching, learning and behaviour management for Saint Benedict Catholic High School with Carrot Rewards.
Background
Saint Benedict Catholic School and Performing Arts College is a Catholic secondary school in Derby. It has been using printed school rewards from www.schoolstickers.co.uk for several years with great results.
Each certificate, sticker and postcard has a unique code and value, and students log the rewards they are given online at www.mystickers.co.uk. Saint Benedict operates a quota system where teachers are given a set amount of subject specific stickers to be awarded for academic success, behaviour and effort in each lesson. Gold badges are awarded by support staff and silver badges are for cover teachers to reward good behaviour.
Vincent Round, Director of Learning for RE Saint Benedict said “We even did some personalised stickers with a photo as a joke for the Head Teacher to give out at his discretion, but they were so popular, that we have ordered more. Pupils are always excited to receive a physical reward and enjoy being able to register their stickers and create their own online sticker album.”
As students register their own rewards, this saves teachers time, and teachers also love the variety of designs available, as well as the ability to completely customise stickers and postcards with their own text and imagery.
Challenge
Saint Benedict was looking for a sophisticated online system that would make it easy for teachers to manage their house points system and improve student participation and motivation across years 7-11. It had been using an Excel solution, but it was time intensive and cumbersome.
Vincent Round commented, “We have been using the coded School Stickers for four years with great results, but managing and co-ordinating the competitions was complicated. To improve the motivation of our students we knew it was important to put a more structured reward scheme in place. We also knew we had to re-engage the teachers by providing them a simple, efficient scheme that gave them more time with their pupils than with an Excel spreadsheet.”
Solution
School Stickers’ new online rewards programme, www.carrotrewards.co.uk , enables schools to manage their own rewards scheme online and run unique competitions across the whole school. Saint Benedict chose to pilot Carrot Rewards as it had been impressed by School Stickers and was confident that its online solution for teachers would fit well with what they were doing already.
It uses Carrot Rewards to manage its House point system. Teachers no longer have to spend hours logging house points and totalling them for weekly assemblies, Carrot captures all this information and the latest house points can be easily shown in graphs whenever needed.
This has produced an additional benefit for the school in that pupils are so keen to see their house do well, they are encouraging each other to achieve more and ensure they are logging their rewards.
As well as House prizes, Saint Benedict runs two main competitions each term. A Top Performer, where the highest scoring pupil is rewarded, as well as a Prize Draw competition, where every sticker logged equates to an entry in the prize draw. This helps to ensure students of all abilities have the opportunity to participate.
To keep the reward scheme fresh for both pupils and teachers, at the start of the lesson the teacher explains to the pupils what they will have to do in that lesson to be rewarded. This transparency ensures less well behaved students are not rewarded just for achieving behaviour levels expected from other pupils. It also ensures it is not the same high achieving pupils rewarded each time, as the teachers can distribute the rewards for different activities in each lesson.
As MyStickers is an online application that can be accessed by pupils wherever they have a broadband connection (the privacy of their own home for example), even those pupils who would never want to be seen to engage with a reward scheme are logging their rewards.
Saint Benedict has found it to have a significant impact on teaching, learning and behaviour management for Years 7-11.Carrot Rewards continues to be a resounding success. Teacher and pupil feedback for both the stickers and online tools are very positive with over 90% of pupils having logged at least one reward online since it launched earlier this year.
With the launch of the Carrot Shop, where pupils can redeem their rewards for prizes including pens, pencils and pencil cases, with iPod vouchers available for special awards, Saint Benedict expect to see pupil engagement rise even further.
Benefits
Over 400,000 students have used the School Stickers system in over 3,500 schools. Neil Hodges, MD, School Stickers said, “School Stickers has been trusted by thousands of schools to reward pupils for good behaviour and achievement ever since it was created by a teacher in 2000 and 2 million stickers have been registered on www.mystickers.co.uk since it launched in 2006. Teachers and pupils have been responding very well to the new online Carrot Rewards and we know that it will not only save teachers time, but will also help to motivate, and encourage better standards of behaviour and work in schools up and down the country.”