Substitute Teaching: Rewarding Responsible Students

A skill that comes in handy for every conscientious student is the ability to "keep things in perspective." It is a skill that adults quickly notice and value in students. It is also a skill that we as adults can greatly benefit from if we put it to use.

Substitute teaching is simultaneously both a challenging and rewarding profession. Coming into contact with thousands of complete strangers every month and trying to provide a safe and stimulating environment for each of them to learn in is a challenge that few people volunteer to accept in the first place. It is easy to walk into a public school and imagine the students to be one big, like-minded blob. However, this is far from the case. Every classroom is filled with a wide spectrum of talents, abilities, personalities, and decisions.

Typically, when you are substituting in a classroom, you will notice that certain students command more attention than others. Often, these are outgoing people, who are enjoyable to talk with. Your job as a substitute, however, is to attend to the needs of every student.

How can you do this when so many of the most dilligent workers are also most often the quietest?

One sure way is to reward productive behavior and work. You do not necessarily need to do anything extravagant, like pass out prizes or anything, but you simply need to communicate to the students in the classroom that you notice them and their performance. Instead of only writing names on the board to penalize students, you can flip this model inside out, and write names on the board to recognize students who are on-track.

Something important to keep in mind is that you want for all students to feel valuable, whether they are on-track in class or totally off-track. Recognizing productive behavior is not about making a strong value judgment. While you will now and then find yourself using words like "good" and "bad" as you relate with students, you will want to avoid these terms as you evaluate the productivity of students, primarily because students will not always hear these words the way you mean for them to be heard.

Rather than saying "good" or "bad," you can use a happy face or a sad face for younger students to communicate your expectations, and simply a "plus sign" or "minus sign" for grades as high up as 7th or 8th.

Toward the end of the day, you can copy your lists from the board to a post-it note, and include it in a letter for the teacher to read when she returns. Let the students know you will be doing this, and supplement the list with more in-depth comments where necessary.

This can be a very effective tool, especially if you begin each class by noticing productive behavior. Productivity is often very contagious. For this reason, do what you can to resolve simple matters with students before you need to resort to communicating displeasure with their work or behavior. Let productivity do it's work. Later in the day, if you need to become more firm, you will still have the option to.

Most importantly, however, never forget to keep things in perspective.