Behaviorist Ideas in the Classroom

Effort is often over looked by many teachers.  I encorporate effort into my behavior plan, but love the idea of using a spread sheet to track effort.  I would like to see the comparisions between how much effort I believe students are putting forth, and what they think they put forth.  I think by providing the with a rubric toscore themselves, we can "train" the students to accurately rate their effort.  IF we can get students to see the correlation between effort and success, then we can get the most out of all our students.

Homework and practice can be daunting to some students, as well as parents.  i have parents complain and say it is a waste of time.  Over the years I have tried to make it more interesting for the students from time to time.  I will occassionaly have students visit websites foro homework.  One site I like to use it Raz-kids.com.  This website allows me to assign reading levels to students.  They listen to and read books into a microphone.  We can both listen to how they have read and traxck their fluency.  It also provides them with worksheets they can print out and a quiz to take.  Report are sent to me so I can see if the students have comleted their assignments and what scores they received on the quiz.  There is also a math site our school has on the server that students can access from home,complete an assignment and print a reprot card of their work.  Homework is a important for the drill aspect of learning and behaviorist views.