It's crucial to build students' confidence this year! Positive reinforcement and motivation are proven to have a tremendous impact on student performance. In a previous post, we outline some creative strategies to incorporate incentives into your lesson plans. Here are 100 more!

• Plan a virtual dance party to celebrate everyone meeting this month’s time on task or mastery goals
• Wear fun hats during your video lectures, vote for the best one and let that student pick a prize
• End successful video lessons with a game, like “I Spy” with different colored items in the teacher’s background
• Send personalized encouragement videos to students -- remember, students love feeling like VIPs
• Host an in-person or Zoom lunch with students 
• Incorporate online classroom games like Go Noodle
• Make a class playlist of all your students favorite songs and play them during group work time
• Take the time to chat about a topic that interests your class
• Offer online peer reviews and office hours for older students
• Share and shout out students who have earned Classworks badges, characters, and shields
• Use kindness jar to keep tabs on students who help their peers or volunteer to lead discussions
• Include fun videos, gifs, and images in your positive feedback messages with students
• Let your virtual class out early (the timetable is more flexible than ever!)
• Emailing parents with student congratulations, parents love hearing about their students’ achievements 
• Share student’s My Scores page to parents, guardians and adults in their lives to build buy-in at home
• Work with students to help plan and accomplish their individual goals
• Set class-wide goals and monitor progress with the whole classroom community
• Host a movie day! Have your students vote on a movie and stream it during class time
• Go on virtual field trips to places you’re studying - ever wanted to visit The Smithsonian? 
• Use breakout rooms for peer to peer collaboration 
• Assign partner projects for students to build community
• Teachers introduce students to their pet(s) and vice-versa
• Allow students to use fun virtual backgrounds during lessons 
• Model enthusiasm for learning
• Provide high interest learning opportunities -- relate lessons to your students favorite topics. Check out Classworks Classroom Reading passages.
• Offer opportunities for improving grades or catch-up work
• Create scavenger hunts either online or in-person to teach about different resources and tools
• Send shout outs to your students, too - not just parents!
• Show students how to take ownership with different classroom roles and technology features -- Students can track their own progress using the My Scores dashboard
• Highlight student strengths in group projects - assign each student a role or have them pick their own
• Shift teaching from a book to applicable learning like teaching science with cooking
• Play virtual games with Google Slides
• Create custom assessments to practice key skills - check out our step-by-step guide
• Give students an opportunity to show and tell what they value most about each lesson
• Host unit/ theme parties with relevant food and beverages
• Data track students growth and progress 
• Offer students choice boards or menus on what they want to learn
• Let students decide how they want to learn something ie books, internet, interview
• Safely integrate social media into classroom projects when appropriate
• Use pop culture topics for culturally relevant connections
• Publicize goals to keep students accountable -- check out our bulletin board kit!
• Have students create vision boards to align to their goals on programs like Canva
• Give students time to reflect on goals and progress
• Really emphasize the power of “yet” and having a growth mindset with younger students
• Provide practical feedback on their goals and what’s going well for a student during your one-on-ones
• Build in weekly time for feedback on students’ work so they can improve right away
• Offer students check-ins at the beginning of class so everyone feels heard
• Establish clear expectations and provide all the resources your students need to achieve them
• Be inspirational - add inspirational quotes and photos into a lesson
• Create a classroom vision board and have everyone contribute
• Use collaborative culture norms for different classroom practices to set expectations
• Host your own All-Star Contest! Celebrate students with the highest time-on-task above 80% mastery
• Remind students to keep their eyes on the prize - whatever prize is relevant for your students at the time
• Flexibility in ways to complete work and assignments - technology has made asynchronous learning a lot easier!
• Let students act out examples and non-examples for the class
• Share personal experiences and anecdotes with students so they get to know you more
• Use varied types of technology for your lessons. For example, Classworks can be used on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
• Establish routines for your class -- it’s easier to maintain good habits than to break bad ones!
• Take a poll to see what your students want to be when they grow up. Then, connect subject matter to careers that interest them
• Ask students to reflect on prior experiences and visualize their future goals, then draw them!
• Check for understanding in different ways. One teacher has her students give a signal at various times to ensure they’re paying attention, kind of like Simon Says: “If you have questions about what I just went over, pinch your nose!”
• Incorporate multiple learning styles, but don’t explicitly use them for select students. 
• Create different classroom clubs or teams so students feel apart of a community
• Group students dynamically rather than at random -- Grouping reports can help ensure that students change groups appropriately as skill mastery increases
• Host a variety show for students to show various talents
• Celebrate students heritage, values, and cultures with celebrations and projects
• Gauge confidence levels of goals and tasks to provide adequate support for students
• Shout out student success by their efforts
• Read motivational stories from different cultures and backgrounds
• Incorporate mysteries into your lessons
• Discover new things together- if you don’t know, google it!
• Students earn goofy time with you
• Avoid going through the motions - try to keep each day fresh, you’ll appreciate this too!
• Flip the order of lessons to keep students on their toes
• Put on performances
• Make yourself available for students
• Have “Master” classes where students teach something they’re an expert on
• Teach using units of study so content is related
• Provide scaffolded reading material to build background knowledge
• Create interactive notebooks together -- See a sneak peek of the Classworks Goal Tracker‍
• Use accountable talk/ talking stems
• Have a classroom pet (real or fake!) and have students take care of it
• Let students take turns on being the “navigator” for presentations or screen sharing
• Pull brain breaks throughout the day
• Do classroom yoga to keep students active
• Find books to explain and support the Why behind classroom expectations and norms
• Ask for students favorite books and read them aloud
• Teach cross-curricular lessons to peak students interests
• Have pajama day for virtual students
• Gamify lessons -- in Classworks, students have access to over 7,000 gamified activities for ELA and Math!
• Find virtual tours for different careers possibilities
• Take learning outside! Many schools have empty stadiums that are currently not being used.
• Reach out to authors and people of interest to speak to your class
• Give students tasks that keep them moving, like a Carousel Brainstorm activity!
• Proudly display exemplary student work in your digital or in-person classroom
• Celebrate differences and uniqueness among your students
• Find and read a book that’s been turned into a movie then critique the differences
• Play pictionary when learning new vocabulary
• Visit your dollar store for fun prizes to create a grab-bag
• Give students additional time to work on closing gaps. If you have Classworks, your students already have learning paths based on their most current assessment and progress monitoring data.

New! Check out our updated bulletin board kit options to add some flair to your classroom.