Somestudents thrive on peer attention-and will do whatever they have to in order to get it.
Jim's Hints
Use Positive Peer Reporting to Improve the Whole Classroom Climate. As a teacher, you may want to adopt the Positive Peer Reporting strategy in your classroom even if you do not have students who regularly seek negative attention. All students can benefit from the chance to practice giving and receiving compliments. You may also find that, once the intervention is in place, your students begin to be more complimentary toward one another and use fewer putdowns.
Extend Positive Peer Reporting to Less Structured Situations. Once this strategy is in place and effective, you can experiment with extending it to school settings or situations in which there is less structure and direct adult supervision (generalization). You may announce, for example, that the class can earn a certain number of additional bonus points each day for each sincere compliment that you observe being used in cooperative learning groups, free time, while students are in the lunch line, etc. (Of course, you would also remind students that you are the sole judge of whether bonus points are to be given.) You can make this generalization strategy more effective by sharing specific instances in which you saw students giving praise or compliments. (E.g., "I am giving a point to the class because, on the playground, I saw Jacob teaching some of the younger kids how to play freeze tag. He also complimented them on how quickly they learned the rule. I bet it made them feel good to have an older student pay that kind of attention to them.")
Surprise Students With 'Mystery List' Days. To maintain interest in this intervention, you might occasionally have a 'mystery list' day. Tell students that they need to be very observant of their peers that day because you will not be announcing the list of students chosen to be complimented until the end of the period or school day.