Class Dojo – https://www.classdojo.com
ClassDojo is an behaviour management tool for the classroom that can be used both on an app and web basis. It is aimed at teachers, parents, students and school leaders and is designed to help increase student participation and communication between parents and teachers by creating an online classroom.
Feature of ClassDojo:
- Organising students into class groups online to encourage teamwork
- Award the class for working together and keep track of points to work towards a class goal
- Track homework, participation and attendance
- Using countdowns and timers during individual or group work time to keep students focused
- Create a ‘class story’ to share classroom moments, photos and updates with parents
- Give individual feedback to students
- Parents can see a daily report at the end of the day
However, ClassDojo has received a lot of criticism… here are what the critics say:
6 reasons to reject ClassDojo:
- ClassDojo gets character education wrong. Children’s psychiatrist Ross Greene reminds us that when a situation demands a child’s lagging skills, we get unsolved problems. Because we know that misbehaviour is a symptom of much more complex and interesting problems, we need to see these unsolved problems as teachable moments. ClassDojo reduces children to punitive measures where the misbehaviour is seen as nothing more than an inconvenience to the teacher that needs to be snuffed out. ClassDojo judges and labels students by ranking and sorting them and distracts even well-intentioned adults from providing children with the feedback and the guidance they need to learn.
- ClassDojo gets motivation wrong. There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic & extrinsic. The problem here is that we need to stop asking ‘How motivated are my students?’ and start asking ‘How are my students motivated?’. Motivation is not a single entity that you either have a lot or little of. There are two kinds: intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated then you are doing something for its own sake; if you are extrinsically motivated, you are driven to do something, or not do something, based on a reward or punishment that may be waiting for you. But that is not even the interesting part—the real catch here is that these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. When you grow students’ extrinsic motivation by bribing them (or threatening them), you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Rewards can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement.
- The public nature of ClassDojo is inappropriate. Making this kind of information for all to see is nothing more than a way of publicly naming and shaming children. I know very few adults who would put up with this kind of treatment at their workplace, so then why would we ever subject children to this? A doctor would never post their patients’ health records publicly, and an accountant would not post their clients’ tax records publicly. A lawyer would not post their clients’ billing information publicly, nor would a teacher post their students’ Individual Program Plans for all to see. So why would a teacher ever think that it would be appropriate to share ClassDojo publicly? To do so would be unprofessional and malpractice.
- ClassDojo pits adults and children against each other. Teachers who use ClassDojo spend a great deal of their day catching kids being good and catching kids being bad. Point systems, like token economies, pit children and adults against each other and ultimately rupture relationships through power struggles. With ClassDojo, children come too see their teachers less as safe and caring allies and more as judges-in-waiting whom they learn to keep their distance.
- ClassDojo can only ever be experienced as coercive and manipulative. Like Alfie Kohn says, rewards and punishments are not opposites — rather they are two sides of the same coin, and they don’t buy us very much other than short-term compliance. ClassDojo is by definition a way to do things to kids when we should be working with them. And for those who use ClassDojo only for the positives and the rewards, remember that with-holding a reward or removing a privilege can only ever be experienced as a punishment. The best teachers understand what Jerome Bruner meant when he said, “Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment, but as information.”
- ClassDojo prepares children to be ruled by others. School already places a premium on blind obedience and mindless compliance, and an App like ClassDojo that implicitly and explicitly makes following the rules the primary goal of school prepares children to be ruled by others. When we allow operant conditioning to infect the classroom, we see children less as active, free thinkers and more as passive, conditional objects. Under these conditions, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is less likely to be a problem than Compliant Acquiescent Disorder (CAD). It’s important to remember that mindless compliance is responsible for far more of the atrocities against human kind than needless disobedience.
A parents concerns:
“As a parent, I have a few concerns about ClassDojo that I would want to see addressed by the teacher if it were being used in my child’s classroom. First, I would like more clarity on ClassDojo’s privacy policies than the difficult-to-parse legal language on their website. Second, I have some concerns about how publicly displaying points to an entire classroom of students might impact particularly sensitive kids. ClassDojo offers many different ways to use its product, including anonymous avatars and not displaying points at all. And, finally, I’d like to ensure that ClassDojo was just one tool, albeit a very powerful one, in the teacher’s classroom management arsenal, and that other tools like individual conversations about problem behaviours and smiles or a quick word of praise for good behaviours were still being used.”
‘A major concern is that the point system that the app operates by publicly shames students infront of their classmates, which isn’t motivating and doesn’t encourage longterm change. If you are a child who is usually on task and doing well, but sometimes slips up, your mistakes are now made BIGGER. Your occasional goof ups become public errors, and they suddenly become a much bigger deal. Everyone has bad days sometimes. Let’s imagine that it is not your best day, or worse, it is a terrible day. Everything seems to be going wrong. We all have those experiences. If you are in a classroom where that is understood, and your teacher and peers accept you with an attitude of forgiveness and a fresh start, your next day can be good. You know you can go back to school and try again. However, if you are in a classroom where your failures are publicly displayed, you are likely to return to school anxious. You are embarrassed and fearful of having the same bad day again.’
Although the outcome of my project will be different to ClassDojo in many ways, there are some similarities. As you can see from the evidence above ClassDojo however, has a lot of problems and potential pitfalls. The outcome of my project will aim to avoid these problems and improve upon them to ensure it doesn’t suffer from the same critiques as ClassDojo. For example my service will not pit children against each other, there will be no ranking or points system. It will not focus on whether the child has been ‘good or bad’ but instead focus on how they are coping in certain lessons, whether they are distressed or frustrated for example in Maths but enthusiastic and content in English. It will do this not by a points system but by a system that displays their mood with the potential to elaborate on why they are in this mood. The service will not be available for the whole class to see, as the main aim of the service is to help children with learning difficulties and their parents, so it will be personal to each child and their parent.
The service will act as a conversation between the teacher and the parent as the parent will also be able to input information on the childs behaviour at home, for example completing homework tasks. It will be up to the parent and the teacher as to whether the child is aware of the device. The teacher should not get overwhelmed with the task as the outcome of the project will be easy to use and will not be for every single child and their parent in the class room, it will instead be reserved for children with moderate to severe learning difficulties. In some situations if a child has an assistent teacher or special helper that sits in class with them, this task of monitoring their behaviour could be given to them as to not overwhelm the main teacher. The service will enable teachers to be a bystander when observing exactly when their students are engaged and motivated to discover the best methods of teaching them. The service will tend to focus on the positive improvements that the student is making in class and even when introducing negatives it will be for the benefit of the student or the teacher with the chance to improve, also taking into account that sometimes students can just have bad days. It will be about working with the student to cater learning to what is best for them, not fighting them to make them learn the same way as everyone else. In a Blended Learning style, the outcome of the project is to be used alongside traditional teaching methods and not just one tool to rule them all.
Overall I believe that these significant differences will make the outcome of the project unique from ClassDojo, if not an improvement on it.
Sources:
http://www.joebower.org/2014/11/6-reasons-to-reject-classdojo.html
Thinking About Classroom Dojo – Why Not Just Tase Your Kids Instead?
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