My Favorite Plan for Behavior Management-Positive Reinforcement

I've had classes and individual students who were extremely challenging. One bad apple can ruin the bunch, when the bunch is constantly reacting to the bad apple. This idea was given to me by one of my mentors when I had a very difficult class.Behavior Lottery- You need to have raffle tickets at hand and little prizes from the dollar store work great. Tell the class you would like to do something very special today with them, because they are some of your favorite kids. They have to earn the raffle tickets based on behavior, staying on task, and following procedure. The better they are, the more raffle tickets they earn, the more likely to win a prize. You want to show them the prizes they could earn to motivate and grab their interest. As you give them raffle tickets (which you can print out from the web for free) they will write their names on them and drop them into a jar. Once they are cleaned up at the end of the period shake the jar and pull for the raffle, I do about three prizes/winners a week. The kids all clap and are thrilled for their classmates. I write the winners down and if they ever win again before everyone else has had a chance, they can pull for the raffle winner instead of me.This idea has worked for double classes in which several students do not get along and it was total mayhem, now these classes are some of my favorites.