How a student-run rewards store can improve both student behavior and engagement without stressing your staff!
Students are being suspended at a rate that is causing far more harm than good. Not only that, it seems the consequences assigned due to behavior infractions are far from equitable.
So your school takes action. You take a positive approach, establishing a token economy based on incentives to do the right thing with significantly less emphasis on the negative consequences.
To handle the incentives they have tasked a group of staff members to run a school rewards store. The store is run from a classroom and teachers divide and conquer the responsibilities of inventory, packing, order form collections, and the delivery of rewards.
And you know what? It works! Students love it. Behavior improves, and teachers see a noticeable uptick in engagement and morale in the building. That is until it works a little too well.
Students love the system so much that they begin to earn more and more points and they begin to spend those points on more and more rewards.
Pretty soon the staff can’t keep up with demand (they do still have a school to run) and the rewards store either closes or becomes inconsistent to the point that students aren’t as invested in the process. It just isn’t sustainable.
So how do you create a system that works, but is also sustainable? That’s what we set out to find out when we visited Von Tobel Middle School.
Von Tobel is located in Las Vegas, Nevada and they experienced the situation I described above. Assistant Principal Sarada Toomey and English Teacher Elizabeth Holt led the charge in organizing the store.
They created a shopping list on Amazon and purchased LiveSchool to award and track positive behavior points…and initially, they had great success. But just like the example above, the system was quickly overwhelming and a new solution was necessary to move forward.
They needed some help to make it work. Who was available, capable, and heavily invested in Von Tobel’s success? The students at Von Tobel. Elizabeth initially asked for student assistants. Sarada and the leadership team did her one better though, they created a class called “The LiveSchool Council”.
The LiveSchool Council has been so effective at VTMS that they have processed over 1800 rewards this school year alone. It was so impressive that we asked Elizabeth to share the process in a webinar earlier this school and we just had to go see the team in person.
So what did I learn from our trip to the desert? What makes the rewards store at Von Tobel so special?
It can work at any school. Let’s take a look at the process I observed and I’ll break down further how you can make it work at your school.
Let’s start by addressing the standard obstacles that any school needs to clear in order to establish its own rewards store.
Von Tobel has a built-in intervention period for their school day. During this time, every student has a place to be and a staff member assigned to them. For the purpose of the school store, Sarada assigned Elizabeth to be the teacher of the LiveSchool Council class.
The time here is critical because it meant that deliveries were occurring during a time of the day that wasn’t affecting classroom instruction.
Because of the timing, The LiveSchool council would be staffed by students who were not in need of intervention but instead were in need of an enrichment opportunity.
Your school may not have a dedicated time slot in the day for intervention…but you likely do have a homeroom, advisory, or enrichment period available that could work in the exact same manner.
Location, location, location! Nope, that isn't a saying reserved for realtors. It’s pretty important for your school store as well! Most “stores” are positioned for maximum visibility and maximum foot traffic.
But for Von Tobel they actually wanted less visibility, and less foot traffic. That seems counterintuitive but their plan was about creating a sustainable process…not turning a classroom into a Dollar General.
The room itself was a classroom that went unused the rest of the school day, and it was used for all the processes of the store except the actual transaction.
Students wouldn’t need to ever go to the store to redeem rewards because the plan at Von Tobel called for online orders and next-day deliveries.
I joked with some of the students in charge of deliveries that they should start charging a subscription fee to secure that next-day service just like Amazon!
For your school culture, this opens up a huge variety of options as you really could dedicate any room or office to be your base of operations without worrying about a storefront at all.
The rewards in the store were all selected from polling students and listening to the suggestions of the council. It doesn’t have to be complicated. If you want to know what will motivate students to behave better…you should really just ask them.
This one is an easy problem to solve. 😉
Von Tobel uses LiveSchool to award students with points, track those points, and redeem prizes with those points in the store.
But as we mentioned before, the biggest problem to solve is more about the who than the what. The big lifts for the store at Von Tobel are all done by students on the LiveSchool Council, let’s take a closer look at how they make it all go.
Initially, Elizabeth had only asked for a few students to deliver rewards to students. Once the council was formed it became apparent that they were capable of much more than that.
The students brainstormed strategies, processes, and even long-term goals for the store. Included in that planning, they developed and assigned roles amongst themselves.
These students keep a google form updated and inform Elizabeth when they are out of something or if something is underperforming and they’d like to replace it in the store with something students would rather have.
The ideal students for this role in your school are those that enjoy organization and planning.
These students pull up the submitted google form submissions and write the name of the student, their classroom number, and the rewards they have requested on a post-it note that they pass along to “processing”.
Your ideal candidates for this job are students who have organizational skills and are detail-oriented.
Students in processing then take the post-it note information and verify that those students have the points necessary for the purchase in LiveSchool. Once confirmed, they process the purchase and send the order to “shipping”.
Once again, students who show strong organizational skills are ideal here.
The students in charge of shipping take the order, pack up the reward(s), and tape the post-it on the top. Then the reward is placed on a shelf to await “delivery”.
Students selected for shipping are your kiddos who love to be active and enjoy hands-on learning experiences.
Delivery students pick up the packaged rewards from the shelf, take a hall pass, and deliver the rewards to their peers in classrooms all throughout the building.
Delivery students need to be trustworthy and possess strong social skills as they will need to communicate clearly when they make deliveries.
When students are finished with their jobs they spend the remaining time brainstorming, discussing, and refining their processes. The process of running a small rewards store is very much like running a small business…if that business was operated by middle school students!
The experience I found at Von Tobel was both effective and replicable. If a school was new to reward stores or struggling to keep theirs afloat this is the process I’d suggest they adopt.
Running the rewards store at VTMS provides an excellent leadership experience for The LiveSchool Council because of the specific roles and responsibilities they created.
But it’s much more than that because it requires students to work together as a team, communicate effectively, and take ownership of their tasks. Additionally, the process of managing the store teaches students about budgeting, customer service, and problem-solving.
All of those are skills that your students will put to use over and over later in their life… and don’t forget your original goal with the store: student behavior is going to improve dramatically!
Need more information on building your own student rewards store? Check out episode 35 of our podcast.
Students are being suspended at a rate that is causing far more harm than good. Not only that, it seems the consequences assigned due to behavior infractions are far from equitable.
So your school takes action. You take a positive approach, establishing a token economy based on incentives to do the right thing with significantly less emphasis on the negative consequences.
To handle the incentives they have tasked a group of staff members to run a school rewards store. The store is run from a classroom and teachers divide and conquer the responsibilities of inventory, packing, order form collections, and the delivery of rewards.
And you know what? It works! Students love it. Behavior improves, and teachers see a noticeable uptick in engagement and morale in the building. That is until it works a little too well.
Students love the system so much that they begin to earn more and more points and they begin to spend those points on more and more rewards.
Pretty soon the staff can’t keep up with demand (they do still have a school to run) and the rewards store either closes or becomes inconsistent to the point that students aren’t as invested in the process. It just isn’t sustainable.
So how do you create a system that works, but is also sustainable? That’s what we set out to find out when we visited Von Tobel Middle School.
Von Tobel is located in Las Vegas, Nevada and they experienced the situation I described above. Assistant Principal Sarada Toomey and English Teacher Elizabeth Holt led the charge in organizing the store.
They created a shopping list on Amazon and purchased LiveSchool to award and track positive behavior points…and initially, they had great success. But just like the example above, the system was quickly overwhelming and a new solution was necessary to move forward.
They needed some help to make it work. Who was available, capable, and heavily invested in Von Tobel’s success? The students at Von Tobel. Elizabeth initially asked for student assistants. Sarada and the leadership team did her one better though, they created a class called “The LiveSchool Council”.
The LiveSchool Council has been so effective at VTMS that they have processed over 1800 rewards this school year alone. It was so impressive that we asked Elizabeth to share the process in a webinar earlier this school and we just had to go see the team in person.
So what did I learn from our trip to the desert? What makes the rewards store at Von Tobel so special?
It can work at any school. Let’s take a look at the process I observed and I’ll break down further how you can make it work at your school.
Let’s start by addressing the standard obstacles that any school needs to clear in order to establish its own rewards store.
Von Tobel has a built-in intervention period for their school day. During this time, every student has a place to be and a staff member assigned to them. For the purpose of the school store, Sarada assigned Elizabeth to be the teacher of the LiveSchool Council class.
The time here is critical because it meant that deliveries were occurring during a time of the day that wasn’t affecting classroom instruction.
Because of the timing, The LiveSchool council would be staffed by students who were not in need of intervention but instead were in need of an enrichment opportunity.
Your school may not have a dedicated time slot in the day for intervention…but you likely do have a homeroom, advisory, or enrichment period available that could work in the exact same manner.
Location, location, location! Nope, that isn't a saying reserved for realtors. It’s pretty important for your school store as well! Most “stores” are positioned for maximum visibility and maximum foot traffic.
But for Von Tobel they actually wanted less visibility, and less foot traffic. That seems counterintuitive but their plan was about creating a sustainable process…not turning a classroom into a Dollar General.
The room itself was a classroom that went unused the rest of the school day, and it was used for all the processes of the store except the actual transaction.
Students wouldn’t need to ever go to the store to redeem rewards because the plan at Von Tobel called for online orders and next-day deliveries.
I joked with some of the students in charge of deliveries that they should start charging a subscription fee to secure that next-day service just like Amazon!
For your school culture, this opens up a huge variety of options as you really could dedicate any room or office to be your base of operations without worrying about a storefront at all.
The rewards in the store were all selected from polling students and listening to the suggestions of the council. It doesn’t have to be complicated. If you want to know what will motivate students to behave better…you should really just ask them.
This one is an easy problem to solve. 😉
Von Tobel uses LiveSchool to award students with points, track those points, and redeem prizes with those points in the store.
But as we mentioned before, the biggest problem to solve is more about the who than the what. The big lifts for the store at Von Tobel are all done by students on the LiveSchool Council, let’s take a closer look at how they make it all go.
Initially, Elizabeth had only asked for a few students to deliver rewards to students. Once the council was formed it became apparent that they were capable of much more than that.
The students brainstormed strategies, processes, and even long-term goals for the store. Included in that planning, they developed and assigned roles amongst themselves.
These students keep a google form updated and inform Elizabeth when they are out of something or if something is underperforming and they’d like to replace it in the store with something students would rather have.
The ideal students for this role in your school are those that enjoy organization and planning.
These students pull up the submitted google form submissions and write the name of the student, their classroom number, and the rewards they have requested on a post-it note that they pass along to “processing”.
Your ideal candidates for this job are students who have organizational skills and are detail-oriented.
Students in processing then take the post-it note information and verify that those students have the points necessary for the purchase in LiveSchool. Once confirmed, they process the purchase and send the order to “shipping”.
Once again, students who show strong organizational skills are ideal here.
The students in charge of shipping take the order, pack up the reward(s), and tape the post-it on the top. Then the reward is placed on a shelf to await “delivery”.
Students selected for shipping are your kiddos who love to be active and enjoy hands-on learning experiences.
Delivery students pick up the packaged rewards from the shelf, take a hall pass, and deliver the rewards to their peers in classrooms all throughout the building.
Delivery students need to be trustworthy and possess strong social skills as they will need to communicate clearly when they make deliveries.
When students are finished with their jobs they spend the remaining time brainstorming, discussing, and refining their processes. The process of running a small rewards store is very much like running a small business…if that business was operated by middle school students!
The experience I found at Von Tobel was both effective and replicable. If a school was new to reward stores or struggling to keep theirs afloat this is the process I’d suggest they adopt.
Running the rewards store at VTMS provides an excellent leadership experience for The LiveSchool Council because of the specific roles and responsibilities they created.
But it’s much more than that because it requires students to work together as a team, communicate effectively, and take ownership of their tasks. Additionally, the process of managing the store teaches students about budgeting, customer service, and problem-solving.
All of those are skills that your students will put to use over and over later in their life… and don’t forget your original goal with the store: student behavior is going to improve dramatically!
Need more information on building your own student rewards store? Check out episode 35 of our podcast.
Students are being suspended at a rate that is causing far more harm than good. Not only that, it seems the consequences assigned due to behavior infractions are far from equitable.
So your school takes action. You take a positive approach, establishing a token economy based on incentives to do the right thing with significantly less emphasis on the negative consequences.
To handle the incentives they have tasked a group of staff members to run a school rewards store. The store is run from a classroom and teachers divide and conquer the responsibilities of inventory, packing, order form collections, and the delivery of rewards.
And you know what? It works! Students love it. Behavior improves, and teachers see a noticeable uptick in engagement and morale in the building. That is until it works a little too well.
Students love the system so much that they begin to earn more and more points and they begin to spend those points on more and more rewards.
Pretty soon the staff can’t keep up with demand (they do still have a school to run) and the rewards store either closes or becomes inconsistent to the point that students aren’t as invested in the process. It just isn’t sustainable.
So how do you create a system that works, but is also sustainable? That’s what we set out to find out when we visited Von Tobel Middle School.
Von Tobel is located in Las Vegas, Nevada and they experienced the situation I described above. Assistant Principal Sarada Toomey and English Teacher Elizabeth Holt led the charge in organizing the store.
They created a shopping list on Amazon and purchased LiveSchool to award and track positive behavior points…and initially, they had great success. But just like the example above, the system was quickly overwhelming and a new solution was necessary to move forward.
They needed some help to make it work. Who was available, capable, and heavily invested in Von Tobel’s success? The students at Von Tobel. Elizabeth initially asked for student assistants. Sarada and the leadership team did her one better though, they created a class called “The LiveSchool Council”.
The LiveSchool Council has been so effective at VTMS that they have processed over 1800 rewards this school year alone. It was so impressive that we asked Elizabeth to share the process in a webinar earlier this school and we just had to go see the team in person.
So what did I learn from our trip to the desert? What makes the rewards store at Von Tobel so special?
It can work at any school. Let’s take a look at the process I observed and I’ll break down further how you can make it work at your school.
Let’s start by addressing the standard obstacles that any school needs to clear in order to establish its own rewards store.
Von Tobel has a built-in intervention period for their school day. During this time, every student has a place to be and a staff member assigned to them. For the purpose of the school store, Sarada assigned Elizabeth to be the teacher of the LiveSchool Council class.
The time here is critical because it meant that deliveries were occurring during a time of the day that wasn’t affecting classroom instruction.
Because of the timing, The LiveSchool council would be staffed by students who were not in need of intervention but instead were in need of an enrichment opportunity.
Your school may not have a dedicated time slot in the day for intervention…but you likely do have a homeroom, advisory, or enrichment period available that could work in the exact same manner.
Location, location, location! Nope, that isn't a saying reserved for realtors. It’s pretty important for your school store as well! Most “stores” are positioned for maximum visibility and maximum foot traffic.
But for Von Tobel they actually wanted less visibility, and less foot traffic. That seems counterintuitive but their plan was about creating a sustainable process…not turning a classroom into a Dollar General.
The room itself was a classroom that went unused the rest of the school day, and it was used for all the processes of the store except the actual transaction.
Students wouldn’t need to ever go to the store to redeem rewards because the plan at Von Tobel called for online orders and next-day deliveries.
I joked with some of the students in charge of deliveries that they should start charging a subscription fee to secure that next-day service just like Amazon!
For your school culture, this opens up a huge variety of options as you really could dedicate any room or office to be your base of operations without worrying about a storefront at all.
The rewards in the store were all selected from polling students and listening to the suggestions of the council. It doesn’t have to be complicated. If you want to know what will motivate students to behave better…you should really just ask them.
This one is an easy problem to solve. 😉
Von Tobel uses LiveSchool to award students with points, track those points, and redeem prizes with those points in the store.
But as we mentioned before, the biggest problem to solve is more about the who than the what. The big lifts for the store at Von Tobel are all done by students on the LiveSchool Council, let’s take a closer look at how they make it all go.
Initially, Elizabeth had only asked for a few students to deliver rewards to students. Once the council was formed it became apparent that they were capable of much more than that.
The students brainstormed strategies, processes, and even long-term goals for the store. Included in that planning, they developed and assigned roles amongst themselves.
These students keep a google form updated and inform Elizabeth when they are out of something or if something is underperforming and they’d like to replace it in the store with something students would rather have.
The ideal students for this role in your school are those that enjoy organization and planning.
These students pull up the submitted google form submissions and write the name of the student, their classroom number, and the rewards they have requested on a post-it note that they pass along to “processing”.
Your ideal candidates for this job are students who have organizational skills and are detail-oriented.
Students in processing then take the post-it note information and verify that those students have the points necessary for the purchase in LiveSchool. Once confirmed, they process the purchase and send the order to “shipping”.
Once again, students who show strong organizational skills are ideal here.
The students in charge of shipping take the order, pack up the reward(s), and tape the post-it on the top. Then the reward is placed on a shelf to await “delivery”.
Students selected for shipping are your kiddos who love to be active and enjoy hands-on learning experiences.
Delivery students pick up the packaged rewards from the shelf, take a hall pass, and deliver the rewards to their peers in classrooms all throughout the building.
Delivery students need to be trustworthy and possess strong social skills as they will need to communicate clearly when they make deliveries.
When students are finished with their jobs they spend the remaining time brainstorming, discussing, and refining their processes. The process of running a small rewards store is very much like running a small business…if that business was operated by middle school students!
The experience I found at Von Tobel was both effective and replicable. If a school was new to reward stores or struggling to keep theirs afloat this is the process I’d suggest they adopt.
Running the rewards store at VTMS provides an excellent leadership experience for The LiveSchool Council because of the specific roles and responsibilities they created.
But it’s much more than that because it requires students to work together as a team, communicate effectively, and take ownership of their tasks. Additionally, the process of managing the store teaches students about budgeting, customer service, and problem-solving.
All of those are skills that your students will put to use over and over later in their life… and don’t forget your original goal with the store: student behavior is going to improve dramatically!
Need more information on building your own student rewards store? Check out episode 35 of our podcast.
Students are being suspended at a rate that is causing far more harm than good. Not only that, it seems the consequences assigned due to behavior infractions are far from equitable.
So your school takes action. You take a positive approach, establishing a token economy based on incentives to do the right thing with significantly less emphasis on the negative consequences.
To handle the incentives they have tasked a group of staff members to run a school rewards store. The store is run from a classroom and teachers divide and conquer the responsibilities of inventory, packing, order form collections, and the delivery of rewards.
And you know what? It works! Students love it. Behavior improves, and teachers see a noticeable uptick in engagement and morale in the building. That is until it works a little too well.
Students love the system so much that they begin to earn more and more points and they begin to spend those points on more and more rewards.
Pretty soon the staff can’t keep up with demand (they do still have a school to run) and the rewards store either closes or becomes inconsistent to the point that students aren’t as invested in the process. It just isn’t sustainable.
So how do you create a system that works, but is also sustainable? That’s what we set out to find out when we visited Von Tobel Middle School.
Von Tobel is located in Las Vegas, Nevada and they experienced the situation I described above. Assistant Principal Sarada Toomey and English Teacher Elizabeth Holt led the charge in organizing the store.
They created a shopping list on Amazon and purchased LiveSchool to award and track positive behavior points…and initially, they had great success. But just like the example above, the system was quickly overwhelming and a new solution was necessary to move forward.
They needed some help to make it work. Who was available, capable, and heavily invested in Von Tobel’s success? The students at Von Tobel. Elizabeth initially asked for student assistants. Sarada and the leadership team did her one better though, they created a class called “The LiveSchool Council”.
The LiveSchool Council has been so effective at VTMS that they have processed over 1800 rewards this school year alone. It was so impressive that we asked Elizabeth to share the process in a webinar earlier this school and we just had to go see the team in person.
So what did I learn from our trip to the desert? What makes the rewards store at Von Tobel so special?
It can work at any school. Let’s take a look at the process I observed and I’ll break down further how you can make it work at your school.
Let’s start by addressing the standard obstacles that any school needs to clear in order to establish its own rewards store.
Von Tobel has a built-in intervention period for their school day. During this time, every student has a place to be and a staff member assigned to them. For the purpose of the school store, Sarada assigned Elizabeth to be the teacher of the LiveSchool Council class.
The time here is critical because it meant that deliveries were occurring during a time of the day that wasn’t affecting classroom instruction.
Because of the timing, The LiveSchool council would be staffed by students who were not in need of intervention but instead were in need of an enrichment opportunity.
Your school may not have a dedicated time slot in the day for intervention…but you likely do have a homeroom, advisory, or enrichment period available that could work in the exact same manner.
Location, location, location! Nope, that isn't a saying reserved for realtors. It’s pretty important for your school store as well! Most “stores” are positioned for maximum visibility and maximum foot traffic.
But for Von Tobel they actually wanted less visibility, and less foot traffic. That seems counterintuitive but their plan was about creating a sustainable process…not turning a classroom into a Dollar General.
The room itself was a classroom that went unused the rest of the school day, and it was used for all the processes of the store except the actual transaction.
Students wouldn’t need to ever go to the store to redeem rewards because the plan at Von Tobel called for online orders and next-day deliveries.
I joked with some of the students in charge of deliveries that they should start charging a subscription fee to secure that next-day service just like Amazon!
For your school culture, this opens up a huge variety of options as you really could dedicate any room or office to be your base of operations without worrying about a storefront at all.
The rewards in the store were all selected from polling students and listening to the suggestions of the council. It doesn’t have to be complicated. If you want to know what will motivate students to behave better…you should really just ask them.
This one is an easy problem to solve. 😉
Von Tobel uses LiveSchool to award students with points, track those points, and redeem prizes with those points in the store.
But as we mentioned before, the biggest problem to solve is more about the who than the what. The big lifts for the store at Von Tobel are all done by students on the LiveSchool Council, let’s take a closer look at how they make it all go.
Initially, Elizabeth had only asked for a few students to deliver rewards to students. Once the council was formed it became apparent that they were capable of much more than that.
The students brainstormed strategies, processes, and even long-term goals for the store. Included in that planning, they developed and assigned roles amongst themselves.
These students keep a google form updated and inform Elizabeth when they are out of something or if something is underperforming and they’d like to replace it in the store with something students would rather have.
The ideal students for this role in your school are those that enjoy organization and planning.
These students pull up the submitted google form submissions and write the name of the student, their classroom number, and the rewards they have requested on a post-it note that they pass along to “processing”.
Your ideal candidates for this job are students who have organizational skills and are detail-oriented.
Students in processing then take the post-it note information and verify that those students have the points necessary for the purchase in LiveSchool. Once confirmed, they process the purchase and send the order to “shipping”.
Once again, students who show strong organizational skills are ideal here.
The students in charge of shipping take the order, pack up the reward(s), and tape the post-it on the top. Then the reward is placed on a shelf to await “delivery”.
Students selected for shipping are your kiddos who love to be active and enjoy hands-on learning experiences.
Delivery students pick up the packaged rewards from the shelf, take a hall pass, and deliver the rewards to their peers in classrooms all throughout the building.
Delivery students need to be trustworthy and possess strong social skills as they will need to communicate clearly when they make deliveries.
When students are finished with their jobs they spend the remaining time brainstorming, discussing, and refining their processes. The process of running a small rewards store is very much like running a small business…if that business was operated by middle school students!
The experience I found at Von Tobel was both effective and replicable. If a school was new to reward stores or struggling to keep theirs afloat this is the process I’d suggest they adopt.
Running the rewards store at VTMS provides an excellent leadership experience for The LiveSchool Council because of the specific roles and responsibilities they created.
But it’s much more than that because it requires students to work together as a team, communicate effectively, and take ownership of their tasks. Additionally, the process of managing the store teaches students about budgeting, customer service, and problem-solving.
All of those are skills that your students will put to use over and over later in their life… and don’t forget your original goal with the store: student behavior is going to improve dramatically!
Need more information on building your own student rewards store? Check out episode 35 of our podcast.
Jordan resides in Lexington, Kentucky. He has experience in Public Education as an Administrator, Science Teacher, and as a Coach. He has extensive experience with School Discipline, PBIS, SEL, Restorative Practices, MTSS, and Trauma-Informed Care.
Let’s walk through a common occurrence in schools. Your school leadership team decides to make major changes to the discipline process in the building. Disruptions to the learning environment are occurring far too often.
Students are being suspended at a rate that is causing far more harm than good. Not only that, it seems the consequences assigned due to behavior infractions are far from equitable.
So your school takes action. You take a positive approach, establishing a token economy based on incentives to do the right thing with significantly less emphasis on the negative consequences.
To handle the incentives they have tasked a group of staff members to run a school rewards store. The store is run from a classroom and teachers divide and conquer the responsibilities of inventory, packing, order form collections, and the delivery of rewards.
And you know what? It works! Students love it. Behavior improves, and teachers see a noticeable uptick in engagement and morale in the building. That is until it works a little too well.
Students love the system so much that they begin to earn more and more points and they begin to spend those points on more and more rewards.
Pretty soon the staff can’t keep up with demand (they do still have a school to run) and the rewards store either closes or becomes inconsistent to the point that students aren’t as invested in the process. It just isn’t sustainable.
So how do you create a system that works, but is also sustainable? That’s what we set out to find out when we visited Von Tobel Middle School.
Von Tobel is located in Las Vegas, Nevada and they experienced the situation I described above. Assistant Principal Sarada Toomey and English Teacher Elizabeth Holt led the charge in organizing the store.
They created a shopping list on Amazon and purchased LiveSchool to award and track positive behavior points…and initially, they had great success. But just like the example above, the system was quickly overwhelming and a new solution was necessary to move forward.
They needed some help to make it work. Who was available, capable, and heavily invested in Von Tobel’s success? The students at Von Tobel. Elizabeth initially asked for student assistants. Sarada and the leadership team did her one better though, they created a class called “The LiveSchool Council”.
The LiveSchool Council has been so effective at VTMS that they have processed over 1800 rewards this school year alone. It was so impressive that we asked Elizabeth to share the process in a webinar earlier this school and we just had to go see the team in person.
So what did I learn from our trip to the desert? What makes the rewards store at Von Tobel so special?
It can work at any school. Let’s take a look at the process I observed and I’ll break down further how you can make it work at your school.
Let’s start by addressing the standard obstacles that any school needs to clear in order to establish its own rewards store.
Von Tobel has a built-in intervention period for their school day. During this time, every student has a place to be and a staff member assigned to them. For the purpose of the school store, Sarada assigned Elizabeth to be the teacher of the LiveSchool Council class.
The time here is critical because it meant that deliveries were occurring during a time of the day that wasn’t affecting classroom instruction.
Because of the timing, The LiveSchool council would be staffed by students who were not in need of intervention but instead were in need of an enrichment opportunity.
Your school may not have a dedicated time slot in the day for intervention…but you likely do have a homeroom, advisory, or enrichment period available that could work in the exact same manner.
Location, location, location! Nope, that isn't a saying reserved for realtors. It’s pretty important for your school store as well! Most “stores” are positioned for maximum visibility and maximum foot traffic.
But for Von Tobel they actually wanted less visibility, and less foot traffic. That seems counterintuitive but their plan was about creating a sustainable process…not turning a classroom into a Dollar General.
The room itself was a classroom that went unused the rest of the school day, and it was used for all the processes of the store except the actual transaction.
Students wouldn’t need to ever go to the store to redeem rewards because the plan at Von Tobel called for online orders and next-day deliveries.
I joked with some of the students in charge of deliveries that they should start charging a subscription fee to secure that next-day service just like Amazon!
For your school culture, this opens up a huge variety of options as you really could dedicate any room or office to be your base of operations without worrying about a storefront at all.
The rewards in the store were all selected from polling students and listening to the suggestions of the council. It doesn’t have to be complicated. If you want to know what will motivate students to behave better…you should really just ask them.
This one is an easy problem to solve. 😉
Von Tobel uses LiveSchool to award students with points, track those points, and redeem prizes with those points in the store.
But as we mentioned before, the biggest problem to solve is more about the who than the what. The big lifts for the store at Von Tobel are all done by students on the LiveSchool Council, let’s take a closer look at how they make it all go.
Initially, Elizabeth had only asked for a few students to deliver rewards to students. Once the council was formed it became apparent that they were capable of much more than that.
The students brainstormed strategies, processes, and even long-term goals for the store. Included in that planning, they developed and assigned roles amongst themselves.
These students keep a google form updated and inform Elizabeth when they are out of something or if something is underperforming and they’d like to replace it in the store with something students would rather have.
The ideal students for this role in your school are those that enjoy organization and planning.
These students pull up the submitted google form submissions and write the name of the student, their classroom number, and the rewards they have requested on a post-it note that they pass along to “processing”.
Your ideal candidates for this job are students who have organizational skills and are detail-oriented.
Students in processing then take the post-it note information and verify that those students have the points necessary for the purchase in LiveSchool. Once confirmed, they process the purchase and send the order to “shipping”.
Once again, students who show strong organizational skills are ideal here.
The students in charge of shipping take the order, pack up the reward(s), and tape the post-it on the top. Then the reward is placed on a shelf to await “delivery”.
Students selected for shipping are your kiddos who love to be active and enjoy hands-on learning experiences.
Delivery students pick up the packaged rewards from the shelf, take a hall pass, and deliver the rewards to their peers in classrooms all throughout the building.
Delivery students need to be trustworthy and possess strong social skills as they will need to communicate clearly when they make deliveries.
When students are finished with their jobs they spend the remaining time brainstorming, discussing, and refining their processes. The process of running a small rewards store is very much like running a small business…if that business was operated by middle school students!
The experience I found at Von Tobel was both effective and replicable. If a school was new to reward stores or struggling to keep theirs afloat this is the process I’d suggest they adopt.
Running the rewards store at VTMS provides an excellent leadership experience for The LiveSchool Council because of the specific roles and responsibilities they created.
But it’s much more than that because it requires students to work together as a team, communicate effectively, and take ownership of their tasks. Additionally, the process of managing the store teaches students about budgeting, customer service, and problem-solving.
All of those are skills that your students will put to use over and over later in their life… and don’t forget your original goal with the store: student behavior is going to improve dramatically!
Need more information on building your own student rewards store? Check out episode 35 of our podcast.
Let’s walk through a common occurrence in schools. Your school leadership team decides to make major changes to the discipline process in the building. Disruptions to the learning environment are occurring far too often.
Students are being suspended at a rate that is causing far more harm than good. Not only that, it seems the consequences assigned due to behavior infractions are far from equitable.
So your school takes action. You take a positive approach, establishing a token economy based on incentives to do the right thing with significantly less emphasis on the negative consequences.
To handle the incentives they have tasked a group of staff members to run a school rewards store. The store is run from a classroom and teachers divide and conquer the responsibilities of inventory, packing, order form collections, and the delivery of rewards.
And you know what? It works! Students love it. Behavior improves, and teachers see a noticeable uptick in engagement and morale in the building. That is until it works a little too well.
Students love the system so much that they begin to earn more and more points and they begin to spend those points on more and more rewards.
Pretty soon the staff can’t keep up with demand (they do still have a school to run) and the rewards store either closes or becomes inconsistent to the point that students aren’t as invested in the process. It just isn’t sustainable.
So how do you create a system that works, but is also sustainable? That’s what we set out to find out when we visited Von Tobel Middle School.
Von Tobel is located in Las Vegas, Nevada and they experienced the situation I described above. Assistant Principal Sarada Toomey and English Teacher Elizabeth Holt led the charge in organizing the store.
They created a shopping list on Amazon and purchased LiveSchool to award and track positive behavior points…and initially, they had great success. But just like the example above, the system was quickly overwhelming and a new solution was necessary to move forward.
They needed some help to make it work. Who was available, capable, and heavily invested in Von Tobel’s success? The students at Von Tobel. Elizabeth initially asked for student assistants. Sarada and the leadership team did her one better though, they created a class called “The LiveSchool Council”.
The LiveSchool Council has been so effective at VTMS that they have processed over 1800 rewards this school year alone. It was so impressive that we asked Elizabeth to share the process in a webinar earlier this school and we just had to go see the team in person.
So what did I learn from our trip to the desert? What makes the rewards store at Von Tobel so special?
It can work at any school. Let’s take a look at the process I observed and I’ll break down further how you can make it work at your school.
Let’s start by addressing the standard obstacles that any school needs to clear in order to establish its own rewards store.
Von Tobel has a built-in intervention period for their school day. During this time, every student has a place to be and a staff member assigned to them. For the purpose of the school store, Sarada assigned Elizabeth to be the teacher of the LiveSchool Council class.
The time here is critical because it meant that deliveries were occurring during a time of the day that wasn’t affecting classroom instruction.
Because of the timing, The LiveSchool council would be staffed by students who were not in need of intervention but instead were in need of an enrichment opportunity.
Your school may not have a dedicated time slot in the day for intervention…but you likely do have a homeroom, advisory, or enrichment period available that could work in the exact same manner.
Location, location, location! Nope, that isn't a saying reserved for realtors. It’s pretty important for your school store as well! Most “stores” are positioned for maximum visibility and maximum foot traffic.
But for Von Tobel they actually wanted less visibility, and less foot traffic. That seems counterintuitive but their plan was about creating a sustainable process…not turning a classroom into a Dollar General.
The room itself was a classroom that went unused the rest of the school day, and it was used for all the processes of the store except the actual transaction.
Students wouldn’t need to ever go to the store to redeem rewards because the plan at Von Tobel called for online orders and next-day deliveries.
I joked with some of the students in charge of deliveries that they should start charging a subscription fee to secure that next-day service just like Amazon!
For your school culture, this opens up a huge variety of options as you really could dedicate any room or office to be your base of operations without worrying about a storefront at all.
The rewards in the store were all selected from polling students and listening to the suggestions of the council. It doesn’t have to be complicated. If you want to know what will motivate students to behave better…you should really just ask them.
This one is an easy problem to solve. 😉
Von Tobel uses LiveSchool to award students with points, track those points, and redeem prizes with those points in the store.
But as we mentioned before, the biggest problem to solve is more about the who than the what. The big lifts for the store at Von Tobel are all done by students on the LiveSchool Council, let’s take a closer look at how they make it all go.
Initially, Elizabeth had only asked for a few students to deliver rewards to students. Once the council was formed it became apparent that they were capable of much more than that.
The students brainstormed strategies, processes, and even long-term goals for the store. Included in that planning, they developed and assigned roles amongst themselves.
These students keep a google form updated and inform Elizabeth when they are out of something or if something is underperforming and they’d like to replace it in the store with something students would rather have.
The ideal students for this role in your school are those that enjoy organization and planning.
These students pull up the submitted google form submissions and write the name of the student, their classroom number, and the rewards they have requested on a post-it note that they pass along to “processing”.
Your ideal candidates for this job are students who have organizational skills and are detail-oriented.
Students in processing then take the post-it note information and verify that those students have the points necessary for the purchase in LiveSchool. Once confirmed, they process the purchase and send the order to “shipping”.
Once again, students who show strong organizational skills are ideal here.
The students in charge of shipping take the order, pack up the reward(s), and tape the post-it on the top. Then the reward is placed on a shelf to await “delivery”.
Students selected for shipping are your kiddos who love to be active and enjoy hands-on learning experiences.
Delivery students pick up the packaged rewards from the shelf, take a hall pass, and deliver the rewards to their peers in classrooms all throughout the building.
Delivery students need to be trustworthy and possess strong social skills as they will need to communicate clearly when they make deliveries.
When students are finished with their jobs they spend the remaining time brainstorming, discussing, and refining their processes. The process of running a small rewards store is very much like running a small business…if that business was operated by middle school students!
The experience I found at Von Tobel was both effective and replicable. If a school was new to reward stores or struggling to keep theirs afloat this is the process I’d suggest they adopt.
Running the rewards store at VTMS provides an excellent leadership experience for The LiveSchool Council because of the specific roles and responsibilities they created.
But it’s much more than that because it requires students to work together as a team, communicate effectively, and take ownership of their tasks. Additionally, the process of managing the store teaches students about budgeting, customer service, and problem-solving.
All of those are skills that your students will put to use over and over later in their life… and don’t forget your original goal with the store: student behavior is going to improve dramatically!
Need more information on building your own student rewards store? Check out episode 35 of our podcast.
All the behavior resources you need to create the positive culture your school community deserves.
