Getting children to care about their school work and do things neatly can be a challenge. As a result, many teachers offer rewards to encourage neatness. This, of course, is counterproductive, because it doesn’t instill the self-discipline to focus on producing neat work. Here are a few options to try instead of resorting to rewards.
- Talk about neatness. Whatever you put your focus upon will increase!
- Talk proactively. In other words, before a lesson begins discuss with the students what a great job would look like. This helps those children who really have no idea of what a good job looks like and it helps the other students who might not care too much about neatness otherwise. It sets everyone