Classroom Jobs Poster

The Classroom Job Board Poster was designed to help your students develop their personal and social responsibility skills while contributing to a positive classroom environment.

I created this poster to be aligned with the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) model by baking some of the key strategies that support the model into the system’s design:

✅ Assigning Responsibilities

🤝 Fostering Social Interaction

🔥 Leadership

🔀 Transfer

The system seeks to solve some of the common issues that teachers face when trying to implement a classroom jobs board into their lessons:

❌ Complicated assignment process: Having to assign student names each lesson is time-consuming. Also, keeping track of who has done what is a headache.

❌ Inequitable student opportunities: Due to the limited amount of PE lessons in a year, not all students may get to experience the different jobs on the board.

❌ Unclear responsibilities: When students are assigned a job, it may not be clear to them what responsibilities come with it.

❌ Time needed to practice roles: Helping students improve their ability to succcessfully perform a job requires practice and practice takes time (which is limited in PE).

❌ Meaningless roles: Some jobs are less interesting to students than others. Because students are less interested, they may not be as willing to perform the job well.

❌ Lack of alignment w/ TPSR: TPSR is more than just giving a responsibility to a student. It involves supporting students as they develop personally and socially responsible behaviours.

Here is how the system works:

The poster features four fun classroom job titles:

🏀 Equipment Experts

⛑ Safety Squad

📋 Awesome Assistants

🥳 Cheer Captains

Each job features a brief description that explains how that job contributes to the development of a positive classroom environment. This helps make each job meaningful and helps the students assigned to those jobs feel valued within the classroom community.

Additionally, each job is broken down into three clear expectations. By keeping these expectations simple and low in numbers, students can feel confident and competent in their ability to carry the job out.

You may have noticed that there are only four jobs in the classroom. Keeping this number low helps keep the whole system simple and allows students to master each job quickly (also reducing the amount of “practice” time they would need).

That said, each job allows you to assign three students per lesson. This allows more students to experience the different roles, fosters social interaction (since students work as a group to do their job), and allows us to bake in some leadership building opportunities. Here’s how that works:

• Each lesson, three students get assigned to each job. They are assigned using their classroom numbers from the Visual Class Rosters resource (which also helps the teacher save time and energy).
• One student is assigned as an “Apprentice“, another assigned as a “Junior Leader“, and the third student is assigned as a “Senior Leader“.
• All three students focus on getting their job done during the lesson, but their experience will also be affected by the level they are assigned within the job:
• The “Apprentice” is living their first day on the job. Their focus is to help and learn how to be effective at that role.
• The “Junior Leader” in living their second day on the job. Their focus is to complete tasks while also mentoring the “Apprentice”.
• Finally, the “Senior Leader” is living their third day on the job. Their focus is to direct the group, lead by example, and interact with the teacher if need be (e.g. questions/concerns).
• A student who is assigned to a job for the first time will get to stick with that job for three lessons. This way, they’ll get to experience all three levels: Apprentice, Junior Leader, Senior Leader.
• This provides every student with opportunity to practice and become comfortable with each role. Also, the leadership progression baked into the three levels will help students develop their capacity as leader.
• Because students basically shift over one level per lesson, it also makes the teacher’s job assignment task even easier.

By being intentional about how we approach our classroom job systems and by aligning those systems to the evidence-based teaching strategies that help foster personal and social responsibility, we can help our students and classrooms thrive!

To learn more about the design process behind this Classroom Jobs Board system, check out the blog post I wrote.

Happy Teaching!