We argue that ClassDojo is a school-based technology of surveillance encouraging teachers to enact disciplinary practices underpinned by behaviourist principles that require intensified monitoring of students (Watters 2017a; Williamson 2017a).

This paper critically examines the ways in which ClassDojo is altering the disciplinary landscape in schools through the datafication of discipline and student behaviour. ClassDojo is one of the most popular and successful educational technologies and is used internationally. It is a school-based social media platform that incorporates a gamified behaviour-shaping function, providing school communities with a centralised digital network in which to interact. We argue that ClassDojo’s datafying system of school discipline intensifies and normalises the surveillance of students. Furthermore, it creates a culture of performativity and serves as a mechanism for behaviour control.

In this paper, we critically examine ClassDojo as a classroom management and communication platform. Despite ClassDojo’s popularity, a scarcity of research has investigated the ways in which it is used and how it is influencing education, particularly at the level of the school and classroom. We draw on publicly available online material as a data source for this study. First, we undertake a brief theoretical exploration of the ideas we use to understand ClassDojo, and identify that schools are increasingly using data and surveillance to track and monitor students. Then we describe the speed and volume of ClassDojo’s uptake, and explain why it is so appealing to educators as a rationale for its uncritical adoption, and how it works. We then shift the focus to problematise the uncritical uptake of ClassDojo as a school discipline tool. Examining ClassDojo using the concepts of surveillance and performativity we identify how the datafication of school discipline and student behaviour is implicated in both. Within this analysis, we describe how ClassDojo is influencing educational processes related to the discipline, management and measurement of students, the way in which teachers understand students and the way in which students understand themselves.