By Dr. Harry Tennant
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Wednesday, February 28, 2018 Success Story: Fike High SchoolOur Behavior Manager statistics for Fike High School show a dramatic improvement in office referrals this year. I asked Assitant Principal Timothy Messer about that. Edclick: We noticed your referrals were down 67% compared to last year. Have you done something different? Timothy Messer: We sure have! We made a change in the culture. We increased accountability and consistency and set expectations. Edclick: How did you do that? Timothy Messer: Training on expectations at the beginning of the school year. And a new rules matrix. We required consistency among teachers, administrators and students. There’s no more “this teacher says this” and “that teacher says that.” With training it’s now consistent across the board. Edclick: I see that most of your improvement was in disrespect, disruptive behavior, inappropriate language and insubordination. Improvement in these areas are typically the result of improved classroom management skills. Did you work on that? Timothy Messer: We did a lot of training on what defines a misbehavior. We made it clear what should be handled in the classroom and what requires an office referral. Edclick: Is there any way we can improve Behavior Manager to better support you? Timothy Messer: I don’t think so. Behavior Manager is an excellent program. It’s easy to use. And it does just what we need. Randy St. Clair, Principal of Fike High school, added: It's been the result of buy-in from both teachers and students. The staff and administration are working hard to be consistent in handling discipline but also rewarding positive behavior We're just getting started. I know it can be better than what it is. I am excited and thrilled to see that the things we've put in place are having a positive result in our building. Thanks for your support. It isn't easy to make such a significant change in a school's culture in one year! But the folks at Fike have demonstrated that it is definitely possible. A complete culture change, the transition for proactive behavior methods to fully take root, typically takes several years. With so much progress in the first year, we're looking forward to the results over the next few years. Posted at 12:00 AM (permalink)
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Tuesday, February 27, 2018 Responsible-Motivated-Engaged: ConclusionThis series of posts comes from a paper, Responsibility, Motivation and Engagement: How To Develop Learners Using Behavior Manager. It describes how Edclick’s Behavior Manager combines three essential capabilities.
Teachers have complained about student behavior at least since the time of Socrates. Student behavior problems are not likely to go away with some simple gimmick in a new app. The scientific evidence is mounting that the best solutions include teaching behavior proactively, developing basic students’ social skills, developing sophisticated and subtle social skills in teachers and teaching material in an engaging way. In addition, the school and staff must adopt an attitude of continuous improvement in these skills and procedures. Behavior Manager covers the scope of student behavior issues. It might seem daunting at first. But it’s not necessary to take it all in one bite. Some schools start by using Behavior Manager only for tardies. Some start with only PBIS functions of merits, rewards and Check In/Check Out. Many who do start with only a subset of functionality tend to find that they can benefit from the other functions too. Choose what’s right for you while keeping your mind open to other features that other schools have found valuable and use every day. Mastering student behavior in the classroom is a challenge. But it is worth rising to the challenge because it leads to more effective teaching, more pleasant classrooms and higher student achievement. Posted at 12:00 AM (permalink)
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Saturday, February 24, 2018 Parental involvementThis series of posts comes from a paper, Responsibility, Motivation and Engagement: How To Develop Learners Using Behavior Manager. It describes how Edclick’s Behavior Manager combines three essential capabilities.
Parent involvement is highly correlated to student achievement. It’s important to get parents on your side. Just as with students, the best approach to building an effective relationship with parents is to be proactive. Start as early as possible and communicate expectations and rules. As with the students, keep it brief, 3 – 5 expectations that are most important to get across. Let the parents know how things will be working in the class and how the parents can be most helpful. Let them know about the cool things that the class will be doing. If the parents are excited about what’s coming up in the class, it’s likely they will transfer that enthusiasm to the student. Also be thinking about how to deliver a positive message about each student to the parents as early in the school year as possible. You and the parents have one important thing in common: you both want what’s best for the child. It’s as important to know their expectations as it is important for them to know yours. If problems arise with a student, it’s helpful to have a relationship with the parents to help resolve them. How to send and track notifications, personal messages and newsletters in Behavior ManagerBehavior Manager automatically notifies parents of behavior referrals. Make sure that parents also hear from you about the good news. In addition to automatic notifications, Behavior Manager has two other important features for building relationships with parents, the contact log and flash messages. The contact log makes a record of all the parent notifications that are automatically sent for behavior notifications. It also allows you to record other contacts you’ve made with the parents by phone or email. Then you can review the contacts, the reasons for them and their outcomes through the contact log reports. Below is an example of the contacts made between the school and the parents of Huck Finn. There have been two discipline referral notifications and one introductory message. From here you can explore other messages, show contacts to parents of all students, change date ranges and so on. Behavior Manager makes it easy to send messages to parents using flash messages. Flash messages can be sent to the parents of an individual student or to groups of parents such as all 9th graders or the parents of Ms. Armey’s period 2 Biology class. The flash messages can be automatically personalized with the student’s name, useful when sending to large groups. The most effective communication with parents is when it’s two-way. In addition to keeping parents informed about what is going on at school, make it easy for them to provide feedback. Consider sending out a survey once or twice a year when parents can let you know if they are getting enough (or too much) information from you and from the school. Behavior histories in Behavior Manager
Key: Keep in mind that when a student is having behavior issues at school, it is especially important to keep parents notified of things the student is doing well. The behavior history is also available through the Behavior Manager student and parent portal. They can keep up to date whenever they wish. Also available to parents on the portal is a database of parent tips. The parent tips cover a wide range of parenting issues. If their child is having a specific behavior problem at school, the parent tips may include useful suggestions on what parents can do about it. Posted at 12:00 AM (permalink)
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Friday, February 23, 2018 Toward more effective interventions - Restorative DisciplineThis series of posts comes from a paper, Responsibility, Motivation and Engagement: How To Develop Learners Using Behavior Manager. It describes how Edclick’s Behavior Manager combines three essential capabilities.
Restorative discipline in Behavior ManagerRestorative discipline is a consequence for misbehavior that emphasizes belonging in the school community instead of punishment and exclusion. The main idea is to get the offender and victims together and make things right. Ideally, after restorative discipline, the victims feel that their needs have been addressed and the offender rejoins the community. Restorative discipline is an effective substitute for suspension or expulsion, takes the victims into account and does not incur the academic damage that comes with suspensions. There are several techniques for restorative discipline. Different situations require different approaches. Outlines of several restorative discipline techniques included in Behavior Manager are shown below. Conference with students and parentsConference with students, parents, teachers and administrators regarding misbehavior such as use of banned substances. Attendees · Offenders · Parents · Teachers · Administrators · Others To Offenders: what did you think or feel when you found out that parents, administrators and friends learned of the misbehavior? To All: How have things been for you between then and now? To Offenders: Who do you think has been affected by your actions and how? To Parents, Teachers and Administrators: What were you thinking or feeling at the time you found out about the misbehavior? To All: How have things been for you between then and now? To Offenders: Are there additional things that need to happened to restore you to the community and rebuild the community's trust? To Parents, Teachers and Administrators: Are there additional things you would like to add? The CircleThe purpose of the circle is to discover what happened, the impact on victim(s) and offender and what would make it right. Attendees · Offender(s) · Victim(s) · Others The incident · What happened? · Who has been hurt? · What are their needs? · What are the causes? · Who had a "stake" in this? What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to put things right? Community serviceAs an alternative to punishment, a student can be assigned community service with the parent's permission. Community service may include hours worked at school or with a non-profit charity approved by the administration. Community service should include: · Number of hours to be served, · A complete-by date and · Requirement for proof of service time. Community service is most effective as a positive intervention which is viewed as making a positive contribution to the community rather than a "forced labor" or public humiliation punishment. The positive contribution can be seen as making things right following a negative behavior incident. Offender/Victim conference for serious harmsParticipants · Offenders · Victims · Parents · School staff (teachers, administrators, coaches, etc.) What happened? How did participants feel about it? What needs to be done to make things right? How might the situation be prevented in the future? One-on-one restorative processFor incidents such as bullying Initial private meeting with the person harmed. · Create a safety plan · What does he/she need to put things right? · Create an agreement if necessary Private meeting with the wrongdoer · Get his/her perspective · What did you do? · What did you want to happen when you did that? · How do you think [the person harmed] feels about what happened? · Remember a time when someone hurt you. What happened? How did you feel? · Do you want to be someone who fixes mistakes? How can you make things better? · How will you do that? When will you do it? · Encourage self-reflection, responsibility-taking and better actions in the future · Create a plan to put things right · Use an agreement if necessary Follow-up with both parties to assure agreements have been met Are there environmental conditions that may have contributed to the incident? Victim/offender mediationThe purpose of mediation is to find how to make it right for both victim and offender. The mediator's role is not to arbitrate and decide the proper action. Rather, the mediator in Restorative Discipline only facilitates the discussion leading to an agreement on how to make it right. A speaker's token is recommended to help all be heard. Attendees · Offender(s) · Victim(s) · Victim and offender participation should be voluntary · Mediator The incident · What happened? · Who has been hurt? · What are their needs? Making it right · How can the situation be made right? · Have the actions been taken to make it right? Posted at 12:00 AM (permalink)
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Thursday, February 22, 2018 Toward more effective interventions - Behavior Questionnaires & Character BuildersThis series of posts comes from a paper, Responsibility, Motivation and Engagement: How To Develop Learners Using Behavior Manager. It describes how Edclick’s Behavior Manager combines three essential capabilities.
Behavior Questionnaires and Character Builders in Behavior Manager
The Character Builders are about character issues. They are not specific to particular misbehaviors. However, they can be used as consequences for misbehaviors where relevant. They can also be used in a general class on character. The Character Builder subjects are shown below.
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Wednesday, February 21, 2018 Toward more effective interventions - Social SkillsThis series of posts comes from a paper, Responsibility, Motivation and Engagement: How To Develop Learners Using Behavior Manager. It describes how Edclick’s Behavior Manager combines three essential capabilities.
Social skillsMisbehavior is often related to lack of social skills. Conflict may arise between a student and peers or between a student and a teacher simply because the student is lacking necessary social skills. And, if we are to be honest, problems in classrooms are often due to another social skills deficit, that of teachers. When a teacher loses his temper or engages in a power struggle with a student or reacts to a student’s misbehavior with ridicule, he is causing additional problems that could be avoided with appropriate social skills. But here we’ll focus on student social skills. First, consider the proactive big three: expectations, rules and procedures. What are they if not instruction in social skills that apply to schools and classrooms. In that sense, we have already discussed social skills instruction for students. However, there may be a small percentage of students who could benefit from additional social skills instruction. And, just as expectations, rules and procedures proactively prevent misbehaviors, instruction in additional social skills can be beneficial to those students who need it. Here are some example topics.
There are many other social skills to discuss, so it’s important that when assigning social skills to students that the range of topics be specified. Social skills instruction is typically conducted in small groups. There may, however, be students who would need individualized instruction. Posted at 12:00 AM (permalink)
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Tuesday, February 20, 2018 Toward more effective interventions - Check In/Check OutThis series of posts comes from a paper, Responsibility, Motivation and Engagement: How To Develop Learners Using Behavior Manager. It describes how Edclick’s Behavior Manager combines three essential capabilities.
No, Virginia, PBIS will not eliminate all misbehaviorProactive behavior management, the kind advocated in PBIS, will do a great deal to reduce misbehavior in your school. However, students will continue to misbehave. Unfortunately, many books on PBIS, in their enthusiasm for the very real benefits of the approach, give the impression that PBIS will completely solve your school’s behavior problems. It won’t. Lots of things can result in student misbehavior. A few are listed below. Proactive behavior management will help reduce misbehavior even when some of these motivations apply. · Seek attention · Seek escape · Desire for power · Look for revenge · Lack self-confidence · Are sick, hungry or tired · Are in a classroom that is uncomfortable · Have problems with the school work · Have emotional issues · Have problems at home Misbehavior will appear in the school and you must be prepared to deal with it. Is the goal to punish or to improve behavior?The most commonly used consequences for misbehavior is an escalating set of actions that that have been imposed on the student, which he dislikes. Most schools use detention, loss of privileges, in-school suspension, out of school suspension and expulsion. Since the student dislikes the action, the assumption is that she will change her behavior to avoid it in the future. A psychologist might call it a behavior reductive intervention. Others might call it a punishment. The benefit of these common punishments is that they are a way to take immediate action on a misbehavior and get an immediate result. There a several disadvantages to managing student behavior with punishments. · Punishments tend not to be very effective in making long term changes in student behavior. It is far more effective for far more students to take the proactive approach, teach expectations, rules and procedures. However, the proactive approach will not eliminate all misbehaviors, so they need to be dealt with somehow. · Escalation often works against your goals. Take tardies as an example. Schools using escalating punishments for repeated offenses often find themselves giving out-of-school suspension for repeated tardies. At that point, the school is no longer conveying that “we value instruction time and we want you in class.” Perhaps the first punishment was about valuing instruction time, but by the time it has escalated to suspension, the issue has become defiance in the form of not responding to previous actions. · Punishments are designed to be disliked but they may not be. For example, if a student is being tardy to class because he wants to avoid being in class, a suspension becomes a reward, not a punishment. · Punishments typically do not address the problem behind the behavior. Why is this student repeatedly being tardy? The root cause may have something to do with crowded hallways or a preference for chatting with friends over getting to class on time. The root cause may be wanting to avoid a class in which the student is doing poorly. The root cause may be something else. The root cause is not that she hasn’t yet had enough detentions. · Punishments, being imposed on students by staff, are often resented. Resentment decreases the student’s interest in abiding by school rules. The relationship may become adversarial which gets in the way of improving behavior and student achievement. How to get away from punishmentsSignificant progress is made in getting away from punishments when we adopt a proactive approach to behavior management: expectations, rules and procedures. For the misbehaviors that still occur (and some will, although not as many), we can change the student’s perception of the consequence and create better consequences. Consequences should never be assigned in anger. If there is anger, revenge or vindication or an expression of the greater power that the school has versus the student, the student is likely to see that emotion and not consider the lesson behind the consequence. Consequences should be assigned with empathy. Even if a consequence is going to be something that the student dislikes, the responsibility for the consequence should be given to the student. “I like you, Billy, but I can’t let you get away with that. Do you know the consequence for what you did?” That way, the student has caused this detention, not a vindictive teacher. Also, by getting the student to state the expected consequence, he’s showing (himself) that he knew the consequence was expected. Consequences should be seen as a mechanism for learning, not suffering. We want the student to learn to solve her own problems. If Janet has been involved in outbursts with another girl, we can approach this as a problem to be solved rather than a misbehavior to be punished. After Janet has given her side of the story of the incident, the teacher can, rather than imposing a punishment, ask something like “What are you going to do?” or “How will you make amends?” or “What do you think I should do?” Asking questions like these does two things. It shifts the teacher’s task from picking a punishment to solving a problem. It also shifts the responsibility for solving the problem on the student, not on the teacher. Give the student some degree of control. If you’ve asked the student for ideas for solving his problem and he doesn’t offer any, you can still give him some control. Give a list of a few consequences for him to choose one. Even that much control moves him closer to perceiving the problem-solving as his responsibility. In addition to improving the student’s attitude toward consequences, we can assign different consequences that are more effective. Check In/Check OutCheck In/Check Out is an intervention that has received a lot of research attention. It has been found to be very effective in teaching students who have had difficulty following the expectations, rules and procedures. It consists of evaluating the student’s behavior in each class throughout the day, reviewing it quickly at the end of the day (that’s the check out), then reviewing it with the student’s parents at night and returning a card signed by a parent to the school in the morning (that’s the check in). We’ll describe it in more detail in the context of Check In/Check Out in Behavior Manager below. Check In/Check Out has proved to be effective for students from elementary through high school. It’s generally offered as an intervention to students who have not responded to simpler interventions for disruptions, talking out, getting out of one’s seat and disrespect. It benefits the student by focusing on behavior expectations in each period of the day and getting attention and encouragement from teachers throughout the day. Check In/Check Out is often used for repeat offenders so it can be an effective replacement for suspension. It has several significant advantages over suspensions. Most important, the student continues to stay in class so instruction time is not lost. Second, she gets direct feedback throughout the day and day after day on her problem behavior, so it helps in actually solving behavior problems. Third, it is not a punishment and should not be presented as a punishment. It is an intervention to help make behavior changes so it is less likely to be resented by the student. How does Check In/Check Out work in Behavior Manager?
In each class period there is a chance for a brief interaction between student and teacher with a chance for praise or reminders of rules. In some cases, teachers may choose to create expectations specific to this student. At the end of the day, the student has a brief meeting with a counselor or some other designated staff member for a quick recap of the day. Scores are entered into a database. This is Check Out. He then takes the card home, has it signed by a parent and brings it back the next morning. The recorded data is used to track progress. Students are given a goal such as an overall score of 75% or more of the maximum total score. As the data shows progress, the goal is increased. In time, they may switch to having the student evaluate his own behavior and just check with the teacher on whether she agrees. Eventually, the behavior improves and the CICO process is stopped. Behavior Manager improves on this paper process by making it electronic. We can deal with the paper cards and data entry at the end of the day, but it is simpler if it’s all online. The image on the right shows the scoring page. Teachers click scores (0, 1 or 2 for middle schoolers and high schoolers, smiley faces for elementary). They can also enter comments of two kinds: comments for students and parents and comments (with the light blue background) meant for internal use. Scores are tallied and percentages calculated. A graph shows progress and compares scores to goals. Daily score sheets can be digitally signed through the parent portal. The blue internal comments are not presented on the portal for either students or parents.
Social skillsMisbehavior is often related to lack of social skills. Conflict may arise between a student and peers or between a student and a teacher simply because the student is lacking necessary social skills. And, if we are to be honest, problems in classrooms are often due to another social skills deficit, that of teachers. When a teacher loses his temper or engages in a power struggle with a student or reacts to a student’s misbehavior with ridicule, he is causing additional problems that could be avoided with appropriate social skills. But here we’ll focus on student social skills. First, consider the proactive big three: expectations, rules and procedures. What are they if not instruction in social skills that apply to schools and classrooms. In that sense, we have already discussed social skills instruction for students. However, there may be a small percentage of students who could benefit from additional social skills instruction. And, just as expectations, rules and procedures proactively prevent misbehaviors, instruction in additional social skills can be beneficial to those students who need it. Here are some example topics.
There are many other social skills to discuss, so it’s important that when assigning social skills to students that the range of topics be specified. Social skills instruction is typically conducted in small groups. There may, however, be students who would need individualized instruction. Behavior Questionnaires and Character Builders in Behavior Manager
· Bullying · Bus Behavior · Cell Phones or Other Electronic Devices · Discipline Evaluation · Disrespect · Driving Violations · Fighting · Gang-Related Activity · Homework/Project Not Completed · Horseplay · Inappropriate Language · Insubordination · Misbehavior at an Extracurricular Event · Missing Mandatory Tutorials · Off-Task Behavior · Play Fighting · Responding to Adults Respectfully · Restorative Justice · Running in the Halls · Signed Materials Not Returned · Skipping Class · Skipping School · Tardies · Theft (Minor) · Vandalism The Behavior Questionnaires contain 35-40 questions about the offense and its implications. Not only are the Behavior Questionnaires useful for getting a student to think about her behavior, but the answers may reveal insights about the root causes of misbehaviors. The Character Builders are about character issues. They are not specific to particular misbehaviors. However, they can be used as consequences for misbehaviors where relevant. They can also be used in a general class on character. The Character Builder subjects are shown below.
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