Thursday, February 15, 2018

Systems for managing the consequence process in Behavior Manager

This 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.

1. Proactive PBIS tools to prevent student misbehavior
2. Reactive interventions and processes for misbehaviors to minimize loss of instruction time and keep students in school
3. Data and tools for continuous improvement

Systems enable flexibility

We define procedures in classrooms to make things go smoothly. The same applies to the process for managing consequences. The difference is that the process for managing consequences is a lot more complex than the classroom procedure for passing out papers or putting dictionaries away.

Using online systems to support the process of managing consequences offers teachers more flexibility than they had before. In the days of paper office referrals, there were two possibilities. You could either make up consequences or you could create simple rules to follow. Most schools, in the spirit of ease and fairness opted for the latter. That’s where policies come from like first offense, warning, second offence, detention, third offense, extra school, fourth offense, ISS, fifth offense, OSS. That’s problematic because consequences that are punishments like these tend to be ineffective for improving long term behavior. Students would often march right up the ladder of escalating consequences until they were suspended. And once suspended, they are missing more instruction time, falling further behind in their classes and becoming more likely to drop out of school.

Some administrations advocate policies of strict sequences of escalating consequences, arguing that by making the sequence mechanical, they are treating everyone the same. It’s important to be fair and equitable. However, another approach, and one that is likely to be more effective, is to treat everyone the same: with dignity and respect. This approach gives greater flexibility to teachers and administrators to exercise their judgement about what would be most effective for the student. Does that open the school to the possibility of bias? Yes, that’s possible, but with the much improved access to data, queries and trends available through online systems, we can readily detect and track down staff who are using their flexibility to not treat everyone with dignity and respect.

Key: Use the flexibility of online systems to increase effectiveness.

It’s better to have more flexibility. But flexibility means more complexity. Enter the online systems to handle complexity easily.

Here’s a simple example. Minor misbehaviors can result in an after school detention. But if that after school detention has to be served on Tuesday, it could be a problem for the student and his parent if the parent is counting on the student to be home right after school on Tuesday to take care of his sister. So, make it more flexible. Allow the student to serve the detention any day but it must be served within a week. That way the student can choose an afternoon when he’s free or, if arrangements must be made for the little sister, there would be time to set it up. It’s more complex but it’s no problem in Behavior Manager because the detention roll is generated automatically and the system keeps track of whether the student has complied with the deadline.

This same system also allows more flexibility on the number of after school detentions assigned. Since the system is keeping track, administrators now have the flexibility of assigning four or five after school detentions instead of one day of ISS. The system will keep track and the student doesn’t miss any class time.

Assembling the context for assigning consequences

Assigning an intervention is an important act. In many cases, one would like to take relevant information into account. What are the details of this incident? How many office referrals has this student had this year? How many this grading period? What interventions have been tried so far? Do they seem to be effective? What is the general policy for dealing with this behavior? For some behaviors, the state imposes consequences. Does that apply in this case? What consequence will I choose? Does it interfere with any pending consequences that have already been imposed but have not yet been satisfied?

A lot of issues can be considered when assigning a consequence. And there are many types of consequences that might be applied. In addition to considering the details of the student’s behavior history, the administrator may wish to discuss it with the student. After all, it’s the student’s problem, not the administrator’s. Perhaps the student should figure out how to solve it. That’s possible because of the wide range of options available to the administrator.

An important benefit of involving the student in solving the problem is that he makes the problem and the solution (intervention) his own. By making the problem his own, the student is correcting his own behavior rather than having a penalty imposed on him. Taking responsibility for the behavior and its consequences makes it more likely that the student will also take responsibility for his behavior in the future.

Data behind the scenes

When the administrator assigns a consequence, a number of things happen behind the scenes. Rolls, such as the detention roll, are updated. The referring teacher is notified that an intervention has been assigned. The incident and consequence automatically become part of the student’s behavior history and are incorporated into behavior dashboards and database queries. If it is an out-of-placement consequence, emails are sent to the student’s teachers requesting assignments for the student to work on while he will be out of class. Parents are notified and the notification is added to the parent contacts database.

All of this data keeps teachers and parents informed. And it makes data available immediately allowing data-based decision making so people have immediate information on status and trends. And that feeds into the opportunities for continuous improvement which will improve student behavior and student achievement over time.

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Keywords: Responsible-Motivated-Engaged, Behavior Manager