Positive Behavior Management System

This is an idea that I used and tweaked, many times, during my first year of teaching. Next year, I will have new students and will most likely need to adjust my behavior plan, but I wanted to share this idea because it worked well, was easy and efficient and paired nicely with daily parent communication. It was also a great way to have permanent data on each child's behavior (and absences!) for each day.

The Smiley Face System :-)

First of all, each behavior management system has to be consistent with the classroom rules and the classroom rules must be posted along with consequences and rewards for following the expectations. I also must preface that I teach special needs students who are young, so my behavior management system is very basic, simple, easy to follow and understand. Obviously, this system can be modified to work with different types of students (older students you may use something other than smiley faces and X's, for higher functioning students you may not need to be so simple as to what behavior you need to see but can have a vague rule such as "treat people with respect", reinforcers can be different, etc).

Here were my classroom rules, rewards and consequences. The rules were simple, and the icons were attached by velcro because sometimes I needed to take a rule off and set it next to a student so they could see it and focus on it.

1) Hands and feet to self

2) Sit down

3) Listen to adults using eyes and ears

4) Quiet mouth and raise your hand

-Rewards: if you earned all smileys you could earn prize box (small things, stickers, erasers, temp. tattoo) at the end of the day

-If you earned most of your smileys you could earn free choice at the end of the day ("most" would be determined daily based on the schedule...I would number the schedule (usually 8 activities, including lunch and specials, and then I would pick the number to earn...easier at certain times like at the beginning of the year when they don't know the expectations as well and after breaks, but harder towards the end of the year..like 6/8 smileys is most of your smileys for the day)

Here is an example of determining the "most" smileys out of the day. This was on the board each day so the student knows what activities we are doing and how many smileys they need to earn.

-If you earned most of your smileys all week you got treasure bin on Friday (bigger things, dollar prizes from target, a sheet of stickers, pens and pencils, small oriental trader toys, etc)

-If you got most X (did not meet the "most" smileys requirement of the day) you did not earn free choice

-If you got all X's you loose a privilege from an activity or determined by teacher (this was usually a case-by-case basis because to get all X's is hard to do with all the opportunity to earn)

We would review the rules, consequences and rewards usually daily in our circle time, especially after breaks and less as they understood them well. When enforcing this system, I would also usually allow a "warning" before giving an X for an activity so the students could really work on changing the negative behavior into the positive behavior instead of just getting an X.

Here is how I would keep track of it. The numbers on the top correspond with the numbers on the schedule which are the activities of the day. I cut out the student's names, but they are on the left. This plan worked well because there were so many opportunities for the student to be successful and change their behavior around that it wasn't too discouraging to get an X. Also, it kept track of behavior the entire day, making it easier to know when the student was not successful and why. Also, it was student driven-after each activity we would transition back to our seats and I would ask "Who earned a smiley face?" and usually all of them would raise their hands and I would have to ask the student who earned an X why they earned it, etc. Sometimes, I would give X's in the middle of the activity so the student knew that they were not behaving appropriately (after a verbal warning) and if the student was physically violent they would get an X right away, no questions asked, and were usually removed from the group for safety.

At the end of the day, this made a clear and easy way to determine rewards. My parent communication notebook mimicked this board. 

Each child would have a folder that had the little insert in the middle for hole punched papers. I had pre-printed the sheets to go in for each day of the week. The lines say Name: Date: and then have a chart of each activity and a :-) or an X. I would go through and circle what the student earned for each activity. They were customizable because there were blanks in the sections that were not the same each week so I can say exactly what activity we were working on. There were lined sections at the end of each page for comments from teacher and comments from parents and a signature line. I would refill them every Monday morning and keep their old sheets in a file folder in my desk in case I needed a record or to review their behavior to look for patterns. I would also record absences on there if they were absent (obviously would have to record that when they come back to school because their folder stayed in their backpack every night).

Some ideas of how I want to make this better:

So, since I have used this almost an entire school year some ideas for making it better are to bound the parent communication sheets into an entire book for the students to keep in their backpacks. This would cut down on time of putting in new sheets each Monday and would cut down on having to run and make copies quickly of the days that I ran out of. It would also help to keep parents on track with the school schedule because I would separate it by months, including sheets at the beginning of each month stating days we have off of school and not putting in a sheet for that day. I think this would save time and paper. Also, then I wouldn't have to file them away each week and it would make a great data collection from the entire year to look at patterns. Maybe even a graph of behavior at the end of each month would be a cool way to represent the data.

I would like the smileys and X's to be right next to the schedule. This was hard the way my board was set up last year but I was thinking maybe a pocket chart where each activity could be listed as an icon on the top and then the names would be on the left going down and for each one they get either a smiley or an X card. 

At the end of the week it was a burden to have to look through each student's folder to see if they earned treasure bin or not...I attempted to solve this problem with little index cards that they would just get a mark with if they earned it but I got busy at the end of each day and didn't keep up with it...possibly with the new pocket chart idea there could be a way to keep track of what they got each day of the week. Like, if they got most :-) they were green and most X they were red and they have to have all greens to get treasure bin. It was easy to keep track of daily but weekly got to be a lot of guessing or looking back through each day.

I also enjoy using coins with a behavior management system and I haven't gotten to how I would change the smiley system to work with coins. I think it is an important skill to not only learn the value of coins, but understand the transaction between earning money and then turning it in to buy something you want. Often times, I find that students do not understand the exchange between money and the value of something they want...sometimes they think everything is free :-) 

Please leave your comments on this ! Thanks!!