Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Toward more effective interventions - Check In/Check Out

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

No, Virginia, PBIS will not eliminate all misbehavior

Proactive 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 punishments

Significant 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 Out

Check 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?

Here’s how Check In/Check Out (CICO) works. First, the paper version. The student checks in in the morning and gets a card like the one above. If he has one from yesterday that has been signed by a parent, he turns it in. Note that the schoolwide expectations are at the top of each column. Class periods are listed along the left side. Through the day, the teacher in each period will rate the student’s behavior for each expectation. Recall that in the rule matrix, those expectations are broken down into specific rules.

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 skills

Misbehavior 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

Behavior Questionnaires and Character Builders have been created in Behavior Manager in order to teach students about the natural consequences of their actions through reflection. The Behavior Questionnaires are about specific behavior issues. They can be completed online and be stored with the student’s behavior history or can be printed in PDF format. A list of Behavior Questionnaire issues is shown below.

·         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.

Posted at 12:00 AM Keywords: Responsible-Motivated-Engaged , Behavior Manager 0 Comments