13. Behavior Plan Techniques

Hello, there, we are so glad to have you here today. I'm Ellie, one of your hosts, and I'm here with Brittany.

Hello,

our other host, and today we're here to have a conversation about behavior plans, we have a previous episode on behavior and discipline in the classroom.

That's Episode Four if you'd like to go back and listen to it,

but we wanted to touch on this topic again, since it seems to be a very popular one and give you some rapid fire ideas to use for behavior plans.

First

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of all, for those of you unfamiliar or new to teaching, a behavior plan is a plan put in place when behavior needs improvement, just like an IEP for special needs, or 504. For learning issues, such as anxiety or hearing loss, or an i LP for reading difficulties, a behavior plan is the same thing. But for behavior. These plans can be as basic or as complicated as you'd like them to be considering that they're effective. And they work. I've had one that consisted of just a face with two eyes, and each day I drew either a smile or a frown or a flat line. And at the end of the week, the parent then handed out rewards or punishments based on the results, then I've had plans with five or six objectives that the student and I went over every afternoon, emails were sent home every day, and things were very laborious, but it was effective for that child. What about you, Ellie, did you have any other types of plans.

Um, I do have one specific example. But before I share that, I'd like to add that behavior plans are more proactive than discipline and consequences. Often, the repeated reaction of having to use consequences leads us to using a more proactive approach like a behavior plan. So just that little bit of difference to think about there. One thing that we did in middle school, if behavior was an issue across classes was we will create a chart for students with the expected behaviors at the top and there would be discussion with the student, why we're doing this, what the expected behaviors are to make sure that they clearly understand what the expectations mean. And then the chart would typically be for Monday through Friday, and on each day, there will be a space for each class period that the chart applied to. And then if the student met expectations during that class period, the teacher would initial that space showing that they had met expectations. If not, they would tell the student why they weren't initialing or maybe have a conversation, you know, why do you think I'm not initialing this today, so the student is aware of why they're not getting the initial for that day. And they might write a note teachers might write a note if they didn't meet the expectation, so that that was recorded on the chart, and then the chart would be evaluated at the end of the week. Or sometimes it might be evaluated at the end of each day, if we felt that week was too long to go without evaluating the chart and seeing how things were going. If the student met expectations, you know, either for the day or for the week, whatever the the contract of that chart said, then they would get some type of reward. As an alternative students could have a similar chart and self monitor for each class period. That might be all they need, depending on what the behavior issues are, or that self monitoring could be a second phase, after a specific time period of the teachers monitoring once the teachers are monitoring things are getting better than students might self monitor and having them take some charge that way helps promote some responsibility. So what are some other ways that you dealt with behavior plans, Brittany, what types of techniques did you put into place?

Well, like I mentioned before, you can let parents handle the rewards or consequences. Okay, you can do timeouts or have like a calm down corner, where you have stress balls, fidgets, finger puzzles, etc. What about you,

you could have students walk around the school like take a little break that could be part of their plan that when necessary, they're going to take a little walk maybe to the library to another teacher and back to the office. You can reward positive changes in behavior with classroom money, positive passes or tickets, kind of like the classroom economy ideas that we talked about. In the last episode. You can incorporate your classroom economy into your behavior plan.

You can turn the tables and make them your assistant or your helper for the day. Make them a class leader, paper passer, a line leader. Just make them you know, help You so that their focus on attention is on doing work for you and not on bad behavior.

Okay, yeah, you can have them set their specific goals for behavior. If you're going to use it behavior plan, it's helpful to get some buy in from the students. So they can be setting specific goals. And they can even help in the tracking process, you can give them options about how they want to track their progress in their behavior plan,

providing meditation time for just a couple of minutes, I did this, especially after recess. And gym, this was a great time to do it.

I never used meditation. But I think that it's a fantastic idea. And I would love to see its effects on students, you can use special seating seating can be part of your behavior plan, it might be as simple as moving a seat, it's very simple. But having students in a different seat can be part of the behavior plan and moving them just to a different location, maybe they need to be closer to the window, maybe they need to be closer to the door, maybe you know, sometimes they say put the student closest to you. But I always walked around the room. So closest to me, it wasn't necessarily a thing it was maybe there's a specific location in the room that is best for them,

giving them an accountability partner, students can have a peer that might help them stay on track. So maybe it's a different student who's a good student who you can rely on, or maybe it's one of their friends who you know, will behave and help them. But just having someone who will help them stay on track on target, and do what needs to be done.

Yeah, and I mean, accountability partners are fantastic throughout our lives, whether we want to, you know, reinforce positive behaviors or reduce, you know, less positive behaviors. Yes, you know, my daughter got an Apple Watch recently. And she's never really into, into working out all the time kind of thing. But my daughter in law also has one, and now she'll be like, Oh my gosh, she just went a mile and a half or whatever. Now I gotta go on the treadmill again. So, you know, it's kind of an accountability thing, even though they didn't set it up that way. That's how it seems to be working out. So it's always helpful to have an accountability partner and have students learn that young, they can use that, you know, as a life lesson and realize that having an accountability partner was really helpful to them.

Yes.

And then you can have students create a positive classroom project as part of their behavior plan, to redirect them, perhaps to something that will help them feel like they're contributing to the classroom in a different way. Maybe something that jives with their interests where they could create something for the classroom or work on something every day to enhance the classroom environment, just giving them a little bit more ownership in the classroom and redirecting the behaviors perhaps into a positive thing that's going to be helpful to everyone.

They could create a mural they could make a classroom video, maybe a class song, anything like that. That'd be cool. All right. So that does it for our rapid fire behavior plan strategies. For more ideas. Remember to check out Episode Four behavior and discipline.

And if you have any questions, send us a DM on Instagram at teaching Toolbox Podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you later.