Behavior, Behavior, Behavior! (and my first FREEBIE!)

So, I kind of have an obsession with all things behavior. Maybe it's the sociologist/psychologist turned special educator in me, but I LOVE learning about behavior and behavior management strategies! It's gone to a whole new level thanks to an amazing training from The Behavior Queen, Amie Dean!

Today, I had the opportunity to attend a training that my county sponsored and the presenter was Amie Dean! She is a teacher turned behavior specialist and now assists with training people around the country to deal with challenging classroom behaviors. You can find more about her at her website, here. Follow her on Twitter, @behaviorqueen.

I went into the training hoping to get more strategies for managing my students' behaviors. I actually consider behavior management to be a strength of mine, but I had a student last year that it seemed like nothing worked with! Literally, nothing. I walked in hoping for a few strategies, but nothing could have prepared me for the wealth of information that Amie shared with us. 

What I liked most about her was her realness. Amie was hilarious and shared stories of both her successes AND her failures. Even though she gave us a TON of strategies, she stressed the importance of finding what worked for us and tweaking things to make it work. She was realistic about the implementation of the strategies, which was good for me because I tend to attempt to take on everything, only to end up discouraged and overwhelmed in the end. 

There are many strategies that I'll blog about later once I have visuals of how I plan to use them in my classroom, but my FAVORITE one of the day was the Yes Card! The Yes Card is a self-monitoring tool meant to be a Tier 2 intervention. Self-monitoring? Behavior intervention?? Sign. Me. Up. 

I'm ALL ABOUT some self monitoring for a few reasons. 1) It increases student accountability and awareness of their behavior. 2) It makes my life easier. Much easier. Seriously, everybody wins when students self-monitor. 

Anywho, back to the Yes Card. Here is how you use it: 

• Step 1: You'll want to identify a SPECIFIC target behavior. For this example, let's say we're targeting blurting out in class. 
• Step 2: Do some observation to identify a baseline. Take 20-30 minutes and observe how long the student can go WITHOUT blurting out. Find the average amount of time and that is how long of an interval your intervention will start with. For example, if the student averages 6 minutes, start them off in 5 minute intervals because you KNOW they can be successful with that. 
• Step 3: Give the student the Yes Card sheet and determine what reward they will work for. The kicker to this that will reduce your whining from other students about how you're rewarding only the one student who is likely to be your "bad" student is that the student is working on a reward for THE ENTIRE CLASS! Genius! (Click on the image for a FREE download of a sheet I created similar to Amie's!)

• Step 4: Set a timer for the baseline time. If the student can go that length of time without engaging in the behavior, they put a check in the box. Otherwise, they leave the box blank, reset the timer, and try again. You're going to want to model how to use this with the student before setting them loose. 
• Step 5: When the student has filled in all boxes, praise them and ask if they want to remain anonymous or not when you tell the class they've earned a reward. 
• Step 6: Start with a new trial with the same length of time. When they fill THAT card, increase by 5 minutes and do 2 more trials. Repeat this process until the student has gone 20 minutes. When they have done the 20 minute trials TWICE, you can consider your intervention successful! 

That's all there is to it! 

Please let me know if you have any questions and I'm happy to answer them! Also, let me know if you use this strategy in your class!