Jim's Hints

As your class shows that it is able to lower noise levels and improve behaviors, you can gradually decrease the number of "Traffic Points" that you assign while increasing the minimum number of continuous minutes of green-light behavior required to earn those points.

Jim's Hints

A Kid's Guide to Safety in the Car & On the Road.  Check out this directory of links to safety information for kids on car and bus travel.

From Down Under: Bus Safety Resources. The New Zealand Ministry of Education has posted excellent resources to promote safety on the bus, including a sample student ‘code of conduct’ and a two-page behavior reference guide for bus drivers.

Riding the School Bus European-Style. The US Department of Defense Dependents Schools/Europe hosts a resource page that contains a model school bus behavior management policy and a student handout on appropriate bus behaviors (‘An unruly bus is an unsafe bus!’)

School Bus Safety Tips from CarsDirect. This webpage provides advice to students for safely getting on and off the bus, crossing the street, and riding the bus.

Attachments

• Classroom Poster for 'Respectful Classroom'

Jim's Hints

This strategy gives you the option of including student self-monitoring and reward elements if you choose. The Respectful Classroom intervention is likely to work without these added components but will probably be quite a bit more effective if it includes them.

As student behaviors improve, you may want to gradually 'fade' the procedure by only occasionally reviewing the expected behaviors at the start of class and by having students self-monitor less frequently than once per week.

If you are having students self-monitor and are finding that a student chronically exaggerates his or her behavior ratings, you may want to call that student routinely for 'spot-checks' until the student learns to rate his or her behaviors more accurately.

Attachments

• Sample Adopt-A-School-Location Poster

Jim's Hints

Build Student Excitement With an Assembly. If multiple classrooms will be participating in the Adopt-a-School-Location program, schools can introduce the program in an assembly to generate greater visibility and enthusiasm for the initiative.

Encourage Classrooms to Help to Implement the Program. Teachers can tap student creativity and strengthen their classroom's commitment to the location-adoption project by having students assist in carrying out the program. Students, for example, might design their own 'site-adoption' posters or visit their adopted location on a daily basis to evaluate its appearance (using a 'quality' checklist of their own creation). Students might also be enlisted in a service-learning project to make repairs or improvements to a school setting. A classroom responsible for a wall on the exterior of the school that is a popular target for graffiti, for example, might solicit a small grant from a local foundation, use the money to purchase paint from a neighborhood hardware store, and work together under the art teacher's supervision to cover the wall with an inspirational mural.

Use Public Announcements and Newsletters to Build Interest. A school can deepen student investment in the adopt-a-location program in inventive ways. A building may make daily announcements over the public address system, for example, of classrooms who earned prize points because of the good condition of their adopted locations or deliver weekly reports of those five classrooms with the longest string of uninterrupted days of having prize points awarded. The same information can be written up for school newsletters.

Attachments

• What Is Praise?' Poster
• Examples of Praise' Poster
• Classroom Behavior Chart

Jim's Hints

Use Positive Peer Reporting to Improve the Whole Classroom Climate. As a teacher, you may want to adopt the Positive Peer Reporting strategy in your classroom even if you do not have students who regularly seek negative attention. All students can benefit from the chance to practice giving and receiving compliments. You may also find that, once the intervention is in place, your students begin to be more complimentary toward one another and use fewer putdowns.

Extend Positive Peer Reporting to Less Structured Situations. Once this strategy is in place and effective, you can experiment with extending it to school settings or situations in which there is less structure and direct adult supervision (generalization). You may announce, for example, that the class can earn a certain number of additional bonus points each day for each sincere compliment that you observe being used in cooperative learning groups, free time, while students are in the lunch line, etc. (Of course, you would also remind students that you are the sole judge of whether bonus points are to be given.) You can make this generalization strategy more effective by sharing specific instances in which you saw students giving praise or compliments. (E.g., "I am giving a point to the class because, on the playground, I saw Jacob teaching some of the younger kids how to play freeze tag. He also complimented them on how quickly they learned the rule. I bet it made them feel good to have an older student pay that kind of attention to them.")

Surprise Students With 'Mystery List' Days. To maintain interest in this intervention, you might occasionally have a 'mystery list' day. Tell students that they need to be very observant of their peers that day because you will not be announcing the list of students chosen to be complimented until the end of the period or school day.

Jim's Hints

The Good Behavior Game is an effective strategy for managing a classroom-but don't overdo it! Allow breaks from the Game during the school day. A caution should be kept in mind when involving your students in the Good Behavior Game: Generally, the Game should be scheduled for a maximum of 1-2 hours per day in any classroom. After all, students will need some time to relax, socialize, and "be kids."

Of course, minimum standards of acceptable classroom conduct remain in place whether the Game is in effect or not.

Attachments

• Teacher Command Monitoring Chart

Jim's Hints

Monitor Your Use of Commands. By tracking your use of teacher commands in the classroom, you can gain a better understanding of how frequently you give then and how effective those commands are. Check out the Teacher Command Monitoring Chart (see attachment at the bottom of this page) as an example of one instructor self-rating form.

Attachments

• Standard Critters
• Fanciful Critters

Jim's Hints

Give Critter Slips Out to Other Staff to Distribute to Your Students. Here is a strategy to use if you want your students to show the daily positive behavior in settings other than your classroom (e.g., in art, gym, music, lunch). Give the staff responsible for supervising students in these settings a handful of Critter Slips. Tell them the target positive behavior and, throughout the class or activity period, encourage these staff members to hand out slips randomly to students engaging in that behavior.

Have a 'Mystery Behavior Day'. Tell students at the start of the day that you will be handing out Critter Slips as usual, but that you are keeping secret the positive behavior that you are rewarding. When handing out slips, say to the receiving students something like: "Nice job. Here is a Critter Slip. Think about why you received it!". At the end of the day, ask students who had received Critter Slips to guess the positive behavior that you had selected as the theme for that day.

Customize Reward Slips to Support Curriculum. You may want to create your own customized reward slips to link them thematically to the curriculum that you are teaching. If you are presenting a unit on African wildlife, for example, you might make up slips that depict representative animals from the savannah ecosystem. For a unit on American presidents, you could hand out reward slips featuring the faces and names of lesser-known Chief Executives to help children better to remember them.

Alter the Reward Slips for Older Students. The Critter Slips program is suitable for older students as well as for younger children. Since 'cute' Critter Slips may put off middle and high school students, though, you can replace them with reward slips that resemble currency. Some inventive teachers even go so far as to create 'classroom bucks', fake dollar bills that display their face and name. Older students collect these 'dollars' as avidly as smaller children seek Critter Slips!