006: Behavior Charts

Podcasts
Written By Sarah Gilmore

As with so many of our episodes so far, Katierose and I came into this one without any idea of what we would learn. We were just interested to find out whether and how clip charts work as a behavior management strategy, because we have seen and used them many times in our own careers. As we did our research, however, we not only learned about the research behind clip charts, but also ended up feeling differently about clip charts and behavior charts in general.

Clip charts are a form of behavior chart, which are tools used to manage the types of day-to-day disruptive behaviors we all see, like talking out of turn, or being off task etc while also recognizing good behavior. Clip charts are something that many teachers, particularly elementary classrooms, use because they find them useful and effective, or because they are mandated by their school or district. To get a feel for how widespread they are, a quick search on Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers will show a huge array of styles!

What Are Clip Charts?

The ‘Clip Chart Management System’ was created by Rick Morris, who based the system on the research that positive reinforcement is more effective than negative reinforcement. A clip chart is usually a set of vertically connecting, laminated pieces of paper with statements such as (from top to bottom) ‘Outstanding/You are a star’, ‘Nice job’, ‘Ready to Learn’, ‘Take a break/Warning’, ‘Note to Parent’, ‘Meet with Principal’. It’s publicly displayed in a prominent place in the classroom, and each student has a personalized clothes pin. Each day all students start the day on Ready to Learn and then, depending on how the day goes, will be asked by the teacher to move up or down the chart. 

Many teachers feel that their clip charts are effective tools for managing student behavior, but if they do work, how do they work?

The Science Behind Behaviour Management

To answer that, we need to dive a little deeper into the science behind behavior management more generally.

When we talk about “behavior management”, we are talking about the process of shaping students’ behavior in order to create a classroom environment where meaningful learning can take place (Walker & Shea, 1999). One thing we know is that well developed routines have shown to directly impact social and emotional development as well as reduce behavior problems (Ostrosky, Jung, Hemmeter, & Thomas, 2003). Teaching the exact desired behavior of a routine allows all students to understand what is expected and leave no confusion, and routines and procedures should be practiced regularly until they become the natural habits of the class (Lester et al., 2017). 

For many teachers (us included!) this can be one of the hardest aspects of the job: classroom behavior really is integral to both student and teacher success in the classroom.

There are two main approaches to managing behavior, which come from B.F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning.

The first, most common, and most effective, is positive reinforcement. I used to assume that the “positive” part meant positive in the sense of happy or uplifting, but actually it means positive in the sense of adding something. This is when a positive stimulus (e.g. a treat, or praise) is added/given in response to a desirable behavior to increase the likelihood of it happening again. If you’ve ever rewarded a child for sitting on the potty with a high five or an M&M, or even given a warm smile to a student who fulfilled your expectations, or given the class a pizza party or early break time for doing well you have used positive reinforcement.

Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, is about taking something away in the sense that the subject (the child, the dog, or whoever is being trained) will repeat a desirable behavior to avoid something they don’t want to happen. In Skinner’s work this meant training animals to perform a behavior to avoid electric shocks (!), but in the context of the classroom it means students changing their behavior to avoid humiliation, being told off, or getting detention etc. However, negative reinforcement can also result in increased misbehavior. Imagine this scenario:

You are asking your students to read a text, but one of them is reading below the level needed to be able to read the text. That student feels stressed, humiliated, embarrassed, bored, or some other negative emotion because they aren’t able to do what is being asked, so they start staring out the window, or bugging their neighbor, or even swearing at you. You (understandably) react to this misbehavior by telling off the child, or giving them a time out, or moving their clip. The focus from both you and the student is taken off the reading, and they avoid the negative feelings caused by the inappropriate task. Over time, the student learns “When I act up, I can avoid tasks that I don’t like”, and the misbehavior continues.

Another pair of terms you are likely to be familiar with are intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

The easier of the two to think about is extrinsic motivation. This is where you are motivated to do something or behave in a certain way by external factors, such as rewards. When you tell your child that if they tidy their room they will get ice cream, that is extrinsic motivation. 

Intrinsic motivation comes from within. If your child tidies their room just because it is messy and they know that tidying it is the right thing to do, that is an example of intrinsic motivation. Perhaps experts in the field would disagree with me, but I find these two terms not as clear cut as those examples would seem. Where does intrinsic motivation come from, if not from having been trained through extrinsic motivation? Right and wrong are not innate senses in humans - they are largely social constructs. Rooms are not fundamentally required to be uncluttered and tidy, we learn that they should be that way from the example set by our caregivers, and being rewarded for emulating that example. So, does extrinsic motivation create intrinsic motivation? Answers in the comments please!

The third form of behavior management we discuss briefly in this episode is “positive discipline”. This is a philosophy of behavior management based on the work of Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs, which is designed to teach young people to become responsible, respectful and resourceful members of their communities. Its ideas will be familiar to parents who follow or know of “RIE” (Resources for Infant Educarers) or respectful parenting techniques. It is a much less authoritarian approach, based on respect and understanding.

How Clip Charts Work

Well, clip charts  - contrary to what Rick Morris seems to claim - are not an example of positive reinforcement. Certainly, for those students who are consistently moving up the chart and being recognized for positive behavior, they may be. But for those students who are moving down, clip charts work through negative reinforcement, and I’ll come back to just how that works a little later on.

Another way in which they work is through social compliance, so here is a little background on Social Comparison Theory. Leon Festinger found that individuals use groups to evaluate their abilities and opinions and that these comparisons lead to pressures toward uniformity (Suls & Wheeler, 2013). Classrooms are ripe for social comparison: ability groups, popularity, skill mastery are all very transparent to our students and cause inevitable comparisons.  These comparisons affect how people feel about themselves, and these feelings contribute to academic achievement. Comparison can create status within the classroom, and this is important because noticeable variations in status result in increased rates of classroom bullying, while classrooms where the students are all on an equal peer standing have high levels of engagement and community. 

I’m sure we can all remember from when we were children that some degree of social comparison is unavoidable (two-stripe tracksuit bottoms, anyone?) but teachers can unknowingly play into this separation of status through our behavior towards students. Publicly stratifying children by behavior being one great example! 

So, what’s the big deal?

We tend to focus on whether a behavior management intervention “works” without discussing whether it might “fail to pass moral scrutiny” (Goodman & Cook 2019). “We must not forget that discipline, ‘ like all other aspects of teaching, is fundamentally moral… [and] moral qualities are not apt to be learned… through techniques which are themselves of dubious moral value’ (Butchart, 1997, cited by Goodman & Cook 2019)

The real mechanism behind clip charts is really shame, and although Goodman & Cook describe clip charts as a form of “shaming-lite”, shame is a very negative and damaging emotion that really should be avoided in the classroom.

In ‘Shame, Guilt and Embarrassment: Will the real emotion please stand up’, the authors Tangney, Mashek and Stuewig do a great job of explaining the difference between these three commonly confused emotions.

Guilt is about an act, and something that comes from within. We feel guilty about something we have done because we believe it was wrong.

Embarrassment is situation-specific. We feel embarrassed about something that has happened, but we don’t necessarily feel that we did something morally wrong, just that the situation was embarrassing.

Monroe, in ‘Shame Solutions: How Shame Impacts School-Aged Children and What Teachers Can Do to Help’ tells us: 

 ”Shame must have an audience. We feel shame when our weaknesses are exposed to an “other.” Most often the other is another person, but when shame becomes internalized, that other is our own critical eye. When shame is internalized, we become the witnesses to our weaknesses, and our sense of self-worth is diminished (Schenk and Everingham 1995)”.

Fundamentally, shame really hits at the core of who we are as people. 

Not what we have done, or what has happened, but who we are.

And that is why it is so damaging. She goes on to say:

“Shame so easily moves from functional to toxic because of our capacity to relive shaming situations. Once we have experienced shame in the presence of another person, we can relive that experience over and over again by becoming our own audience. (p. 61)”

And if we are going to focus on the question of whether shame works as a behavior management tactic (much as we would argue that whether it works is not the point at all!), then we can say: no. Not really.

In the short term, shame will only work as a mechanism for children who share your opinion that their behavior was unacceptable. If moving their clip down the chart doesn’t cause them to feel shame, it won't work to change their future behavior. And if it does cause shame in them, the long term effects of shame on children have been shown to be extremely negative: from externalized blame, to anger, risk-taking and substance abuse. Now, “shaming-lite” isn’t likely to lead to a life of hard drugs, but we should be asking ourselves hard questions about whether our role as educators should involve being a part of creating any kind of sense of shame in our students, knowing what we know about its effects.

What to do in your classroom

1 - Prevent disruptive behavior 

Nobody is going to like this statistic, but according to OFSTED 80% of disruptive behavior is caused by  “poor classroom organization, planning and teaching” (Parsonson, 2012)

As much as that hurts to hear I, for one, can recognize the truth of it in many of my experiences of low-level classroom disruption. So, to help us address this, Parsonson quoted the factors that Kern and Clemens identified in a 2007 literature review, in his paper “Evidence-based Classroom Behavior Management Strategies”:

  • Clear, simple rules and expectations which are consistently and fairly applied.

  • Predictability of events and activities through establishing routines, information, cues and signals about forthcoming transitions and changes, as well as for content, duration, and consequences for activities.

  • Frequent use of praise, both verbal and non-verbal. Teacher praise has demonstrated effects on both those earning it and those nearby. Verbal praise should be specific and descriptive. Teachers should try to provide a child with at least four praise statements for every reprimand.

  • Because disruptive behavior is often associated with learning deficits, task difficulty needs to be monitored. All students need to have the required entry skills and ability to successfully engage in assigned activities. Participation and learning can only follow successful access to the curriculum and encouragement to sustain activity.

  • Opportunities to respond and participate in the classroom activities, to use the materials and to respond to requests must be inclusive of all children in the class.

They also share some strategies to increase the engagement of all students:

  • having everyone write answers to some teacher questions rather than just seeking one correct response.

  • Seating arrangements: For older students (10 years and above) seating in rows works better than group seating.

  • Effective instructions and commands need to be preceded by getting the pupils’ attention, and then presented clearly one at a time as “do’s”, in a firm (not angry) voice, with time to comply and praise for compliance. Precise, specific, direct and paced (one-at-a- time) instructions delivered in a calm and quiet voice, followed by praise for compliance have been found most effective.

  • Sequencing of activities, so that easy and brief tasks are interspersed with longer and more demanding ones, enhances engagement and learning as well as reducing disruption. Preceding difficult activities with a few simple ones has been found to enhance transition to a new activity as has scheduling active learning after breaks before moving on to more passive activities so that children have time to adapt to quieter routines.

Another important consideration in preventing disruptive behavior is to return to what we know about negative reinforcement. Gunter & Coutinho’s paper ‘Negative reinforcement in classrooms: what we’re beginning to learn’ (1997) explains how aversive behavior is a vicious cycle. As we know, some children misbehave to avoid the task (because it is inappropriate in some way usually). If they learn this is effective, perhaps because it results in a time-out, or their teacher’s attention is successfully diverted from instruction to behavior management, their disruptive behavior increases. 

The next part of the cycle is that teachers are also not immune to negative reinforcement! When our students behave aggressively, or disruptively, we don’t enjoy this and research has found that when teachers find the behavior of the child aversive, they may respond by physically staying further away from the child, reducing their instructional interactions, and increasing negative interactions focused on behavior. The kicker is that all of these (decreased proximity, decreased instruction, and increased negativity) have been shown to increase disruptive behaviors.

When you think about it, it makes sense. The child is most often acting up because they feel unable to do the work. Reducing the amount of help we give them is not going to improve that situation!

So, we can only break this cycle by spending more time, not less, near children when they are misbehaving, increasing positive interactions by actively looking for opportunities to be positive, and increasing instructional directions rather than behavioral ones.

But we can’t prevent all disruptive behavior, not matter how hard we try. So what can we do to address it when it arises?

2 - Address disruptive behavior 

Jung & Smith’s ‘Tear down your behavior chart!’ (2018) is a very accessible look at the options we have beyond interventions like behavior charts. They advise:

  • “Take 10 for each learner” on a rotating basis. This means finding 10 minutes to talk to even just one student per day and get to know them better. Positive teacher-student relationships are a big help in managing behavior

  • “Keep it off stage”. Whenever possible discipline should be private, not public. Our aim should be to help the child understand what they did wrong, and take responsibility for it. This essentially means trying to induce guilt rather than shame

  • “Hear students out” - try to understand what happened from the student’s perspective. There are two sides to every story and while we don’t want students to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, if we don’t understand how they got to the point of behaving in the way they have, it will be much harder for us to help them avoid it happening again.

Another tried and tested, evidence-based approach is called “The Good Behavior Game”. It has been the subject of a huge number of papers and all the ones I read agreed that using the good behavior game resulting in increased positive behavior and decreased disruptive behaviors.

How do you play?

  • First, define broad classroom expectations, followed by more specific behaviors that will demonstrate this expectation  - these are the “rules” of the game (see example below)

  • Divide your class into at least two “teams”. You can also use any groups you already have in place, such as reading, maths, or table groups.

  • When a student demonstrates one of the behaviors in your classroom expectations, their team wins a point.

  • It’s very important that the team is praised when points are won, that it is clear what the positive behavior was, and the points are nice and public, for example tally marks up on the board beside the rules.

  • You set a goal number of required points to “win” and it’s up to you how long each game lasts. It could be an hour, or a lesson at the start, working up to being played over the course of the day, week or longer as behavior improves.

  • If you goal was, say, 5 points, and all teams make 5 points by the end of the session that is absolutely fine - they all win!

  • What teams are rewarded for is up to you, but make it easy and ideally free so it’s manageable for you. Some ideas might be:

    • Access to in-class games or activities

    • Early release at a break or sports activities in the playground

    • Points towards some special event, such as a winning-team pizza at the end of the week.

    • A dance party

    • Even something silly (for younger kids), like acting like your favorite animal

    • Stickers

Another evidence-based strategy is the “token economy”. In a token economy, students earn tokens for good behavior that they can spend on rewards. You can buy several hundred raffle tickets very cheap, and when students demonstrate positive behavior, they win a token. Things to remember about token economies:

  • Clarity about behavior expectations is key. Use the same approach as in the Good Behavior Game to make it absolutely clear to students how they should behave

  • When a student wins a token, write their name on the token, along with what they did to win it

  • You can either have a “price list” of rewards that students save up for with their tokens, or do a prize draw approach. With the first approach, the more tokens you have the bigger the reward you can buy, and with the second approach, the more tokens you have the greater the chance you will have yours drawn from the box of student tokens to win a prize.

  • Again, if you are facing a lot of disruptive behavior, issue rewards as often as you can - positive reinforcement is highly effective and the more students are rewarded for showing positive behavior, the more they will repeat that behavior.

So, as you go into your classroom tomorrow, we encourage you to proceed throughout the day with a critical eye and ear to pick up the visible and somewhat invisible aspects of your behavior management system to decide if your system truly supports your students holistic development and supports your classroom as a community.

To help you do this we have generated some guiding questions/thoughts..

  • How does your current behavior management system “work”? What is the underlying approach to how it seeks to modify behavior?

  • Does that approach align with your values or moral purpose as an educator?

  • What message does your BM system send to kids about your expectations of their behavior? Compliance? Cooperation? That you care?

  • Be critical of whatever system you are being told or encouraged to implement: sometimes you won't have a choice, but do research about it, think critically and use your voice to share any concerns you have, as well as using your own agency to decide how you implement systems you don’t have control over.

  • Take time to build community and have conversations with students - behaviors are never as simple as what you are seeing. All behavior has a cause and a back story.

  • When you have a student exhibiting behaviors that need to be addressed (and this does happen. There need to be consequences and parents do need to be contacted) remember to think about:

    • How can I support a positive interaction between you and the student?

    • How can I make this interaction personalized so the student understands why the behavior is not acceptable yet feels cared for and knows that the behavior needs to change and not an attack on the child?

Researching this episode has really changed our thinking about behavior management in general, and clip charts in particular. We hope it will do the same for you!

We hope you enjoyed this episode, and we would love to hear your thoughts about clip charts and behavior management generally! Reach out on our social media, and if you’re enjoying LKL Podcast, you can help us to reach more teachers and classrooms by subscribing to our podcast on your podcast streaming service, and rating or writing a review.

Thanks for listening!

Sarah and Katierose

Sources

Sarah Gilmore

http://www.intechgrate.eu
Previous

007: COVID-19, and the Facebook group helping teachers around the world
Next

005: Does Brain Gym Help Students Learn?