The way it works is that every student carries around a sheet that has a row for each period and a column for each day of the week. Teachers either initial the period to indicate the student had no problems, or put a code for one of the numerous issues a teacher might have in class. There are codes for chewing gum, having your uniform untucked, missing an assignment, not turning in homework, missing a signature on another part of your sheet, and behavior (which covers everything else, including cussing out your teacher, for example). All of these result in the same consequence: a 45 minute detention after school. So if you forget to get your mom to sign your sheet, or cuss at your teacher, you get the same consequence.

Also, if you miss a detention, you still have to serve that one, plus you get an additional detention.

By the 7th week of school, we had detentions with 20% of the 8th grade in them, and some students had so many detentions racked up they could have been perfect for the rest of the year, and still had to serve detention every day for the rest of the year.

Yet my colleagues say we have a Positive Behavior System. How? Well, if you go for 2 straight weeks without receiving any bad codes, you get a Cougar Card. The benefits of this are that you only need to get your sheet signed twice per day, and you get to have free dress every third Friday, if someone else in your grade level doesn’t get in a fight and lose it for the whole grade level. Also, we sometimes have neat events, like a movie day, at the end of the quarter. Sometimes.

What is the end result of this? Students don’t care enough about the Cougar Card, and can’t fight the unending onslaught of bad codes.

There’s a lot of research out there that shows people are innately draw to the path of least resistance. It’s why it’s so hard to get people to eat right and exercise when it’s so much easier to watch TV and eat Domino’s. It’s not that teenagers are lazy, it’s that they are people.

Not only that, but recent research has shown that teenagers are not bad at assessing the amount of risk in a situation, it’s that they drastically overvalue the positive effect of a situation. Students will misbehave if they value the possible positive result for themselves of the misbehavior, no matter what the chance of success, and no matter how large the risk is, especially if there is no awesome thing drawing them the other way.

Put more simply, if you make it easy to be a bad kid, and hard to be a good kid, most kids will be bad.

I’m trying an experiment right now. Rather than demanding 2 straight weeks of perfect behavior from my students to get their Cougar Card, or even 2 weeks worth of good behavior, as I was doing with my previous point system, I am offering this: get 90% of your points in a day, you get your Cougar Card. You get to keep it for as long as you keep getting 90% of your points. If you have a day where you get less than 90% , you lose it…until the next day you get 90% or more of your points. Then you get it right back again.

I think this still represents what the Cougar Card is supposed to represent: a great student. However, it brings it into much easier grasping range. There are some students at my school who will never, ever have a Cougar Card. They will never know what it feels like to be successful. And my belief is that until a person knows what that feels like, they won’t desire it. You have to know success to want it. This plan brings that closer to being a reality.

I’ll report back after a few weeks and let you know how it goes.

This quarter we will be doing one subject per day, one day per week. So Monday is Reading, Tuesday is Math, Wednesday is Science, etc.

I believe there will be multiple benefits of this system for both me and the students. The first for me is simply less mental stress every day. I only need to prep myself on one subject per day, rather than 5, and hold all of that information in my head. It’s going to be easier for me to remember 5 periods worth of information about poetry, than about poetry, Newton’s Laws, the Pythagorean Theorem, and World War II. Second, it will make planning more efficient. I can spend all my time each night planning one curriculum area and coming up with different activities based on that theme than jumping around between 80 different resource books for all the different areas.

For the students, I think it will be less mentally stressful as well. There will be less transitioning for them. We will be doing different kinds of activities, but they will also be more focused. I think it will also be easier for the students to stay organized in this way. They will have less homework because they’ll only need homework for one subject per day, and that will in turn make things easier for me since they rarely turn in homework anyways, so I don’t have to track as many pieces of information.

I tried it out on Thursday and Friday doing Reading and Math. It went pretty well. Math particularly went well. First period we took notes on surface area and volume of all different kinds of polygons. 3rd period we did a project where they were handed real objects and had to measure them and, using the formulas we took notes on, come up with their surface area and volume. 5th period we started a comprehensive project using the Investigations curriculum on proportional relationships, and 6th period we did Standardized Test Question practice.

I was much more calm and collected on both days, I was more organized, and I believe that led to a better response from the students, even when they weren’t excited about what we were doing. My 7th period, which is always crazy because it’s when they get to buy free-time with their points, was quiet for the first time this entire year on Friday.

Looking forward to see how it works out for the rest of the quarter.

First, www.explorelearning.com they have some great “gizmos” that are flash-based science experiments. It’s like having a whole science lab without actually having to get the lab!

Second, www.lessonplanet.com is fantastic. It has links to TONS of lesson plans all over the web that are reviewed by other teachers. For teachers like me, who aren’t full content experts in every subject we’re asked to teach, it’s a boon.

Finally, PBS has a wonderful collection of videos and lesson plans on all sorts of stuff, but I’m focused right now on their history materials.

I found all these while trying to put together my curriculum maps for the next month…I’m pretty worn out. Unwrapping all the standards for four subject areas is a long process.

In Language Arts I think I’m going to teach Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies. The major standard for 3rd quarter is comparing themes across different works. These are the only two books I can find that are middle-grade reading level, content-appropriate, and have similar themes we can compare easily. Plus, we have lots of trouble with violence at the school, and having a chance to look at the effects of peer pressure, poor ways to deal with society and disagreements. I’m looking forward to it.

A split class also makes WBT more difficult because if two lessons are going on at the same time, neither can be loud.

Hmmmm…I’ll update as I experiment.

Go here: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

and set the wayback machine for mid-2007. That will let you see the massive spike, the literal 2.5 multiplication of the unemployment rate in this country. There are not jobs to get. That’s why they’re protesting in the first place.

Many people have been unhappy with policy decisions in this country for the last decade, but there weren’t protests on this scale because people didn’t have the time. They were working. As I am now. I’d love to be in the middle of all of this, but I have kids to teach, so I support from the sidelines.

Look. People want to be successful. Nobody wants to be a failure. I have to explain this to other teachers all the time when we’re dealing with students with troublesome behaviors, who operate outside of our parameters in school. I work with one student who was described by another teacher as someone who “wants to fail. He wants to be mischievous.” No he doesn’t. I know, because he told me, because I asked. He just doesn’t get science, and doesn’t feel like he’s getting enough help. I provided the help. He worked his butt off.

Nobody wants to be a failure. But when we feel that we cannot succeed despite our best efforts at following the rules, we will rebel. When we realize that the rules are specifically set up so that we cannot succeed, we will consciously place ourselves outside the rules.

If there were jobs, people would be working, not Occupying. It’s pretty simple behavior analysis.

First, I’m excited, because on Tuesday we’re having a meeting where all of the content teachers will be turning in their objectives through the end of the month. Starting in December, they’ll be asked to turn in all of their objectives for the whole month each month, as well as common formative assessments for the content. What does this mean for me? I don’t have to scope, sequence and plan 6 periods a day anymore! I can have three times as much time every week to actually focus on my specialty, behavior, instead of using up my energy every week just planning content. This is how things ought to be.

Second: I realized I never posted about the Teacher Educators for Children with Behavioral Disorders conference I attended. I’ve talked about it so many times now to people that I don’t think I can recap the whole thing again, but the basics of it is that I met some of the outstanding researchers in this field, and met a bunch of amazing people at ASU who I might end up doing some research with, and the President of the national CCBD.

Speaking of CCBD, we got a few more people to join us as organizers, from Flagstaff and Tucson, including some PhD students at UofA. Starting in January we’re going to do a monthly continuing education seminar that rotates between the three major cities in Arizona. I’ll be doing one of the first presentations in Phoenix. I can’t wait!

Lastly, I’m going to try implementing the Make Your Day! program with my class. I’ll report more on it next week once I’ve tried it. Basically, I think my students need something a little more than the WBT techniques. While I am keeping on the WBT techniques, I’ll be using them as moment to moment reinforcers, and, of course, teaching techniques, while the Make Your Day program provides the structure of the class.

Last year I attended a seminar I was sent to by my Director of Special Services run by this gentleman who runs a private day school for kids with Oppositional Defiance Disorder, BD, etc, who straight up said, “You cannot get these kids to be better without a token economy. Unless you run a token economy, you will never succeed.”

I hate doing token economies. I am not an accountant. I am not good at them. They’re great for some people, but not for me.

So I said, “Well, every other WBT idea has been great. I’ll give it a shot,” and I put up my wall. And I was scared to death. Is this going to work?

When they came in, I explained it. When you improve on something, you put up a star. “Well, what happens when we get stars?” When you get 10 stars, you get a new color? “Well, what do we get when we move up a color?” You move up a color, and you’ve improved ten times! “Oh…ok.”

They weren’t super excited about it. But they didn’t knock it either! They just weren’t sure what to think.

It started slow. I would put up a star, then they started asking me to put up stars, then I had them put up stars.

My all-day students bought in right away. The RTI students took a bit longer. It’s taken them about a month and a half to buy-in. But here’s the real story, here’s the zinger:

Today, Peter came in. I haven’t seen him in about two weeks because he’s been in in-school suspension for various reasons, or with the counselor. Today he comes in and says, “Mr. Sudia! I went a whole week without a TAP! (our school wide mark on their agenda for bad behavior of some sort, lost homework, dress code, behavior, etc) Can I put up five stars?!” “Yeah buddy!” I said, giving him a high-five.

He put up five stars, getting him to 10, and his first level gain, up to blue. He was so excited.

I don’t think there’s anything that shows the universality of our principles than a 14 year old gang-banger who is always drawing his gang’s tag on his school supplies and getting them taken away, who I know has had guns held to his head several times in life, who got suspended last week for shoving one of our more athletic male teachers, who has almost been in regular fights after school, get super excited and bright-faced about using a marker to draw a star on a colored piece of paper, so he can get to the next color.

This stuff works people, doesn’t matter who you’re working with.

To be highly-qualified for my position I need to pass the state teaching exam for 1-8 grade Elementary education, and the Cross-Categorical Special Education exam.

Fine.

Except the state requires middle school teachers to take a specific exam for Language Arts, Math, Social Studies and Science. I don’t have to take that, because I run a self-contained room. Except I’m teaching the same stuff.

I teach 8th grade Language Arts, Math, Science and Social Studies. To be completely honest, I only have content mastery in Math. I can do math. Did my student teaching in Math. Was going to be a math teacher before I chose Special Ed. Gooooood with math.

No. Freaking. Clue. what I’m doing in Language Arts.

I’m looking at these curriculum maps and just lost. First quarter the curriculum map was just plot and character development on the reading side, and narrative writing on the writing side. Those match up, I understand how they go together, it makes sense to me, and I still managed to botch it. We got half of everything done, and completed nothing. And then I found out I was teaching the wrong kind of narrative writing, because I was just having them write fiction instead of personal narratives like everyone else was.

And of course the teachers on my campus have been doing this so long they don’t really write lesson plans except as paperwork-requirement-fulfillers.

Breaks are not really breaks when I spend the whole time stressing over lesson planning.

Rant over.

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