You Oughta Know About...Behavior Interventions

Hi teacher friends! I'm really excited to be joining in on the You Oughta Know blog hop once again. You'll be glad you stopped by for this one!

I know you've had your own experiences with that one kid... the one who has so many issues that you don't know where to start, the one who disrupts your class every single day, the one that you've tried EVERYTHING with. Daily notes, calling parents, behavior contracts... nothing works. It's so frustrating!

If you understand just what I'm talking about, then you oughta know about PBIS World. This is a super awesome (and free) website for teachers that's like your own personal behavior specialist. 

When you arrive at the site, you are presented with a list of problems. To get started, just click on the one you really want to address first...

So here I've clicked on "Disrespectful" because well, I hate disrespectful and would like to nip that in the bud first. After you make your selection, the site gives you a list of behaviors that you may be observing. This is to make sure you've correctly identified the root problem. If the list looks accurate, go ahead and click YES at the bottom....

After you've selected the problem, the site gives you a list of tier 1 interventions to try for that particular behavior issue. Now you might be thinking, "Hey, I'm already doing all of this." Maybe, but really look closely and make sure you aren't missing something. For this one, I see that one intervention is to speak with the student in the hallway. I'm wondering why that's important, so I click on it...

This is where the site becomes really helpful. Now you can see the nitty gritty of that specific intervention... why you should do it, when you should do it, and exactly how you should do it so that it will actually work for the student...

This is so important. If you do the intervention the wrong way, you might as well not do anything at all. You have to implement it correctly and consistently and this page really helps you do that.

So after you look at the details, you can go back to the tier 1 page. At the bottom of the page, you have a few options. If you click on "See all tier 1 interventions", you'll just get a list of every intervention under the sun. I don't really suggest this one because you need specific interventions for the problem. However, you should most definitely check out the data tracking forms and strategies...

This page will give you all of the forms you could need from daily behavior notes to self-tracking sheets to parent questionnaires.  They are divided into tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 sections to help you find what you need depending on what stage of intervention you're working in.

PBIS World really is your one-stop shop for behavior interventions. The best part is that it helps you zero in on the issue and then provides all of the tools you need for documentation. Your guidance counselor or school psychologist will love you!

And here are a few resources you might like...

 

You Oughta Know About Winning The Pencil War

When I was a kid, I loved school supplies. I mean really LOVED them. Crisp white sheets of paper, bright markers, a brand new pink eraser, binders, notebooks, index cards. What could be better? It's secretly why I became a teacher. (You too? We should start a club!)

I still love school supplies. Well, most of them. I seem to have developed a love/hate relationship with the King of all school supplies. That's right... the Number 2 Pencil. My classroom is perpetually littered with them. It's not just yellow number 2s that I hate... blue ones, plain wood ones, and especially the ones with pictures all over them that peel off and clog up your pencil sharpener. I hate that my students regularly stick in a nub and sharpen it until it's jammed inside of the machine. Most of all, I hate that they spread their pencil love all over my classroom floor on a daily basis...

So what's a teacher to do? There's actually a solution. Something I used a few years ago when I had the worst class on Earth (the ones who purposefully stuffed things down the toilet to make it overflow on a daily basis). I don't know why I forgot about this. Maybe because I've had such lovely students since then. But the pencils are starting to make me crazy, so it might be time to pull out the big guns...

So what is this little miracle? A wonderful teacher named Mrs. Hazelton created a FREE resource called "Winning The Pencil War" to help us all stay on top of the pencil problem. Here's the gist...

• Give each kid their own pencil pouch with 8 sharpened pencils.
• They keep track of their pencils all week.
• Collect the pouches on Friday.
• Reward the ones who kept all 8 pencils in good condition.

There's a bit more to it than that, but not much. It's very simple to implement and she includes complete instructions and the little coupons you'll be using. If you're smart, you'll assign a student to collect the pouches on Friday and pass them out again Monday morning. I found that having two baskets made it even easier. Students who knew they didn't keep all 8 pencils put their pouches into one basket. The ones who thought they did a good job put theirs in the other basket. Checking them was a breeze! As an extra motivation, I occasionally left a little treat in the good bags.

Once I started using this system, my pencil woes were over. It really worked! Like I said, my classes since then have been quite lovely and I haven't had much of a pencil war going on. But with spring fever setting in and my room looking like the pictures above on a pretty regular basis, this might be the perfect time to pull out my pencil pouches once more.

(Here's a little tip: If pencil bags aren't in your budget right now, quart size freezer bags work quite well.)

So now that you know about this little sanity-saver, what about your pencil sharpener? Does it sound like a dentist's drill gone awry? Do your pencils come out looking like they were gnawed by a beaver? Then you will want to know about the The Quietest Classroom Sharpener. It's super fast and sharpens better than any electric sharpener I've ever seen. It even takes care of those cheap-o pencils from China with the lead that just falls out all the time. Take a look...

Looks pretty good, huh? You can buy one from Classroom Friendly Supplies or you can win your own super awesome sharpener right here:

Good luck! Now head on over to the blog hop to see what else "you oughta know about"!

An InLinkz Link-up

You Oughta Know About...Learn Zillion

For this month's "You Oughta Know" blog hop, I want to share one of my favorite websites for teachers. It's called Learn Zillion. If you saw September's hop, you might be thinking, "Hey, didn't you already recommend your favorite teacher site?" Well yes... EngageNY is my favorite for detailed, standards-based lesson plans. But Learn Zillion is where you can go for interactive, student-oriented lesson support.

• Lessons - Learn Zillion provides a lesson for every math and ELA standard. They are not the in-depth, scripted type you will find on EngageNY. These lessons use visuals that you can project for the students to see. Each one begins with a short opening question called a "Launch" to get students thinking. You can solve this together whole-group or model it. I like to show the launch, have partners talk about strategies they could use to solve it, and then model it myself. Here is an example of a math Launch question for third grade:

The Launch problem is then followed a "Task" and "Task Debrief" which gives students the opportunity to apply the skill that you're working on and see the steps for solving. 

One of my favorite parts of the Learn Zillion presentations are the "Common Misunderstanding" slides. They show students why a certain strategy or idea won't work:

The rest of the presentation shows the Big Ideas students will take away from the lesson, a formative assessment (great for exit tickets!), and then problem sets that can be printed out. At the very end is a video that goes with the lesson, which leads to the BEST part of the website...

• Videos - This is the part of Learn Zillion that you absolutely MUST try! There are so many possible uses for the videos. First, you can use them for direct instruction. The videos are well-paced, clear and easy to understand, and they really break the steps down into manageable pieces. You could also use them for doing flipped classroom by having students view them prior to your own lesson. If you have above or below-level students, you can use the videos for other grade levels to meet their instructional needs. 

There are also teacher-created video "Lesson Sets". These are short series of videos around a particular topic. For example, this week I used the 3rd Grade Opinion Writing video set during my guided reading groups. In one group, I have a student who had gotten far ahead of the others. She needed something to work on while I caught the rest of them up. So, I pulled out the iPad and selected the video from this series called "Make a Brave Statement" to help her develop stronger openings for her writing. We had just read an article in Time For Kids called "Should Soda Be Taxed?" After watching the video, the student used what she learned to write an opening paragraph for her opinion on the TFK article. It allowed her to independently extend her learning and practice an important skill with very little involvement from me.

Next week, my reading groups will all be watching video lessons during their computer time. I set up a "class" so each student has a username and password and assigned specific videos for them to view before we meet at reading table. I can't wait to see how it jump starts their learning!

So that's a little overview of Learn Zillion. Go check it out!