Student Behaviour

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fine dude
Posts: 651
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2012 7:12 pm
Location: SE Asia

Student Behaviour

Post by fine dude »

As educators, we all understand the critical importance of good behavior for effective learning. What measures has your school's leadership undertaken to reinforce positive behavior and compliance with rules? Please do not name any specific schools.
popgirl
Posts: 29
Joined: Fri Jan 21, 2022 1:02 pm

Re: Student Behaviour

Post by popgirl »

fine dude wrote:
> As educators, we all understand the critical importance of good behavior for effective learning. What measures has your school's leadership
> undertaken to reinforce positive behavior and compliance with rules? Please do not name any specific schools.

There are lots of things that can feed into this. Some are:

a) Parent power. If the parents are too powerful, admin are sometimes too frightened (justifiably) to do what's needed.
b) Effectiveness / visibility of admin. Is there a genuine vision / philosophy guiding the school ? Are they the kind that spend most of their time on 'important' Zoom meetings in their office, or do you see them out and about ? Do they leave their offices ? How transparent and available are they ?
c) Education vs PR - which is the priority ? International schools need to sell themselves, but is it all about the gloss ? Do they genuinely care / know about what is going on in the classrooms ? Do they judge teachers / grade level teams / departments just by the showy stuff they do ?
d) Does the school care about its students and faculty ? I've found that schools that genuinely care about their students usually have better student / teacher relationships and thus behavior.

The students know instinctively the answers to the above, and will often react accordingly.
secondplace
Posts: 191
Joined: Thu Apr 14, 2016 12:40 pm

Re: Student Behaviour

Post by secondplace »

We are an ELC to G12 through school. We have school wide expectations of students that are shared with them, and their parents. These are based our 3 overarching agreements on respect, and also implicitly the IB Learner Profile (as we are an IB school).

These are supported by our Behaviour Policy which has a matrix of levels to support teachers and leaders with implementation, and for students and parents to understand.

Everyone is responsible for holding students accountable and for modelling the behaviours and actions we wish to see. E.g. picking up rubbish, being courteous and polite etc.

We have shared supervision duties - so a Secondary teacher may be on duty in the Primary playground - and we expect everyone to be vigilant and proactive.

It's always a work in progress and our leadership team has to be visible in implementing and supporting our teachers in holding students to these expectations.
buffalofan
Posts: 350
Joined: Wed Jan 06, 2010 11:08 pm

Re: Student Behaviour

Post by buffalofan »

Current school has written behavior guidelines which are explicitly taught.

Previous school had no written guidelines and kowtowed to parents in all cases. Not surprisingly, this school had students involved in fistfights, sexual harassment, drug use (at school), online threats, you name it. It was so bad at one point that faculty parents were hesitant to send their children to the HS. And this was a "tier 1" school...
PsyGuy
Posts: 10789
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2011 9:51 am
Location: Northern Europe

Response

Post by PsyGuy »

This seems like the forum doing your assignment for you.

As to actual strategies:
1) Token Economies: Yes this has actually been mandated in the staff handbook as a requirement for every IT. Most of them are reward systems, some of them are punishment systems.
2) Journaling: Doubles as an assessment for ITs who have rigid asst. requirements.
3) "Open Bag" activity. Essentially this means every class is a cross curricular class. So instead of idle time, which is when a student is most likely to lose focus, the student always has work from other classes to do.
4) Whole School Reading Programs: These create external incentives for students to read, which they can take advantage of during idle time.
5) Self Pacing: This is an aspect of the curriculum tasking that is self paced for students such as reading, journaling, projects, etc. My preference is learning centers.
6) House Systems: This is based on the model of peer enforced behavior. If a class or group as a whole earns demerits for a member of their groups misconduct they are more likely to enforce compliance socially.
7) Referral to the SC for possible MH issues: There are way too many students who can attribute misbehavior to an undiagnosed, or more often undisclosed MH issue.
8) Contacting Parents: This is usually the nuclear option for an IT in IE. This depends a lot on the culture but in parts of Asia, etc. this can be extremely effective. It can also backfire with disastrous consequences.
9) Activity Rosters: This is essentially a daily (primary) or weekly (secondary) chart or flow of activities and tasks the student has to complete, and is posted online for parents and other students to observe. It capitalizes on the power of peer pressure and shame. Nobody wants to be the student that got a failure. Nobody wants to be behind. This motivates students to spend idle time productively as well as giving parents an indirect nudge on their childs performance.
10) Leader Referral: This I have found in IE to be much less effective than it is in DE. Leaders have few tools, and are very hesitant to apply them. Most of them are nuclear options. Detention rarely exists in IE. Corporal punishment is often prohibited. Expulsion is really last resort, and suspension is more likely to result in student withdrawal. Ive yet to find an IS that has ISS. An office referral typically equates to a time out for the student, with parent conference the most often used with repeated referrals.
11) Fines: I did know one leader who had an effective "fine" system which was debited against the parents and was included as a fee as part of their invoice. It was very effective in getting parents to correct misbehavior, but thats because the IS predominately served families of modest affluence as opposed to highly affluent parents.
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