LevelsLevels
Levels
The Scoreboard addresses behavior issues in your class as a whole. Practice Cards target individual student behavior. In brief, label each pocket of a card pocket chart with a student’s name or number. When a student breaks one of the five classroom rules, place a white card with that rule number in his/her card pocket. Students rehearse for two minutes the gesture for the rule they’ve broken at recess. At the end of the day, a note goes home asking parents to help students with additional rule practice. With the exception of students from unreliable families, the white card stays in the card pocket until the note comes back from home.
Along with the Bull’s Eye Game, the Agreement Bridge is designed to help our most troubled students, those who are immune to penalty and punishment.
Based on Ross W. Greene’s successful book “Lost At School,” the Agreement Bridge unites challenging kids with their teachers in collaborative problem solving. The problems addressed can include, but are not limited to: conflicts with other students or the instructor, gang activity, lagging social skills, anger management, patterns of weak academic performance, poor attendance, disruptive classroom behavior. If you have a kid who cusses you out, or who brings drugs to school or who merely never does homework, the Agreement Bridge provides a flexible, entertaining environment for discovering solutions that satisfy not only the teacher, but also the rebel student.
Weeks, maybe even months, after you’ve added the Guff Counter to your Scoreboard, you may be ready to address the problem of rebellious cliques of students. These are the kids, usually friends, who support each other’s disruptive behavior.
One bright morning, draw a line under the Guff Counter on your Scoreboard and write “Independents.” Say, “As some of you may have noticed, a few students have been causing us to have the majority of the negative points in our system. I’m now giving them their own section of the Scoreboard. We’ll call these students ‘Independents’ because they have been independent of the goals of the rest of the class. I’ll tell them at recess who they are.”
Sixteen Variations on the Scoreboard
The Scoreboard, described in the “First Steps” menu, is your initial and primary motivator. For K-4th graders, use Smilies and Frownies as your categories; for older students we’ve found Teacher vs. Students works wonderfully well.
Because you'll be using the Scoreboard all year, here are a variety of Scoreboard strategies ... but don't employ them too often! It's a long time until spring.
A major problem for any learning system is keeping techniques from going stale. What worked wonderfully in September can put your students to sleep in December.
To address this substantial difficulty, the WBT classroom management system is set up in levels like a video game. Every few weeks (or, if possible, months) you move your class up a level.
When you begin the Scoreboard, write “Level 1” on the board. Before long, your students will be asking, “What’s Level 2?” What has happened? You’ve created a classroom management system with built in suspense!
The Bull’s Eye game is one of Whole Brain Teaching's most potent resources for dealing with your most challenging students. The game is designed expressly for students who are immune to punishment. The core idea of the Bull’s Eye game is quite simple. In a brief one on one session, student and teacher, without letting the other see, grade the student’s behavior in class that day on a 1 to 5 scale (with 5 being best). If the student’s grade matches the teacher’s, then the student scores two points. If the student’s grade misses the teacher’s by a point, then the student scores one point. Points are accumulated over time for a small, agreed upon reward ... anything from stickers to a soda.
Some students will not respond right away to the Scoreboard Game. They want to get into a power struggle with the teacher. They want to have the last word.
As a teacher you are between a rock and a hard place. You cannot let the rebel student win the struggle and allow the rest of the class to believe you will back down. You also cannot afford the battle of wills with the student. If you win, the student will be angry and hurt. If you lose your cool, it won’t matter whether you win or not, you will lose the respect of your class.