5 Memes to Help Teachers Support Improved Student Behaviour at School
There has been a lot of recent commentary about student behaviour in schools and what teachers should do about it. We thought it might be useful to share a series of five “memes” over the coming days that may enhance a teacher’s ability to understand and implement evidence-based behaviour support practices in their classroom. Each meme is based on a significant body of research evidence and may be used to add depth or breadth to practices that you are familiar with already (such as explicit instruction and opportunities to respond).
1. It’s all behaviour
The first meme is designed to illustrate that high-impact academic instructional practices can be applied to support improved student behaviour in classrooms, with great effect.
Tom Bennett describes behaviour as a curriculum that needs to be taught. We agree! Behavioural skills are those skills that help students participate and succeed at school, including communication, listening, engaging in classroom routines, emotional regulation, conflict resolution, and self-management.
However, we would go further and add that a teacher’s work is always about behaviour change. When we teach reading and writing, we are supporting behaviour change for our students. However, we are focusing on teaching academic skills - reading and writing behaviour! From a behaviour science perspective, we consider anything that anyone does, says, thinks, feels, writes - and more - as behaviour. We want teachers to know that the instructional practices that have been shown to help students learn new academic skills can be used to teach behaviour and social skills. Consider the following high impact behaviour support instructional practices and their similarities to high impact academic instructional practices:
Deliver high rates of opportunities to respond to simultaneously increase active participation and engagement AND reduce disruptive behaviour
Deliver high rates of behaviour specific praise as positive feedback for desired behavioural and social skills (e.g., 1 BSP statement every 4-min)
Prompt and pre-correct to increase the likelihood that a student will engage in positive classroom behaviour
Provide error corrections (not reprimands alone!) when students display disruptive or challenging behaviour (e.g., describe or model what the student should be doing, provide another opportunity for them engage in the correct behaviour, and provide behaviour specific feedback – just as you would when teaching handwriting!)
Use task analysis (think chunking) to assess, and then teach, each of the component skills required in a behaviour chain (behavioural skills can be taught using forward or backward chaining). This can be useful for teaching classroom routines, emotional regulation, and self-management.
When teaching behaviour and social skills, we still need to explicitly teach, model, prompt, pre-correct, provide opportunities to practice, differentiate support, and deliver corrective or positive feedback. We just focus on classroom expectations, routines, and engagement norms instead of academic skills. The Science of Learning, Science of Reading, and Science of Behaviour share a deep research history, as well as many practical and theoretical links. We encourage you to apply your SoL and SoR knowledge to behaviour.
Our roadmap:
1. First, identify the positive behaviours you want your students to engage in.
2. Break the behaviour chain down using task analysis.
3. Teach (or re-teach) each step using modelling and explicit teaching practices.
4. Use prompting and pre-corrections to increase the likelihood of success.
5. Provide lots of opportunities for practice and feedback (positive reinforcement and error correction) until fluency is achieved.
Get instructional about behaviour, your toolkit will serve you and your students well.
There are some excellent apps like the Be+ app from the PBIS Technical Assistance Center in the United States that can be used to set up self-prompts to help remind teachers to use evidence-based behaviour support practices while teaching or measure their rate or frequency during observations.
Download the Be+ app:
Russ Fox is a teacher, researcher, and Lecturer in behaviour science in the Faculty of Education at Monash.
Karina Stocker is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Education at Monash University and Instructional Coach at Docklands Primary School.
Erin Leif is a Senior Fellow - Higher Education Academy.