Pick a Goal

If you’ve ever tried to change your behavior, you know it’s not easy. This is especially the case if you have several behaviors on which to work.  The same is true for your students.  Now that school has been in session awhile, it is a good time to work with your students on setting behavioral goals.

Consider meeting individually with students and having each of them target one goal on which to focus.  For example, some might work on “getting attention appropriately,” while others focus on “keeping hands, feet and objects to self.” Even students with the strongest of skills can find room for improvement in some area.

With younger students, write notes to parents about the behavioral goals on which their children are working. Older students can write letters themselves. As an academic bonus, have students provide weekly journal entries about progress towards their goals, periodically writing updated letters to their parents.

When report card time rolls around, have short individual conferences with your students, and together determine their behavioral “grades.”  This is a great example of a strategy I often recommend to parents: When it comes to behavior shaping, do more things WITH your kids, rather than TO them.  Teachers, I recommend you heed this same advice.