With kids going back to school, many parents are concerned about how their child will do managing their behavior for eight hours a day. School can be overwhelming for kids who may already struggle with managing their attention and behavior. When a child is transitioning to a new grade and new teacher, many parents may keep a watchful eye on their phone in case they receive a phone call from the school regarding their child’s behavior. If a child has difficulty staying on task, keeping their body to themselves, or controlling their words and behavior, a daily behavior report card may be a helpful option to discuss with the child’s teacher.
A daily behavior report card can be as simple as a chart on the child’s desk (or index card for older kids who hope to draw less attention to themselves) where their teacher provides ratings based on their behavior. For middle school and upper elementary students, the chart might be broken down into a unit for each of the classes the student attends in a day. For younger elementary or preschool students, it should be broken up into more units (for example, every 10 or 20 minutes). At the end of each unit of time, the teacher will rate the student based on how well they did in meeting their behavioral goals. For example, goals can be “follow directions” and “keep body to self.” An older child might get scored on a 1-10 scale, while a younger child may earn a smiley face or a frowny face or a green light or a red light.
Students will have a goal score to earn after each unit (say, 7 or higher out of 10 for older children and a green light for younger children). If they earn their goal score, then they would get an instant experience-based reward. Examples of experience-based rewards could be a special handshake with their teacher, playing one round of the “Would You Rather…” game, a rock-paper-scissors contest, etc. The goal is that giving the student feedback on their behavior (through the rating and any verbal feedback the teacher gives) and providing the experience-based reward (a brief but fun interaction that lasts 30 seconds or less) would be feasible for the teacher to weave into their busy day. If the child does not meet their behavioral goal for that unit, they do not earn the reward. The teacher may say, “You chose to keep playing with your toy instead of getting your folder out, so you earned a red light for this unit. I’ll be watching the next unit to see if you do a better job of following directions so you can earn a green light. I know you can do it."
Some advantages of the daily behavior report card intervention are that it makes classroom expectations clear and gives kids frequent and explicit feedback on how they did and what they need to do to improve next time. While many teachers will often promise a reward for good behavior at the end of the school day, this possibility of a reward is often too far into the distance for many kids to care. Instead, by offering a more immediate reward after each unit that a child’s behavioral goal is met, their motivation level can stay high to control their attention and behavior.
Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the daily behavior report card intervention improves parent-teacher communication. At the end of each day, the report card goes home with the student in their backpack or folder for parents to review. This gives them an accounting of how the child did that day at school and often includes room for teachers' written comments as well. Parents can then opt to offer the child access to a larger reward (screen time, special privileges) based on whether a daily goal was met at school when looking across all the time units (for example, 15 green lights earn a daily reward at home).
To get started, parents can typically request a teacher conference to discuss whether this type of program would be a good fit for the student, teacher, and classroom. It is possible that the teacher may already have something similar in place that could be tweaked and individualized for the student while ensuring that the behavioral ratings/check-ins and rewards are occurring frequently enough. Teachers are busy during the school day and parents may be hesitant to ask them to add a specialized program for their child. However, it is important to remember that the classroom instruction time a teacher loses by having to manage difficult behaviors could be saved by using a daily behavior report card intervention that may be able to prevent difficult behaviors from occurring in the first place.
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July 24, 2023 at 03:29AM
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Improving Child Behavior in Schools Using Daily Report Cards - Psychology Today
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