A condensed version of this interview appeared in the May 2004 issue of Stratenotes.
Return to Article ArchiveRandy Sprick is the well-known author of several behavior management programs that collectively are referred to as the Safe and Civil Schools Series. In the past year, Randy and members of CRL's Institute for Effective Instruction have been exploring the relationship between effective instruction and behavior management.
One component of Randy's Safe and Civil Schools program, CHAMPs, also has been introduced into several schools in Topeka, Kan., that are partners in CRL's Pathways to Success project.
CHAMPs helps teachers manage behavior, increase on-task behavior, and reduce misbehavior by teaching students exactly what is expected and by providing positive feedback.
In the following conversation with CRL's Jim Knight, Randy highlights some of the key features of the Safe and Civil Schools Series.
A first-year high school teacher apologetically called Randy at home one night in November. Her principal had suggested she call after she told him she thought she could make it until Christmas, but she couldn't even think about coming back after Christmas. Four of her five classes--four sections of very low tracked math--were out of control. They set up a time for Randy to observe.
The classes were basically out of control, regardless of the activity structure that was going on at the time. During teacher-directed instruction, students would carry on conversations right in front of her. Independent work and cooperative group structures were even worse, with off-task rates of 80 to 100 percent.
Randy and the teacher began a process of clarifying her expectations for student behavior for each activity structure. The process brought to light that she did not have a clear vision of what she wanted from her students. She had inadvertently created unpredictable, amorphous, and unclear expectations for her students based on her reactions in a variety of circumstances: "I don't want you talking to each other. If you have a question, I want you to raise your hands, unless I'm at my desk, in which case I want you to come up, unless I'm feeling claustrophobic, in which case I want you to talk to each other." These are not things she directly said to the students, but, rather, this is what she communicated when she interacted with students. Her expectations seemed to shift depending on her whim at the moment.
Randy: I hope this doesn't sound disrespectful, because this teacher had the guts to ask for help, and she's still in her classroom. I use that as a vehicle to introduce the whole notion that each teacher, activity structure by activity structure, needs to clarify exactly what is appropriate behavior and what is inappropriate behavior. It's important to clarify those issues because most teachers do have, if not explicit expectations, they do have expectations that they may have never made explicit to the students.
An example I give is just something as seemingly simple and inane as the pencil sharpener. In any given wing of the building, there are probably some teachers whose attitude toward the pencil sharpener is, "You never use it during class time, regardless of activity structure." For other teachers, it's "sharpen your pencil whenever you want, just use good judgment and don't disturb anybody." Whereas for other teachers, it'll be "sharpen your pencil any time during independent work, sharpen your pencil whenever you need to during a test, sharpen your pencil any time in any kid of lab activities, but don't sharpen your pencil during any kind of teacher-directed instruction, student speaking to the group, discussion period, or cooperative groups, because your attention is needed on the activity itself and not your pencil."
The idea is that kids shouldn't have to look in a teacher's eyes and try to guess. For every activity structure, we need to clarify, "Is it OK to talk to each other? If so, about what, to whom, how long, how many can be involved, how loud? Can you move your seat to go talk to somebody else? How can you get attention from the teacher when you need it, and how can you get any questions answered that you need answered? Can you move about for any reason? If so, do you need permission or not? And what does active participation look like and sound like?"
An example on the participation end of things that I see many teachers neglect to clarify relates to the SLANT acronym. Many teachers neglect to even tell kids, "I expect you to sit up during instruction," and yet it upsets them because all the kids are slouched down in their chairs with their baseball caps turned backwards on their heads. Often times, the misbehaviors we get are in fact truly an issue of ignorance on the part of the kids--the kids not knowing what the teacher wants because the teacher has not made it explicit.
Jim: What are some of the foundational beliefs that you think are important for you to create a safe classroom and a good learning community.
Randy: The first beliefs are sort of broad procedural variables for CHAMPS.
Number one: The teacher needs to structure and organize the classroom to maximize student success. That's thinking about physical arrangements of the room, routines, policies, procedures, a schedule, handing things in, handing things out. The more parts of the classroom that we can design as regular predictable routines and well-structured settings, the fewer problems that we're going to have.
An example of that would be, don't take attendance by calling roll because kids are disengaged during that time. It's a deathly dull way to start a class. If you're going to take roll, do it with a seating chart while kids are engaged in some kind of preliminary warm-up task, either individually or in cooperative groups.
Number two: Directly teach your expectations for each activity, each major activity structure, and each major transition in the school or in the classroom. Part of that means teaching kids the operational procedures to fit the structure that you've developed. A subset of that is really a coaching metaphor, a sports coaching metaphor. Coaches know and understand you don't just tell kids a play or a pattern or you don't just show them a play or a pattern. You directly teach and practice. You're going to have to reteach it across days, and you're actually going to have to practice it across days. Even if the kids can tell you what the expectation is, it doesn't mean that they are going to apply it. The lack of the application isn't necessarily even a willful problem. If it's not in front of them with reminders and rehearsals and practice, they'll forget and they'll fall back into old patterns.
Number three: Provide frequent positive feedback to kids. That positive feedback would fit all of the same kinds of things that are in the SIM model: needs to be specific and descriptive, needs to be contingent based upon what students have done, not embarrassing kids, and so on. There needs to be a wealth of age-appropriate positive feedback on both instructional issues and behavioral issues. A minor subset of that is the fewer behavior problems there are, the more the preponderance of feedback should be on academic issues; the more behavior problems, the more I'm going to have to skew a fair amount of my positive feedback to being on meeting behavioral expectations.
Number four: Correct misbehavior calmly, consistently, and immediately. If you know what your expectations are, as soon as you see kids veering away from those expectations, you want to correct that misbehavior as immediately as you can. But you do so in a very calm way, and you do it every time the misbehavior occurs so that the pattern of misbehavior is interrupted in the early stages and is corrected with repetition across time so the kids can learn you never get away with this behavior, and you can never get this teacher upset or angry. Thus, calm corrections take away the thing that reinforces misbehavior in some students--the power that comes from making an adult angry.
Number five: The importance of being aware of ratios of interactions--that the sum total of my positive interactions compared to my corrective interactions needs to be at least a three-to-one ratio with every student. This demonstrates to students that you do not have to misbehave to get adult attention, and this adult is actively interested in me as person and noticing my successes. One other variable to bring into play there is a fair number of the positives can be non-contingent attention: Just saying good morning to a kid when she's walking in the door, seeing the kid walking down the hallway later in the afternoon and saying, "Good afternoon, Adam, how are you today?" Those add to your ratio on the positive side.
Those are the main procedures, but some other themes run through everything we do. One would be everybody needs to be treated with dignity and respect. Another would be continually remembering that we're the adult in the situation, so that if the kid is not treating me with dignity and respect, it is my job to do whatever I can across time to try to teach him to treat me with dignity and respect rather than what is easy to do if we aren't careful: Fall into "if he's not going to treat me respectfully, I'm not going to treat him respectfully."
Another theme that I think runs through everything we do is that the teacher does have the potential to make a huge difference in the lives of kids. Something that I'm emphasizing more is that with any kid and with any group of kids, the only real failure would be to ever give up and to assume, "I'll never be able to change this kid's behavior." Even if I've not successfully changed a kid's behavior, up until the very last day of school, it is vital that this kid perceives that I still have high expectations for her, that I've continually looked for different things that might help her to meet my expectations, and that I've tried to find ways to get her to strive to be successful. If I've been able to do that, even until the very last day of school, the very least I've accomplished is having communicated to that kid, "I'm worth bothering with. This is one adult who's never given up on me." And when you look at the resiliency literature, I think that literature is clear that people who had disastrous life circumstances as children and that make it as successful adults, one of the things they point to is adults, either in the school setting or the home setting, who had high expectations and never gave up on them.
Another theme is that when correcting rule violations, the teacher really needs to have developed a plan that allows him or her to be on automatic pilot. When a rule violation occurs--I'm in the midst of instruction, whether that be teacher-directed instruction or during cooperative groups or monitoring independent seat work, it doesn't matter--I should be able literally to use relatively few brain cells and immediately go, "That's disruptive, Jim, the consequence for that action is so and so," so that I can get my mental and physical energy back onto a roll and momentum of instruction. That 30 seconds of pause or verbal contortions that I go through while I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do takes me and the other students away from any kind of momentum of instruction. I think what that leads to is the teacher resenting misbehavior to a much greater degree than the misbehavior really warranted and that what the teacher is really resenting is the sort of mental being jerked around by kids. With good planning, you can prevent that from happening. I characterize it in training as it should have the feel of a parenthetical statement within the text, whether it's a quick reprimand or whether it's "Jim, that's disruptive, you owe me fifteen seconds after class."
Teachers also need to have a mental repertoire of things they can pull out for unpredictable events. Misbehavior occurs and I'm not sure what to do, I need a mental plan of things that I can pull out, from verbal reprimands to humor to proximity management, scheduling a discussion for later. Then, when I don't know what else to do, I can do one of those. My suggestion is that whenever a teacher truly doesn't know what to do, try a gentle verbal reprimand or a gentle verbal correction. Err on the side of giving the kid information about what he should be doing right at that moment. What that does is that buys me time to find out is this a one-time anomaly or is this something that could become chronic. If I realize I've been reprimanding this behavior for a week now, this is now a chronic problem, because the simple solution didn't work. So once you have a chronic problem that is not covered in the rule violations, at that point you go into thinking about the function of the misbehavior, what need is this meeting on the part of this kid? Maybe it's not so much meeting a need. Maybe it is a problem of ability or awareness: The student really doesn't know how to exhibit appropriate behavior. Another common reason that a chronic misbehavior may occur can be attention seeking. Another may be some level of power or control. Another may be competing reinforcers: The kid would just rather be doing what he's doing than what you're having him do. You then try to build a plan to reduce the probability that the kid is getting that need met when he misbehaves, and you try to increase the probability that he will get that need met when he is not engaged in misbehavior. That moves us into the realm of individualized planning.
Jim: When you're watching the teacher who's using CHAMPS to set expectations, what kind of things are you watching for, in addition to the three-to-one ratio of positive interactions?
Randy: One of the things that I'll look for are rates of on-task student behavior. We've got a little tool called "instantaneous time sampling" that basically allows an observer, let's say during an independent seat-work period, to observe each kid for about a second and make a quick mark: "Was that student on task or off task?" I'll go around the room three times, looking at each student individually and marking whether that student was on or off task at that instant. Then I'll just take the total number of marks and divide that into the total number of on-task marks, which gives a very rough, general picture of a percentage of on-task behavior. If the rate of on-task behavior is 90 percent or above, I reinforce the heck out of that teacher. If it's an 80 to 90 percent, I say, "This is in the ball park, and you might want to improve it a little bit, but it's not a huge problem." If my view is anything less than 80 percent, we have to be questioning, "Are we giving kids too much time? Are they not capable of doing the task, or have we not taught our expectations with enough clarity?" At these rates of on-task behavior, the teacher needs to do something to increase these levels. The last thing we want is kids not utilizing the time that we give them. Cooperative groups are one of the hardest activity structures to measure rates of on-task behavior because you can't tell whether cooperative groups are working on task or not unless you go over and listen to their conversation. The very act of coming over, of course, increases the probability that they'll engage.
One tip that I would really give to coaches and to administrators who are observing in a classroom looking at behavior management: You always want to look at least as much, if not more, at student behavior as you are looking at teacher behavior. There are some teachers where my first glance at the teacher is this teacher is making all kinds of errors in this stuff. But you look at kid behavior, and kid behavior is actively engaged, respectful, bringing tasks to completion, and so on. And my view there is this teacher is probably doing some things pretty well.
Jim: Is there anything else you want to say about coaches?
Randy: Just that the whole concept of coaching, I am so absolutely behind. One of the problems with CHAMPS or any other good initiative is that even though it's very practical, even though it's relatively simple to do, what's hard is teachers have to make so many decisions, and they're under so much pressure that without the opportunity of modeling, of ongoing discussion, what happens is they get so busy that they fall back into all of the patterns that are easy for them, which doesn't involve the new learning. Even if we distribute training across time, without some level of coaching, they end up practicing the old ways so much more than any practice they're getting on the new way that they never really get to a level of automaticity of new skills. I think the whole notion of coaching is absolutely critical to really helping a teacher develop the CHAMPS approach. The key approach is structure for success, teach exactly what you want, lots of positive feedback, lots of calm consistent corrective feedback. To get that to be a way that people operate requires lots of reminders, lots of support, lots of encouragement.
Jim: Briefly summarize the other parts of Safe and Civil Schools.
Randy: If you think of sort of three levels of things, CHAMPS is the middle level, because that's the classroom piece. It's a piece that says the things that we do for all kids in the classroom are going to be good for all kids. Above that is what we call the school-wide piece. That, in terms of our published materials, is the Foundations program plus its secondary level, Start on Time. We're never going to micromanage teachers' classrooms. CHAMPS is all about teachers' need, within what the research literature has taught us, to make decisions about the needs of their own kids and their own structure.
Where we need to be consistent across adults in the school moves us into school-wide. When multiple adults are involved in a setting--hallways, cafeterias, restrooms--we need to all be on the same page so we're giving kids consistent messages. Things like disciplinary referral, assembly, substitute teachers, et cetera, all cut across multiple adults. Those are things that need school-wide expectations, school-wide teaching of those expectations, and school-wide enforcement. Foundations basically looks at, "how do we institutionalize a process of data-driven decision making to do that?"
Then some other resources that we've got move us down to a level of setting up plans for individual kids, where the things that we're doing on a school-wide basis and the things that we're doing in our own classroom for all kids still haven't met the needs of certain individuals. I need to now individualize my consequences, and I need to individualize some of my reward structures, even individualize my instruction of expectation to meet the needs of this particular student. A resource we have there is called Interventions: Collaborative Planning for High Risk Students. It's a resource that is especially appropriate for special education teachers, school counselors, school psychologists, coaches, et cetera.
Actually, that was one of the earlier resources I wrote, but we found people were doing so many individualized plans, it was overwhelming the system, so I started moving more to the classroom and school-wide.
Another resource that is predominately individual, but cuts across to CHAMPS a little bit, is Teacher's Encyclopedia of Behavior Management: 100 Problems/500 Plans. That is a reference resource. If you've got a problem with homework, you can look up homework completion (one of those 100 problems), and there will be three to five and in some cases up to seven plans for how you might attack that, depending on the nature of the problem and the function of the misbehavior. Some of those are whole class plans; most of them are individual student plans. It really is a cookbook, and cookbooks are useful when you don't have time or expertise to make up something on your own.
We've got little mini-programs on bus discipline, playground discipline, and cafeteria discipline, and those each have two components. One is a component for a leadership team or a planning group: How do you structure that environment, how do you design lessons to teach kids to function in that environment, and how do you supervise that environment? Another set of materials is specifically for training the supervisors or in the bus discipline program, specifically training the bus drivers.
Jim: You talked about how good instruction and classroom management go together. Say a bit about that.
Randy: One of the things that we always try to frame in our training is what we do is the behavioral side of the equation, but that is only part of the equation. The other part is good instruction. If I'm doing everything right in behavior management, but I'm giving kids assignments to take 20 minutes to read something and answer study questions, and half the class can't decode that, then I'm going to have problems. Or if I'm trying to lecture and expecting kids to take notes, but kids don't have any idea how to take notes, I'm going to have problems with that. If I'm trying to present complex information, but I'm presenting it in complex ways without using something like Unit Organizers to help kids understand where this fits in a broader perspective of things, then I'm going to appear to have behavioral problems or motivational problems. Those are not errors or weaknesses in my behavior management, or potentially they're not. They are weaknesses in instruction, but it manifests itself in student misbehavior because students are not meaningfully engaged.
We're always asking teachers while they're working on behavior management expertise to be thinking actively about what they can do in terms of effective instruction to get kids behaving appropriately. SIM is a powerful example of intervention on the academic side, and I'm honored to be associated with it.
Success starts breeding success, and that enforces not just the application of whatever academic strategies they've been taught, but it also reinforces the heck out of whatever behaviors they were exhibiting that led to that success. It really becomes very cyclical--success breeds success, both behaviorally and academically.
I think that good instruction and good behavior management are lifelong learning tasks. No matter how much one knows, there is always more to learn. Teaching is far too complex a mix of both art and science to ever feel like I've mastered it. And the point at which anybody feels like "I've mastered it," that's the point that worries me. I've had the incredible luxury for 25 years now of focusing 100 percent of my professional life on behavioral management. I have time to read the research that teachers don't have time to read and to observe and to train and so on. Yet I'm not the least bit bored with that topic, because I'm still learning more about it. I would just actively encourage that as we train teachers, as we do coaching, et cetera, we really make sure people know and understand that this is just part of an ongoing cycle of improvement.
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