Academic Time-outs

Do you use time-outs in your classroom?  Survey's have found that up to 86% of teachers do.  And with good reason!  According to Turner and Watson, time-outs can be a powerful behavior management tool when used correctly.
But... Have you ever actually studied or been taught the best way to use time-outs?  I would guess that most of us haven't even considered the best way to do it.  I mean, we have all seen them used in homes and classrooms, right?  You tell a kid to go sit in a time-out spot, and when their time is up, they can come out.  How hard can it be?
Here are a few things to think about next time you are ready to use a time-out with a student:

• Where are they sitting?  Are they away from the class, but still able to follow the lesson?  You don't want students to be able to use a time-out as a way to get out of learning.  They should also be able to watch other students modeling appropriate behavior, and witness the reinforcements that those students are receiving.
• How long are they in the time out?  Anything past five minutes is overkill.  That is pushing it beyond the teachable moment, and creating a punishment instead of a consequence.  In fact, Knoff recommends two to three minutes, regardless of the student's age.
• What do the student have to do to get out of time out?  If the answer is "nothing, their time is just up," it isn't the most effective intervention.  Students need to be held accountable for their behavior.  They should have to demonstrate the appropriate behavior that they were not showing before, while they are in the time out, and again immediately after they return to their original spot.
• Have you explicitly taught students how to use the time out?  Do they know the words you will use to send them there and release them from it?  Do they know the expectations for how they move themselves there, and how they sit in the time-out?  This is an important step, don't skip it when you are going over classroom routines at the beginning of the year!

Knoff, H. M. (2005). A review and description of Project ACHIEVE’s educative time-out process. Little Rock, AR: Project ACHIEVE Incorporated.

Turner, H. S., & Watson, T. S. (1999). Consultant's guide for the use of time-out in the preschool and elementary classroom. Psychology In The Schools, 36(2), 135-148.

Intervention Plans

Have you ever hastily thrown together an intervention for a student without thinking through the whole process of what it would look like?  How did that intervention work out for you?  I've done this a few times, and had a few different outcomes.  I'll admit it actually worked a few times, but I ran into some problems other times.  One time I was using a time and energy intensive intervention, and it was really working.  The problem was, I didn't really have a plan for when it would stop.  I ended up keeping up with the intervention for the rest of the year, when it probably would have been more beneficial for me and the student to phase it out.  Another time I began a behavior chart, explaining to the student how he would earn his incentives of breaks and iPad time, but never really thought out how, where, or with whom he would take the breaks, resulting in me scrambling to figure out how to give him the rewards once he had already earned them.
It is tempting to want to get started on interventions that you know are desperately needed as soon as you think of them.  However, it is important to really think them through, and create a written Behavioral Intervention Plan.  What does that look like?  Howard Knoff recommends that you include these things in your written plan: specific goals, a description of the interventions, including their methods, timelines and the resources needed to implement them, evaluation strategies, and criteria indicating a successful resolution.  Take the extra time to get these things written down in the beginning, and it will save you a lot of time and stress down the road!

Knoff, H. M. (2011) Integrating the school prevention, review, and intervention team (SPRINT) and response-to-instruction/intervention (RtI²) process: A model implementation guidebook for schools and districts. Little Rock, AR: Project ACHIEVE Incorporated.

Identifying Reasons for Problem Behaviors

So you have resolved all of the teacher and curricula factors that may be contributing to student misbehavior.  Those were the easy ones to fix.  Now we have to look into this amazingly complicated being that is our student and try to figure out what is holding them back from being the best they can be.  My colleagues and I have discussed how magical it would be if we could just plug our students into a machine and get a printout of everything that is going on in their mind so we would know what to do about it.
Unfortunately, there is no magical machine that does that for us, and we have to do a lot of detective work and analyzing to figure out what factors we have to address our interventions at.  According to Howard Knoff, there are seven high-hit reasons that students demonstrate problem behaviors.  Those reasons really fall into three categories.  The first one is skill-based.  This could mean that the student simply has not mastered the behavior skill that we want them to demonstrate.  Maybe they are working on it, but they just aren't mastering it as quickly as their peers.  Maybe they have mastered the skill in some settings, but haven't been able to transfer it to other situations.  It's possible that they have mastered the skill, but their current emotions are getting in the way of them demonstrating it.  Finally, they may have mastered the skill, but they are simply choosing not to demonstrate it because they are not motivated to do so.  Another reason is inconsistency.  This could apply to any of the mentioned skill factors.  If we can identify and address an inconsistency, especially in how we are motivating our students to demonstrate appropriate behaviors, we may find our problem.  The final reason that students demonstrate problem behaviors is special situations that occur in common areas of the school, peer relationships, and events outside of school.
Identifying which of these high-hit reasons is most affecting your student may take some time and effort initially, but will save you a lot of time down the road that you may have wasted on interventions that addressed only the behavior and not the reason behind it.

Knoff, H. (Course Lecture). (2015). Interventions for Behaviorally Challenging Students: Module 2 [video]. American College of Education. Retrieved from http://ace.edu