Week Three: Rule Review, Assessment, and Scoreboard Here I Come

Originally posted: January 26, 2013

It is important to know that I added the 5 Classroom Rules to my research question.  With that, here is what I focused on this past week.
In my last post, I discussed the fact that my sixth graders have been extremely talkative and in some instances feel they can just get out of their seat at the drop of a hat, so the need to review the five classroom rules was in order.  After viewing Coach Bs rule videos myself, I used his ideas and reviewed Rules Two and Three with students.  Raising your hand to speak and leave your seat were weak areas in all of my classes.  I told students we were going to purposefully break the rules, and I called on students to do just that.  This activity incorporated humor, an idea also mentioned in the read this week, and the kids responded well to this.  Tuesday and Wednesday I took each of the two rules (rule two Tuesday and three Wednesday) and allowed students to break the rule.  I praised them for the wonderful job they did, and we discussed this as a class.  We talked about respect and letting me know they needed to get up and/or speak.  By the third day, students were asking me if they could be the rule breaker.  Ha.  Ha.  This has been a really good focus and reminder for students.  I purposefully chose 'repeat offenders' to do perform the rule breaking demonstration, and this worked like a charm.  Results showed a significant drop in these rules being broken.  On two occasions, students even quietly correct the rule breakers.  Yes!!!  
As a novice WB teacher,  I wanted to review the basics well with my students.  I was pleasantly surprised with how well Coach Bs suggestions about rule review worked.  So, what's next you might ask?  I have so many plans, I, honestly, do not know where to begin.  First, I am going to reintroduce the Scoreboard.  I have purchased the iPhone/iPad Scoreboard app, and I believe this will help me add points to the board no matter where I am at in my classroom.  I am thrilled there is an app.  :)  I have viewed Coach Bs YouTube Scoreboard video and as he suggests, I am going to make sure students know, upfront, the score will always be close (+/- 3).  I did not do that the first time.  Since students like to talk and we don't have daily recess, I am going to allow the students, if they are ahead, to have one minute of free talk time at the beginning of each class.  I also going to set a daily/weekly goal for classes beginning with Rule #2.  
Update on data collection:  
Besides administering/reviewing a student quarterly assessment test, I conducted the WBT Behavior Assessment.  I found this very interesting.  This assessment made me think about each of my 87 students in all four of my history classes.  I do not have leaders in every class.  I followed the directions in the assessment guidelines exactly.  I discovered I have many leaders, model students, go alongs, fence setters, and yes, challenging students. Every class is a mixture of behaviors, but every class does not have all 5 behavior types. This varies from class to class. I am going to incorporate the Super Improvers Wall for one class of students.  I plan on setting individual goals for all students in this class.  I may implement this with the other classes later in semester, but for now I want to test the wall with students who need it the most.  It will be interesting to see if they improve more with the wall than without it.  I also plan to have students in my other three classes set one goal for themselves for the week.  This goal will be kept on post-it note inside their interactive notebooks.  Finally, I plan to use the behavior assessment when I design my seating chart next week.  Leaders and Model students need to be partnered with the Go Along, Fence Setters, and Challenging students.  By doing so, students will be have good examples and models when I use Teach/OK.
There's a lot to be done!