USING CONTRACTS TO MANAGE BEHAVIOUR

The Behavior Contract

A behavior contract is an agreement between the child and teacher and often includes the student's parent(s).

The behavior contract is a written agreement about how the individual will behave.

It will indicate the appropriate consequence should the student neglect to behave according to the contract and it also states the reinforcer to be used for successful compliance.

The behavior contract provides the student with structure and self-management.

The behavior contract is often an effective form of behavior modification.

Developing the Contract

The contract should be written with the student and teacher - collaboration. It would be wise to involve the parent under certain circumstances.

The contract should include the following:
· The goal. (Will not speak out, will keep hands to him/herself, will remain on
task, etc.)

· How will the student receive the reward? (Become the teacher's monitor after
completing 5 assignments on time etc.)

· What is the consequence should the child not adhere to the behavior
described in the contract?

· Time should be clearly stated in the contract. You may choose a half day, a full
day, a week etc.

· Define who and how the behavior will be monitored. (teacher initials, stickers,
check mark system etc.)

· Set a date for reviewing the contract

It is important to involve the student in the writing of the contract. Ask the student to make suggestions for reinforcement and consequence for failure to comply.

Contracts should name specific behaviors to be changed.

Focus on 1 or 2 behaviors at a time.

Consequences and reinforcers need to be thought out clearly. You can include tangible reinforcers, social or activity based reinforcers, curtailment of an activity, tokens that can be cashed in for a specific activity etc.

NOTE: A minor problem with behavior contracts is that the focus is on controlling a student's behavior rather than helping the child make wise choices.

Keep this in mind when developing behavior contracts. Behavior contracts don't often work right away, be patient and consistent, you should see results. Know when it's time to review and revise. When the contract is not working well, be sure to include the student when making revisions.

What reinforcers would you use?

Try these:


· Caring for Class Pet

· 5-10 Minute Free Choice Activity

· Happy Note to Mom

· Tell the Class a Joke or Read a Text Selection

· Read with a Buddy
·
· Leading the Group

· Time to surf the net

It is critical for the student to know that you like them and that you're only disappointed in their behavior.

HELPING HIGH RISK STUDENTS: THE PAIN MODEL

How Do We Help High Risk Students?

Let us consider this model developed in Queensland, Australia.

THE PAIN MODEL FOR BEHAVIOUR MANAGEMENT

The pain model is a behaviour management model developed for teachers who work with students who have extremely challenging behaviours, social problems and a lack of social skills.

The model's strategies may also be used by teachers to prevent the development of challenging behaviours in the classroom.

The model was developed in Queensland, Australia early this decade by a team of behaviour support teachers led by Patrick Connor, an applied psychologist working as a guidance officer within this team. The teachers, who work within a Behaviour Management Unit work with children who can no longer attend school due to exclusions or suspension from school.

The pain model is grounded in the work they have done with these students identified as high-risk; students whose behaviour has resulted in a referral to the Behaviour Management Unit – a service supplied to schools by some states in Australia.

Basis of the Pain Model

Connor drew on the work of Eric Berne and Harris[ who researched the influences of past experiences on later behaviour, and O’Reilly (1994) and accepted the proposition of the neuro-physiological link between the brain and behaviour.

Connor recognised, as far as learning was concerned, that there was little difference between the effect of physical pain and psychological pain. Both types of pain were debilitating and inhibited learning.

The pain model recognises that social problems such as homelessness, Skill-lessness, meaninglessness, domestic violence, abuse, addiction or chemical or organic problems such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ( ADHD) cause psychological pain. When high-risk students (students that are experiencing one or more of these problems) are fearful, stressed and experiencing psychological pain teachers need to calm the student and relieve the pain before participation within the school environment can begin.

The model also allows the teacher to understand that the student’s behaviour is due to the pain they are experiencing making a less stressful classroom environment and allowing teachers to be more patient with students.

Assumptions

If students ‘feel good’ they will ‘act good’; if students ‘feel bad’ they will ‘act bad’.

Behaviour is a type of communication and, because it is a type of communication schools may misinterpret the intended meaning of the message the student is sending through ‘bad’ behaviour.

Students who act ‘bad’ may be unhappy and experiencing pain; inflicting punishment will only make this worse.

Listening to students is more appropriate than punishing them.

When young people are abused they cannot build primary relationships and often do not have the skills to participate in the class environment.

They need to be taught these skills prior to gradual reintegration to the school.

Traditional models of discipline are not effective with high-risk students.

Some students ‘act bad’ in order to be punished and noticed. As a result, they are noticed for their behaviour not for who they are.

Principles of the Pain Model

Acknowledge the pain

Value the person

Preventative Strategies

Develop relationships

Give clear instructions

Care for teachers – support provided to teachers with ‘high-risk’ students.

Corrective Strategies

Relieve the pain and calm the student – teach relaxation techniques, assess and address physical needs

Re-skill the student – teach personal skills, interpersonal skills, academic skills and problem solving skills

Reconstruct self-esteem – use slogans; set up for success; encourage

Use related strategies - agreements; self-managing log; collaboration with parents

School-wide Strategies

Make school a welcoming place

Create a welfare centre

Advantages

Less stress for teachers

Better outcomes for high-risk students

Long-term advantages for teachers and society

Actively involves parents in process

Disadvantages

Resource intensive

Change to whole school culture needed

It is difficult for some teachers to relinquish power

Some teachers expect naughty students to be punished

Some aspects of the model are not suitable for use as general behaviour management for the majority of classes

Relies upon all aspects of the child’s life supporting the basis of this model in order for it to be successful

Chaining In Behaviour Management

Chaining is an instructional procedure used in Behavioral psychology, experimental analysis of behavior and applied behavior analysis.

It involves reinforcing individual responses occurring in a sequence to form a complex behavior. It is frequently used for training behavioral sequences (or "chains") that are beyond the current repertoire of the learner.

The term is often credited to the work of B.F. Skinner, an American Psychologist working at Harvard University in the 1930s. Skinner based most of his work on the research done by Edward Lee Thorndike at Harvard University in the 1890s

How Do We Use Chaining?

The chain of responses is broken down into small steps using task analysis.

Parts of a chain are referred to as links. The learner's skill level is assessed by an appropriate professional and is then either taught one step at a time while being assisted through the other steps forward or backwards or if the learner already can complete a certain percentage of the steps independently, the remaining steps are all worked on during each trial total task.

A verbal stimulus or prompt is used at the beginning of the teaching trial.

The stimulus change that occurs between each response becomes the reinforcer for that response as well as the prompt/stimulus for the next response without requiring assistance from the teacher.

As small chains become mastered, i.e. are performed consistently following the initial discriminative stimulus prompt, they may be used as links in larger chains. [Ex. teach hand washing, tooth brushing, and showering until mastered and then teach morning hygiene routine which includes the mastered skills].

Chaining requires that the teachers present the training skill in the same order each time and is most effective when teachers are delivering the same prompts to the learner. The most common forms of chaining are backward chaining, forward chaining, and total task presentation.

Behaviour Modification

The first use of the term behavior modification appears to have been by Edward Thorndike in 1911.

His article "Provisional laws of acquired behavior or learning" makes frequent use of the term "modifying behavior".

It has come to refer mainly to techniques for increasing adaptive behavior through reinforcement and decreasing maladaptive behavior through punishment (with emphasis on the former).

Since techniques derived from behavioral psychology tend to be the most effective in altering behavior, most practitioners consider behavior modification along with behavior therapy and applied behavior analysis to be founded in behaviorism.

While behavior modification encompasses applied behavior analysis and typically uses interventions based on the same behavioral principles, many behavior modifiers who are not applied behavior analysts tend to use packages of interventions and do not conduct functional assessments before intervening.

In recent years, the concept of punishment has had many critics, though these critiques tend not to apply to negative punishment (time-outs) and usually apply to the addition of some aversive event.

The use of positive punishment by board-certified behavior analysts is restricted to extreme circumstances when all other forms of treatment have failed and when the behavior to be modified is a danger to the person or to others .

In clinical settings positive punishment is usually restricted using a spray bottle filled with water as an aversive event.

When mis-used, extreme punishment can lead to affective (emotional) disorders, as well as to the target of the punishment eventually focusing only on avoiding punishment (i.e., "not getting caught") rather than improving behavior.

People have consequences for their actions both positive and negative.

This should be taught early as it carries through adulthood.

Overexcitabilities In Gifted Students

Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski identified five of these intensities, which he called "overexcitabilities" or "supersensitivities":

Psychomotor, Sensual, Emotional, Intellectual, and Imaginational.

Gifted children tend to have more than one of these intensities, although one is usually dominant.

Psychomotor

The primary sign of this intensity is a surplus of energy. Children with a dominant psychomotor overexcitability are often misdiagnosed with ADHD since characteristics are similar.

Rapid speech
Impulsive behavior
Competitiveness
Compulsive talking
Compulsive organizing
Nervous habits and tics
Preference for fast action and sports
Physical expression of emotions

Sleeplessness

Sensual

The primary sign of this intensity is a heightened awareness of all five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing.

Children with a dominant sensual overexcitability can get sick from the smell of certain foods or as toddlers will hate to walk on grass in their bare feet.

The pleasure they get from the tastes and textures of some foods may cause them to overeat.

Appreciation of beauty, whether in writing, music, art or nature.

Includes love of objects like jewelry

Sensitive to smells, tastes, or textures of foods

Sensitivity to pollution

Tactile sensitivity (Bothered by feel of some materials on the skin, clothing tags)

Craving for pleasure

Need or desire for comfort

Intellectual

This intensity is the one most recognized in gifted children.

It is characterized by activities of the mind, thought and thinking about thinking.

Children who lead with this intensity seem to be thinking all the time and want answers to deep thoughts.

Sometimes their need for answers will get them in trouble in school when their questioning of the teacher can look like disrespectful challenging.

Deep curiosity
Love of knowledge and learning
Love of problem solving
Avid reading
Asking of probing questions
Theoretical thinking
Analytical thinking
Independent thinking

Concentration, ability to maintain intellectual effort

Imaginational

The primary sign of this intensity is the free play of the imagination.

Their vivid imaginations can cause them to visualize the worst possibility in any situation.

It can keep them from taking chances or getting involved in new situations.

Vivid dreams
Fear of the unknown
Good sense of humor
Magical thinking

Love of poetry, music and drama

Love of fantasy

Daydreaming
Imaginary friends
Detailed visualization

Emotional

The primary sign of this intensity is exceptional emotional sensitivity.

Children with a strong emotional overexcitability are sometimes mistakenly believed to have bipolar disorder or other emotional problems and disorders.

They are often the children about whom people will say, "He's too sensitive for his own good."

Extremes of emotion

Anxiety

Feelings of guilt and sense of responsibility

Feelings of inadequacy and inferiority

Timidity and shyness

Loneliness

Concern for others

Heightened sense right and wrong, of injustice and hypocrisy

Strong memory for feelings

Problems adjusting to change

Depression

Need for security

Physical response to emotions (stomach aches caused by anxiety, for example)

Parents can get a better understanding of their gifted children by matching their child's behavior with the characteristics of each of these intensities.

Telling an emotionally intense child to ignore teasing or not let the teasing bother him is impossible advice for the child to follow.

Understanding what lies behind a gifted child's behavior will help parents better respond to that behavior.

Challenges In Managing The Behaviour Of Gifted Students

The behavior of a gifted child is sometimes confused with attention disorders such as ADD and ADHD.

Children with either disorder generally show an inability to concentrate for long periods of time, regardless of the task. In contrast, gifted children become immersed in a task when interested, focusing for long periods of time; however, they may become bored while waiting for other students to grasp concepts that they already understand.

When not engaged, gifted children often develop negative patterns such as daydreaming, doodling, excessive talking, and failing grades.


Many school systems are developing assessment tools and special programs to address the needs of gifted students because research has shown that these students thrive when placed with students of similar ability.

When given an opportunity to engage in challenging learning environments, many gifted children not only perform at a high level, but also feel more accepted and confident.

Teachers trained to deal with the needs of gifted students can help avoid power struggles and provide adequate stimulation in their classroom.


In the wrong setting giftedness can be as paralyzing as a learning handicap.

Many gifted students become chronically frustrated by the constraints of ordinary classrooms and their abilities go unnoticed, masked by indifference and hostility toward the system of education.

As a result, gifted students are not necessarily those who bring home the best report cards, but may well be the students at the back of the classroom who are not standing up to claim their gift.

PIAGET"S THEORY ON COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

We need to understand the concrete operational stage in Piaget’s theory of Cognitive Development.

How is it different from the formal operations stage characterized by abstract thinking, logical reasoning and adolescent attention getting behaviour?

Read the following and consider the implications for you as a teacher.
Concrete operational stage

The Concrete operational stage is the third of four stages of cognitive development in Piaget's theory. This stage, which follows the Preoperational stage, occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 years and is characterized by the appropriate use of logic. Important processes during this stage are:

Seriation—the ability to sort objects in an order according to size, shape, or any other characteristic. For example, if given different-shaded objects they may make a color gradient.

Transitivity- The ability to recognize logical relationships among elements in a serial order (for example, If A is taller than B, and B is taller than C, then A must be taller than C).

Classification—the ability to name and identify sets of objects according to appearance, size or other characteristic, including the idea that one set of objects can include another.

Decentering—where the child takes into account multiple aspects of a problem to solve it. For example, the child will no longer perceive an exceptionally wide but short cup to contain less than a normally-wide, taller cup.

Reversibility—the child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their original state. For this reason, a child will be able to rapidly determine that if 4+4 equals t, 8−4 will equal 4, the original quantity.

Conservation—understanding that quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or items.

Elimination of Egocentrism—the ability to view things from another's perspective (even if they think incorrectly). For instance, show a child a comic in which Jane puts a doll under a box, leaves the room, and then Melissa moves the doll to a drawer, and Jane comes back. A child in the concrete operations stage will say that Jane will still think it's under the box even though the child knows it is in the drawer. (See also False-belief task).

Children in this stage can, however, only solve problems that apply to actual (concrete) objects or events, and not abstract concepts or hypothetical tasks.

Formal operational stage

The formal operational period is the fourth and final of the periods of cognitive development in Piaget's theory.

This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 11-15 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. In this stage, individuals move beyond concrete experiences and begin to think abstractly, reason logically and draw conclusions from the information available, as well as apply all these processes to hypothetical situations.The abstract quality of the adolescent's thought at the formal operational level is evident in the adolescent's verbal problem solving ability. The logical quality of the adolescent's thought is when children are more likely to solve problems in a trial-and-error fashion. Adolescents begin to think more as a scientist thinks, devising plans to solve problems and systematically testing solutions.They use hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which means that they develop hypotheses or best guesses, and systematically deduce, or conclude, which is the best path to follow in solving the problem.

During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, "shades of gray", logical proofs and values. During this stage the young adult begins to entertain possibilities for the future and are fascinated with what they can be. Adolescents are changing cognitively also by the way that they think about social matters.

Adolescent Egocentrism governs the way that adolescents think about social matters and is the heightened self-consciousness in them as they are which is reflected in their sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility. Adolescent egocentrism can be dissected into two types of social thinking, imaginary audience that involves attention getting behavior, and personal fable which involves an adolescent's sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility.