When Harvard Education Press sent me a review copy of The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students, I was intrigued by the title and concept but procrastinated reading it because of the formal tone. I’ve grown accustomed to reading educational resources that are written in the first person and take on a more conversational approach to the topic at hand. When I initially flipped through The Behavior Code, I wasn’t sure whether I’d review it, as I won’t recommend any books on my blog unless I think they’re going to be a truly relevant and practical read for a time-pressed classroom teacher. However, I was re-organizing my library this week and decided to give The Behavior Code another look, flipping open to a random page to see if there was anything caught my eye. This is the paragraph I found on page 15:

All behavior is a form of communication. This is a key principle that helps when teachers are mystified by students’ behavior. Even though students’ behavior can look bizarre or disruptive, their actions are purposeful and are their attempts to solve a problem. Even if the behabior is not productive or is inappropriate, it is critical to step back and try to decipher what the student is trying to communicate and what the function (or intent) of the behavior is. Instead of asking, ‘Where did that come from?’ ask, ‘What is the student communicating?’ With practice, teachers can learn to stop and ‘listen’ to the message the behavior is conveying. Rather than assume they know the reason for a behavior, teachers can ask these critical questions and, by answering them, begin to break the behavior code and respond in more productive ways.

And with that, I knew this was a book I needed to dive into…and I’m so glad I did. The paragraph above is actually a great summary for the book as a whole: “breaking the behavior code” means understanding that students’ behavior is about communication and the way students act is reflective of their efforts to solve problems. Minahan and Rappaport explain that all student behavior stems from one (or more) of the following four needs: gaining attention, escaping something undesirable, gaining something desirable, and obtaining sensory satisfaction. As you would expect, the authors devote a lot of time to showing teachers how to recognize and respond to the underlying reasons why students act out. There are sections for anxiety, oppositional behavior, withdrawn behavior, and sexualized behavior. It’s very rare to find a behavior management book that deals with inappropriate sexual behavior in the classroom such as this, and I found it extremely helpful.

The authors introduce a structure to help teachers identify why a child is behaving in a certain way. It’s called the FAIR Plan: Functional Hypothesis of Behavior and Antecedent Analysis, Accommodations, Interaction Strategies, and Response Strategies. Um, yeah, let’s just call it FAIR, because it’s not nearly as complex as the name makes it sound.  The authors share an ABC data sheet which is a template that allows teachers to quickly and easily track, understand, and respond to student behaviors according to the FAIR plan. Basically, you write down the antecdent to the behavior (what happened immediately before the student acted out), a description of the behavior, and the consequence (what happens immediately after.)

As I read about this, I realized I’d followed a very similar template before as part of the child study process at my school, and keeping that record was extremely valuable not only for conferences and IEP meetings, but also for myself as I tried to uncover patterns in student behavior and discover responses that worked and didn’t work. Minahan and Rappaport acknowledge that tracking student behavior requires extra time, and I appreciate that their suggestions for tracking are very mindful of how busy teachers are. This is something you only need to do for your most challenging students, not the whole class, and although the authors don’t state this outright, you can read between the lines and figure out that challenging students are going to take up more of a teacher’s time, anyway, so you might as well focus your energy on being proactive rather than reactive. You can spend 15 minutes preventing and analyzing meltdowns, or spend an hour documenting what happened when you had to huddle your class in a corner of the room to prevent them from being harmed by a student who’s in yet another violent rage. It’s a pretty clear choice.

The book’s focus on pro-active measures is what really sets it apart from other behavior management books which focus on what to do after a child misbehaves. Knowing what triggers a child is more than half the battle, in my experience, and minimizing those triggers and supporting children during situations they find triggering can prevent a surprising number of meltdowns. Minahan and Rappaport explain exactly how to do this in very clear and practical terms, and also share how to help students learn replacement behaviors and coping strategies. Additionally, they discuss ways the teacher can build rapport and trust with the student (something that many books tell teachers to do but don’t explain how to do it, from a psychological perspective.)

The authors also explain how the teacher should respond when challenging behaviors occur. The response strategies they provide are very thoughtful and focus on the long-term fix rather than just preventing a meltdown in the moment. This information is really helpful for teachers, as it’s so easy to lose sight of the big picture (the type of character and self-control we want students to develop) in favor of just getting our classroom under control. The strategies they share can be applied when working with children in a wide range of grade levels and settings.

This is not a book you can flip through casually to read funny anecdotes about what doesn’t work or find bullet points of quick strategies you can try. The Behavior Code is a book for the teacher or parent who has been baffled by student behavior for too long and seeks to truly understand why children act out the way they do. It’s a book for those who are struggling with children they just can’t seem to get through to, and want to end the frustration for themselves and the kids they care about. And it’s for any educator who wants to develop behavior plans that are humane, thoughtful, manageable for the teacher, and most importantly, effective for troubled kids. If you are willing to put the time and energy into understanding the behavior code, the payoff is well worth it.

Harvard Press has generously donated an extra copy of The Behavior Code, which will be awarded to the winner of the Rafflecopter contest below. The contest closes at midnight EST on Thursday, May 30, 2013. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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If your computer crashed right now, what would you do? Could you recover everything that was lost, or would you lose years of family photos, work you’ve done for school, and other irreplaceable items?

I had to ask myself those questions this week when my beloved 2.5 year-old MacBook Pro experienced a series of fatal errors. I’ve been on the phone with Apple and running back and forth to the Apple store almost every day talking about kernel panic, logic board replacement, and total hard drive failure. Sigh. First world problems, I know.

The bright spot in all of this (well, besides the fact that the computer is still under warranty!) is that every time we attempted a fix and an Apple employee asked, “Is everything backed up?” I could say with relief, “Yes, absolutely everything.” That wasn’t always the case. Backing up one’s computer used to be a tedious and sometimes expensive ordeal that was just too much trouble for the average user, and I didn’t learn my lesson until my PC crashed in 2009 and I lost tons of music, photos, and school files. Ever since then, I’ve been serious about backing up my files, and it’s been worth every second of my time investment. And these days, it’s incredibly easy to save everything that’s on your computer automatically.

Here are three easy ways I make sure my computer files and settings are always backed up:

1) Save everything to an external hard drive once or twice a month. With Macs, you can use Time Machine, which allows you to simply hook up your external drive and have every single thing (files, programs, settings, passwords, internet history, etc.) transferred. (If you have a PC, you can drag and drop files to the external drive.) If I ever need to access a file I deleted months ago, I can get it back with no problem. And if my computer ever has its hard drive replaced and all my data gets erased (which is happening right now), I can just hook up the computer to my external drive and everything will be automatically restored. Whew. I’ve used cheap back up drives before and had them stop working, so now I use this LaCie model. This was the only financial investment I had to make in backing up my computer and it’s been totally worth it, especially since the 2 TB of storage (over 2,000 GB) is enough for my husband to use as his external drive, too. So, all our pictures, videos, and music get saved on the backup drive and we don’t have to worry about losing anything of sentimental value.

2) Use Dropbox to automatically sync files to the cloud. Dropbox is pretty much the greatest invention ever, and it’s totally free! I installed my Dropbox folder on my desktop and save ALL my files there (personal and for work), creating sub-folders so everything stays organized. The second I save a file, it automatically syncs to Dropbox’s online server (the “cloud”), and I can then access the file from any internet-connected device in the world. That means whatever’s on my MacBook can also be viewed on school computers, on my iPad, etc. And I don’t have to remember to back anything up–it happens without me doing a thing. Dropbox means no more emailing files to yourself or getting viruses from USB/flash drives. Woohoo! Here’s a quick tour:

If you decide to sign up for Dropbox, please use the link here. I don’t get paid in any way to promote Dropbox, but you and I will BOTH get an extra 500 MB of free storage if you sign up through my referral link.

3) Use Google Chrome for browsing the internet. Many people don’t think about backing up their internet history, logins, and passwords, but since most computer time is spent online, losing your bookmarked sites and web settings can be extremely frustrating. For me, Chrome has been the best solution. There are dozens of reasons to use Chrome instead of Firefox or Safari (and about a million reasons to use it instead of Internet Explorer), but for our purposes here, I’ll just mention how easy it is to keep your internet settings when you use Chrome. You can login to Chrome on any computer and see all your bookmarks, web history, internet searches, passwords, and so on. It works seamlessly with your Google Account (which I use for Gmail, Google Drive, and so on). This means that whenever I logon to a new computer, I can just open Chrome and sign in, and everything about my internet experience is like I’m on my own laptop. Take a tour of Google Chrome, or if you don’t want to switch browsers, try using Firefox Sync.

These three tools have meant that being without my MacBook right now isn’t too much of a pain, because all my internet preferences are accessible on any computer via Google Chrome, and all my files are available through Dropbox. And when my laptop comes back from Apple with a new hard drive, getting everything back the way I want it will be simple. I’ll attach my external drive and the computer will import all my programs, settings, etc. (even my screensaver will be the same.) I’ll be able to see all my files in my Dropbox folder, and open up Chrome to see my internet settings just as I like them.

There you go–three simple tools to backup all your computer files and settings. What’s your system for backing up? Feel free to ask questions in the comments, or share tools or routines you’d like to recommend.

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By this point in the school year, you’re probably having some moments when you feel like you’ll lose your mind if you have to repeat yourself one. more. time. Some of you have probably felt like that since September! And that’s perfectly normal. A big part of a teacher’s job is teaching students to listen, follow directions, and be self-directed and independent in their work, and that means LOTS of repetition and reinforcement. It can be exhausting, for sure, so here are some tips to help kids listen to your directions and follow them the first time:

Speak up and say exactly what you need. There have been many times when I gave directions and heard my students whispering to each other afterward, “What’d she say?” even though I was certain I’d been perfectly clear. Eventually my husband pointed out my habit of trailing off mid-sentence and assuming people  know what I’m talking about. I realized that I’d often given the first part of a direction to the class, and when the classroom began buzzing with the background noise of students getting materials from their desks and whispering to each other, I assumed they knew what to do and didn’t command the same attention for the remainder of the directions. I’ve had to be very mindful about enunciating and making sure I’ve given the full directions very clearly.

Use a magic word so students don’t move or talk until you’re done giving directions. This is a wonderful trick for elementary-aged students that I picked up from a co-teacher. Choose a silly word like “pepperoni” or a fun vocabulary word and teach students not to lift a finger until they hear you say it. For example: “When you hear the magic word which is? [class says "pepperoni"), you're going to get out your math journal, pencil, and eraser. [Pause] Pepperoni.” Young students will listen intently to everything you say in anticipation of hearing the magic word, and you can let kids take turns choosing the magic word for the week to keep their interest up.

Have students repeat directions back to you. There are several ways you can do this, and I like to switch it up to keep kids on their toes. Sometimes I’ll say, “Tell your partner what the directions are for this activity” and hold up 10 fingers, slowly putting my fingers down one at a time until I’m at zero, then I release students to begin the activity. Other times I’ll have students repeat the directions back to me in unison: “I need you to take out your math book and turn to page 67. Which page? [67] Thank you, go ahead.” I’ve also known teachers who give students a moment of silence to think about the directions and visualize themselves following through.

Write important information in a special place on the board. Anytime you mention a page number, a time, or any other detail students are likely to forget, make a note of it in a designated section of your board. Then you can simply point to the board or poster instead of repeating yourself. Many students find this extremely helpful, and over time, they will learn to check the board before asking you to give the directions again.

Use a backwards countdown or timer to keep things moving. Isn’t it funny how something as simple as cleaning up math manipulatives can take ten minutes if you allow it to drag on? The timer is your best friend. Tell kids they’ve got 2 minutes to get everything put away and be prepared for the next activity. You can use a real timer and put it under a document camera for students to see, or project an online timer or timer app on your IWB to display the countdown. For really short time periods, countdown verbally and show the amount on your hands: “When I get to zero, I need you to have your backpack on and be ready to line up. 10, 9, 8…” When time is up, move on to the next activity just like you said you’d do, and let stragglers catch up without acknowledging them except to help as needed. If you’re consistent with this, students will learn you mean what you say and they have to keep pace!

Give students a purpose for following the directions. If you want students to open their novels prior in preparation for a discussion, say, “Please turn to page 214 and find the word quintessential. I’d like you put your finger on that word and be prepared to talk about what it means in the context of the paragraph. Ready? Okay, page 214. I’ll know you’re ready when I see your finger on the word quintessential.” If you want groups of students to prepare for a science experiment, ask them to assemble the materials they need and hold up a specific item when they’ve found it–they’ll work more quickly because they won’t want to be the last group to find it.

Ask, ”What should you be doing right now?” When students are off-task, it’s tempting to repeat yourself or nag. Instead, prompt students with questions that require them to think about their choices and the task at hand. Most of the time, students know the correct answer and will either tell you or simply get on task.

Use the 3 Before Me rule. When students have a procedural question that’s not related to instruction, teach them to ask three other students before they ask you. It’s a great way to get students the information they need without having to say “Yes, I said you can get a drink right now. Yes, you can read your book when you’re done,” over and over again. If you model and practice this effectively, then the next time a student asks “What are we doing right now?” you can simply smile and hold up 3 fingers.

Talk less. The more students hear your voice, the more likely they are to tune you out, and before you know it, you’ve become the teacher on Charlie Brown. The wake up call for me was when I was actually tired of hearing my own voice. It’s a challenge, but try to speak only when you have something important to say, and resist the urge to fill every moment of instruction with commentary. Remember: the person doing the most talking is the person doing the most learning, so that role should go to the kids.

How do you help students follow directions? What tips and tricks work in your classroom?

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I’ve been back for a few days, actually, but decided to stay offline for awhile longer. It’s taken some time to get my head in a space where I can process everything I’ve seen and experienced during the 5 days my husband and I were in Iceland celebrating our anniversary. The country touched me in a way that I wasn’t expecting. On day three, I was still thinking how amazing Iceland was, but that I probably wouldn’t ever come back, as we’d done so much and I figured there couldn’t possibly be enough left to warrant another trip. There are so many other places I want to visit that it’s rare I consider backtracking. But on day four, I realized we’d only touched a tiny portion of all that Iceland has to offer, and by day five when it was time to leave, I knew that there was nowhere else on the planet I’d rather visit again than Iceland.

Looking out over the fjord in Borgarnes. I’m wearing my lopapeysa, a traditional Icelandic sweater made of the unique wool from Icelandic sheep. It’s not particularly itchy, is extremely warm, and is somewhat water-resistant, and therefore perfect for Icelandic weather. If I could wear that sweater every day for the rest of my life, I would. I’m obsessed.

As overdramatic as it sounds, I feel as though I left a piece of my soul behind in Iceland. Or maybe, more accurately, in Iceland I connected with a piece of my soul that I never had been in touch with before, and now that I’m back in the traffic and noise and fast pace of New York City, I feel a bit lost and disconnected. I can’t stop thinking about Iceland: looking at pictures of it, reading about it, reminiscing on it. The feeling is similar to when you’re away from someone you really love and miss dearly: there’s a quiet ache inside you that returns whenever a memory is provoked.

Though we saw countless waterfalls in Iceland, Seljalandsfoss is unique because you can walk behind it.

Iceland, in a word, was other-worldly. As we traveled around the country, the landscape changed dramatically and quickly: we spent about 30 hours in the car and never did we have the same type of view for more than three or four minutes. Our surroundings would go from fjord to glacier to volcano to lava fields to grassy highlights to steep cliffs to black sand beach all within a few miles of driving. It was absolutely indescribable. For people like my husband and I who think the ideal vacation consists of experiencing natural wonders, Iceland is just unparalleled. There’s no where else on earth you can see the things that we saw in such quantity, from dramatic waterfalls around every bend to the hot springs and geysers that bubble up out of the ground in the most random places.

The famous Blue Lagoon. The water is that beautiful color because of the mineral content. It’s wonderful for your skin (not so much for your hair.) When the wind blows, the steam floats up and over the water, creating an ethereal effect. We stayed for hours soaking in the warm water and sitting in the steam baths.

The Icelandic people are also remarkable. They were far more aloof to tourists than what we normally experience when traveling. Only once were we asked where we were from, and no one ever asked what we do professionally or even how we liked Iceland. At first, I found that off-putting, as we love to chat with locals wherever we go and here I felt as if we were intruding on them. But later I realized that their aloofness is really a sense of contentedness. Often our conversations when we travel center around the locals’ questions about life in America, but the Icelanders seem to have no fascination with understanding outsiders’ ways or being anything like us. Though they never brag, the Icelanders are secure in their own identity and love their culture. We didn’t talk to a single Icelander who expressed a desire to one day move somewhere else (other than those who felt they had to temporarily for financial reasons.) I’ve never been somewhere–including any town in America–where the young people are so content with their birthplace and want to remain there forever.

This is Gulfoss, a two-tiered waterfall with each tier dropping at right angles to each other. Often you can see a rainbow in one corner of the falls, and we were fortunate to catch it in this photo.

And why wouldn’t Icelanders want to stay? The tap water is among the purest in the world, coming right off the glaciers. The food is incredible–the dairy and meat products come from the animals living in the open land and fresh clean air, and you really can taste the difference. Produce is grown in greenhouses and is therefore pesticide-free. Icelanders spend their free time soaking in geo-thermally heated pools and hot springs, which are good for the skin, joints, and muscles. I’ve never felt healthier than when we were in Iceland. There is no traffic anywhere at any time of day. No one is in a rush, no one yells, and there’s not a single piece of litter to be found in the streets even in downtown Reykvik…it’s pretty much the polar opposite of NYC. People work, and then they relax. They hang out in the community pools (all geo-thermally heated and comfortable no matter what the outdoor temperature), they have a drink (okay, usually many drinks, but you get my point), they write poetry, they create music and art, they play chess, they enjoy their friends and family and the beauty of their country.  The Icelanders we talked to described it as a “good standard of living.” I would describe it as a good life, period.

Thingvellir is the site where the Iceland’s parliament was founded in the year 930. It’s also the site where the North American and Euro-Asian tectonic plates meet: the ridge on the left is America the right is Europe.

Of course, Iceland isn’t paradise in every sense. Though the Gulf Stream prevents the country from having brutally cold weather, the wind and rain can be fierce all year long, and the short daylight hours in the winter must be absolutely brutal. The income tax rate is high (after all, Icelanders have to pay in some way for the cost of college, health care, and all the other subsidized programs they enjoy) and the cost of living is astronomical. The prices for food and gas in Iceland make Manhattan look like a bargain, and rent in the capital city of Reykjavik is sky high. It took a great deal of planning to make this trip affordable. (A great airfare + hotel package, traveling off-season, and making sandwiches every day for lunch instead of going to restaurants were our solutions. And one day, we teamed up with another couple we met there to share the costs of driving around–we paid for the rental car, they paid for the gas, which was $9 a gallon. Ouch.)

This is the view of downtown Reykjavik from the tower of the Hallgrimskirkja (church). The city sits right on the water and to the right of this view, you can see the mountains.

This was the view from our hotel room around midnight. The sun set at 10:15 pm, and it got “dark” from about 12:30 am to 4:30 am while we were there.

One of the best things about Iceland, though, was that the major attractions in the country were almost all free and easy to access. In other places we’ve traveled, getting to see something like a waterfall was a six hour adventure that involved traveling over potholed roads and hiking uphill for hours, plus paying a ridiculous sum to a tour guide to take you through the area which was dangerous because of either crime or wild animals or unstable landscape–sometimes all three. In Iceland, everything we wanted to see was no more than a few yards from a main road. Most of it was on private property, and we were allowed on the land with no admission fees. The Blue Lagoon was actually the only site that we paid to visit. Amazing.

Hello, random volcanic crater by the side of the road. It’s called Kerid and had the most unique color of water at the bottom.

Every time I travel, I return with a renewed sense of the importance of a digital detox. In New York, it’s incredibly common to see people walking around with their “faces in their phones”, as my husband says. If you get in an elevator or otherwise have 30 seconds of time to yourself, you must immediately pull out your phone and check SOMETHING, anything. The mentality here is that you must always be busy, you must always be producing, you must always be trying to be the best and have the most. I, too, get caught up in that mentality sometimes, and it’s good for me to be reminded that things are not that way in so many other parts of the world.

A spectacular view from the side of the road. The view from every road was spectacular, actually.

These are the lessons I’ve brought back with me from observing the land and people of Iceland: there’s no need to rush everywhere you go. Time is not money: in fact, time is far more precious than money could ever be. There is no place for envy in a contented life. Make your contributions to the world without worrying whether you are the best or considering the competition. Each person has a valuable role to play in the community. Find the beauty in your surroundings and take it in. Connect with the people who matter most to you. Breathe. Create. Enjoy each day.

The post I’m back. This is Iceland. appeared first on The Cornerstone.

Every summer, my husband and I take a trip somewhere special to celebrate our wedding anniversary. And every summer we lament the fact that we could have saved a lot of money by going during the school year.

This year, we decided to go to Iceland. I know what you’re thinking. Iceland? But it’s not a freezing cold wasteland of ice. In fact, the winters in New York City are harsher than the winters in Reykjavik, which is to say–not bad at all. And by this time of year, we’ll have about 16 hours of daylight there so we can really pack it in. Iceland is a spectacularly beautiful country with all of our favorite things to explore: waterfalls, mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, and (best of all) natural hot springs and geysers. We found an excellent package deal for May, and since its a short trip, we decided to go for it!

The video above does a really nice job explaining all the reasons why we’re so excited about Iceland, minus the corny music. Watch the first 30 seconds even on mute and you’ll get the idea.

I’m not scheduling out any posts or social media stuff while I’m away. I don’t want to have to worry about moderating comments or promoting content. I just want to take in the beauty of Iceland and leave everything internet-related behind for a few days.

Pictures to come when we return.

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