Time has moved on. After blogging here from 2009 to 2020, I’ve moved over to Substack. It’s sort of like a nice Twitter- for now.

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There are times to suit for both UK and US time zones and it’s open to all school leaders, whether we’ve worked together already or not.

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Here’s how we start our work with new schools.

And here’s how we manage the project once it’s up and running.

Contact Maria or Greg to arrange an online meeting to discuss your school’s needs.

The post Starting and managing your Behaviour Improvement Project appeared first on Future Behaviour.

As an experienced school leader with a concentrated focus on student behavior and interaction, I can appreciate the difficulties schools are currently facing, and will continue to face in light of our current reality.  It is safe to say that one of the main areas of concern, as schools far and wide reopen, is school climate.  In today’s educational reality, it is always paramount to maintain a climate conducive to positive learning experiences; coupled with the quarantine and general uncertainty of the times, it is now even more challenging, and more important, than usual.

As staff and students re-enter schools, many will struggle with the changes and new routines resulting from this global pandemic. The departure from the norm, necessitated by the ongoing health risks to all, will impact all students, especially those already at-risk for behavioral issues.    

As we educators know, there are many factors involved in building and maintaining a positive climate, and that climate impacts every aspect of school success, from student/teacher interaction, to teaching and learning practices, to the school’s overall organizational structure. From my experiences in leading schools at various levels, I have gleaned some key suggestions for schools focused on best meeting students’ needs as they return to school.

Relationships are more important than ever

All students will need positive rapport with school staff and an atmosphere of mutual trust. It will be important to prioritize positive relationships, especially since there will be so much unchartered territory that staff and students will need to navigate together.

• Greet students at the door as they enter your classroom, and demonstrate your enthusiasm and commitment to building rapport with all students.
• Work to know students’ names quickly, and address them by name when possible.  
• Take a few moments throughout the day to ask questions and learn about each student as an individual.
• Use knowledge of students to provide specific and relevant examples in your teaching.  
• Make the first contact; call parents or guardians and make an effort to share positive observations and begin building rapport.

Communication will be key

In order to maintain that aforementioned climate of trust, it is imperative that two-way communication be prioritized. School leaders will need to ramp up communication with students and staff, not only to share information, but also to garner feedback and keep a finger on the “pulse” of the school environment.

• Use traditional methods of communication, such as parent letters, newsletters, and e-mails as usual, but provide these updates more often than in usual circumstances and address pertinent issues surrounding the pandemic situation.
• Administrators should provide virtual meetings that parents and community members can attend to hear important updates, be briefed on the school’s efforts to navigate this situation, and provide feedback.
• Consider open-ended surveys or other tools to collect feedback and concerns.  
• Administrators should also reiterate their open door policies and work to ensure that all stakeholders find them approachable and attuned to concerns that may need to be addressed. If you have operated without an open door policy in the past, it is undoubtedly time to make that change.
• Schools will need to share information regarding supports available to students and parents, such as contact information for counseling staff and school social workers.

Individual students will need individual supports

There has rarely been a time when individual supports for at-risk students were more crucial.  The current state of our world will make it more difficult for students to regulate their behavior.  A proactive approach to assist those students who need extra support will be extremely important.  

• Administrators should work with the appropriate staff members to provide all staff with existing documentation regarding both academic and behavioral supports for individual students.
• These staff members must implement safeguards to ensure that these supports are met, and that students are provided with the scaffolding and/or accommodations that they need.
• Use FBA’s or other methods of analyzing student behavior early and often when students show signs of being behaviorally at-risk. Making proactive behavior decisions based upon data rather than arbitrarily giving consequences to students will more effectively help to combat problem behaviors.
• Administrators should ensure that teachers have time built into their work day to communicate and collaborate with the other teachers of any students struggling with behavior in their classes.  
• More formal “round-table” meetings should be conducted in person or virtually as appropriate to the situation so that all staff who work with the student in question can share with the student and his/her parents positive observations or strengths, opportunities for growth, and strategies for success moving forward.
• Proactively demonstrate a genuine concern for each student by informing parents of any behavioral needs or concerns as they emerge.

Revisit your “Why”

From the top down, schools and educators will need to revisit their reasons for the work they do.  Revisiting our “why” puts our work and our challenges in perspective and gives us renewed motivation to work even harder than we previously have to meet student needs. Reiterating our mission, vision, and core values can help us to work more fluidly as a team and can aid in returning to “business as usual.”

• In opening meetings/addresses, administrators should share, reiterate, and model the “why” of the school using the mission, vision, and core values as tools for getting staff “on the same page.”
• Administrators should use meetings, e-mails, and other forms of communication to monitor and take steps to increase teacher morale, as well as keeping a reminder in front of staff of the school teams’ overall values at all times.
• Schools can utilize social media, e-mail blasts to parents, and announcements during the school day to remind all stakeholder groups of the school community’s mission and vision, and to demonstrate a genuine commitment to making that vision a reality. 

Be world class at the basics

As students return from a lengthy absence, schools can help avoid a large number of behavioral issues by teaching, reteaching, and modeling the key habits or responsibilities they want/need students to see and duplicate.  

• Administrators and teachers should deliver a concise list of rules and priority expectations–5 or 6–that are clear and easy to follow, along with the consequences for not abiding by those rules, to all students, both verbally and in writing.  It is important to have students sign off on their receipt of this information so that they can be held accountable if need be.
• Consider using humor to demonstrate/model what to do and what not to do through videos and skits involving students leaders and/or school staff; the more engaged the students are, the better the future behavior.
• Every school should determine how to deliver this information and follow through on providing it to all parents/guardians.
• These rules and expectations should be taught explicitly and then brought back through official reminders when students begin to veer off course. Even more so, students nearby who are abiding by these expectations should be praised specifically for their action/s.  
• Rules and expectations, along with other important guidelines, should be shared in multiple ways.  This can be accomplished in a handbook with signoff for receipt, published on the school website, shared through announcements to students that can then be posted on social media, and/or delivered by individual teachers to their groups of students.                                                                                                  

This time in our educational world is one of great difficulty and uncertainty for many.  As role models and leaders, we can positively impact our students by teaching them to seek the good in an inherently bad situation, and to embrace the life lessons that have been/will be presented to us. This will not come easy, but as Theodore Roosevelt said, “nothing worth having” ever does.

This post is by our new partner, Dr Maria Peek. Maria studied PBIS and school climate for her Phd. Basically, she knows her stuff!

Follow Maria on Twitter here: www.twitter.com/drmariapeek

The post School climate – revisited appeared first on Future Behaviour.

Atticus, a lawyer in 1930’s fictional Maycomb, Georgia, is intelligent and kind, scrupulous and genuine. He shows courage in stepping out to take the difficult but necessary action that others are too afraid (or too ignorant) to take. He leads with quiet dignity; he leads by example, both in his community and in rearing his children. He teaches his children to empathize with others and find the best qualities in them even when it is most challenging to do so.
In a particularly poignant scene, Atticus has been spit upon by a man angry at him for representing a black man in a rape trial. To his daughter, he says, “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (Lee, 1960). Atticus could see that the man’s actions did not discount good qualities that he had hidden within; he chose, rather, to look more deeply and see that the man was acting only on what he knew and believed, that he was not inherently evil, that he was only as good as his circumstances and worldview allowed him to be. Every time I read the book, I take away something new, and this last time I was struck by just how powerful the combination of Atticus’s qualities could be if I were to apply them in my own leadership.

This year marks my seventh as a public school administrator. I spent five years as an Assistant Principal and am in my second year as Principal of the same building. I like to think of myself as a reflective practitioner—I analyze most aspects of my leadership to a fault, taking time to consider successes and tuck away ideas for growth weekly, if not daily. As with most people, though, I have a few of those hidden, pride-protected zones that are kept under lock and key, those stubborn areas where I’d rather not delve too deeply into my actions and motivations. In these particular areas, I just know I’m right, and if I should happen to discover that I’m not, my entire foundation may be rocked to the core.
One such area is my leadership when confronted with colleagues who do not share my vision, philosophy, or beliefs about education or what is best for students. Like all school leaders, I am confronted with those who make decisions that will obviously have adverse affects on the school environment if left unchallenged. I work with a number of other administrators and teachers on any given day, and many times these individuals do not act in a manner befitting a part of the team that I work to captain as we progress through each new school year.

So, how do my actions in handling these individuals measure up to that quintessential leader I mentioned earlier, Atticus Finch? I can say with confidence that in the past seven years I have displayed many of the qualities I most esteem in Atticus’s character. I have led by example, quietly doing what needed doing; I have been genuine and scrupulous in my leadership, inviting conflict only when it is best for kids. It can be argued that working successfully in my position with difficult relationships is one of the toughest tests of professionalism I have faced, and I’m mostly proud of my performance.
But what was it Atticus said to Scout about truly understanding a person? He said that to master this art, one must consider everything through the other person’s point of view. Do I stop in my daily reflections to think about the perspectives of those with whom I struggle? Do I consider the “why” of their actions or only their failure to act the way I believed they should? Do I “climb into [their] skin and walk around in it”? As it does with any failure, it hurts to admit how far I have fallen short in this particular skill.

Buckingham & Coffman (1999) offer up advice for managers that can greatly influence my response to disagreements with colleagues. They maintain that great managers know that “people don’t change much” and urge managers not to “waste time trying to put in what was left out” but to “try to draw out what was left in”, for “that is hard enough” (p. 57). I often spend more time trying to put into others what was left out and unwittingly discount much of what I should be working to draw out of them. Yes, at times those I find myself in opposition to truly need to be called to the carpet regarding a given issue, but does this mean they are completely without the talents to navigate the situation if led effectively? Of course not. It is easier to focus on what I find lacking in a colleague or his actions than it is to dig deep and capitalize on the strengths he undoubtedly has.
Have I missed key opportunities to provide even better leadership to staff and students because of my limited experience with human relations and the importance of honing in on the strengths of others? Buckingham & Coffman (1999) seemed to suggest so, when they stated, “Great managers look inward. They look inside the company, into each individual, into the differences in style, goals, needs, and motivations of each person . . . these subtle differences guide them toward the right way to release each person’s unique talents into performance” (p. 141). If I had looked at the very different talents that my team members and I possessed, who knows what we could have accomplished together, beyond the great things that we each did individually?
Dwelling on the past won’t change it, but reflecting on it will almost certainly lead to my becoming a greater manager, one who doesn’t simply “get by” in tough professional relationships but learns to transcend differences in talent and style to raise organizations to the next level of success. I can move forward with a better toolbox for handling that next human relations hurdle that I will likely find just around the next turn. Maintaining my focus on the many accomplishments I have made in my first seven years of leadership, I plan to spend the remainder of my years engaging in what Buckingham & Coffman (1999) called the “conscious act” of “finding each person’s strengths and then focusing on those strengths” (p. 143). I think that’s what Atticus would do, and I can’t think of a better act to follow.
________________
References
Buckingham, M. & Coffman, C. (1999). First, break all the rules: What the world’s
greatest managers do differently. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Lee, H. (1960). To kill a mockingbird. Columbus, OH: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill.

This is an older post piece by Maria, posted originally on her personal blog. I thought it was great introduction to her writing and her wisdom.

You can follow Maria on Twitter at www.twitter.com/drmariapeek

The post What Would Atticus Do? appeared first on Future Behaviour.

Maria is an incredibly experienced school leader within the US education system. Whilst working as a school principal, she undertook her Phd in Educational Leadership and specialised in PBIS and school climate.

Her experience of implementing whole school behaviour change using PBIS on the ground in her own schools, coupled with her specialist academic research, makes her perfectly suited to assisting schools with their PBIS and whole school behaviour improvement implementation.

Making Future Behaviour truly international, Maria will be offering Future Behaviour training and support to schools in the US and beyond from her base in Indianapolis, USA.

The aim, as always, is to have the most positive impact we can on the lives of our children and young people. With Maria’s skills marrying so perfectly with ours, we’re so confident we can make our impact even greater, something we’ll certainly need to do in the current climate.

You can contact Maria through our contact page or email her directly: maria@futurebehaviour.co.uk.

The only thing we need to resolve is how to spell behaviour/behavior.

Or find her on twitter at:

www.twitter.com/drmariapeek

The post Introducing Dr Maria Peek appeared first on Future Behaviour.

1. Don’t just nick one from another school and adapt it. Your school is your school. Start with your context, not the contents of someone else’s policy.
2. Don’t make it a list of wishes. Differentiate between ‘Policy’ ie what you want to happen, and ‘Practice’, what actually happens.
3. Look at what your school (or even one teacher) does well. Ask yourself, should everyone be doing this?
4. Look at what other schools do well. Ask yourself, should everyone in my school do this?
5. Ask yourself, what does the research say?
6. Start with one element of the policy. Consult staff. Train everyone. Embed it. Don’t move onto the next one until the last one is embedded. Go slow, to embed fast.
7. Don’t just use words. The best policies have pictures and, even better, video.
8. Revisit and monitoring cycles are not optional. Put them in your policy/practice document. (In your school, what is the ratio of training : revisiting : monitoring for staff meetings over the course of a year?)
9. Make the policy ‘live’ on Google Docs. Highlight what’s embedded, what you’re working on and what you’d like to embed in medium/long term but not now. Staff can use comments to clarify elements and get advice. Reviewing your policy once a year is pathetic. It should be a living, breathing, organic document.
10. SLT must look at what else we’re trying to embed across school. Too often, I see different subjects, SEND, assessment, CP etc fighting it out for staff meeting time and school focus. It usually ends up with an email war, piling pressure on teachers. Prioritise.
11. Make the contents of your policy explicit. Ask yourself, if an NQT read this, would it show them what is embedded at our school and what we’re working on right now. How useful would the document be to them?
12. Check fidelity (this is how many staff and children use the approach you’ve tried to embed). Most school leaders think strategies are more embedded than they often turn out to be. I know because I check the fidelity of behaviour approaches when I work with a school. Publish fidelity to the staff team.

More information on the ideal behaviour management policy can be found here. Same rules apply, whatever the policy.

The post How to write a school policy (not just a behaviour one) appeared first on Future Behaviour.

It’s a trick question.

I ask this question in my training sessions and I’ve seen a pattern in the answers. Many, but by no means all, say that the student’s behaviour needs looking into.

What if I then told you that this student received these fifty negative referrals from just two of his fourteen teachers.

What might we assume?

It’s easy to assume that these two teachers are struggling to cope. Maybe they are new to school or newly qualified?

However, what if these teachers were experienced, high performing practitioners? Should we go back to assuming that the pupil is the ‘source of the problem’?
What if, with some gentle investigation, we found that the increased number of referrals happened in the two subjects the pupils had decided not to study at GCSE?

Imagine we were half as good at collecting, analysing and acting upon behaviour data as we are for academic progress data.

One of the reasons we don’t collect and analyse behaviour data as robustly as we should is that we don’t believe the data is true. I’d suggest it doesn’t matter if it’s true. Good data allows us to formulate questions that help is to identify what the most sensible next intervention might be for a pupil or a teacher. Alternatively it can help school leadership to examine whether their current approach to behaviour is the right one.

Data, is your friend, whether it tells the truth or not.

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In my training, I joke that my wife is twenty years into a lifetime project to make me the perfect husband. I say that my lovely wife has approximately a thousand specific targets for me to achieve to make me a better husband, father and human being, and that this list is stuck to the fridge door for easy, daily access. Then I highlight my wife’s obvious intelligence by revealing the secret to her success in this long term project – she only works on two to three targets at one time. She has listed all of her expectations but knows that trying to get me to change in all of these areas is futile. She knows the secret of how to achieve personal change, change in the classroom or organisational change: it needs to be done slowly. This doesn’t mean that fast change is impossible, but in my experience of working with thousands of teachers and hundreds of school leaders, the common factor in unsuccessful change is trying to change too many things at the same time. Actually, you’ll be shocked by how quickly change can be achieved when you focus intently on just two to three very well-defined priorities.

“If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.”

Jim Collins, Business Consultant

Pushing a hundred boulders

Imagine one hundred very large, round boulders lined up next to each other in a field, and you’ve been asked to move these enormous, heavy items to the other end of the field. Knowing you could only move one boulder a few centimeters with each energy sapping push, would you move each one a few centimeters and then go back to the first? I’m going to guess you’d go to the first one and focus on getting just one heavy boulder to the other end of the field. Imagine the energy you’d waste running from one boulder to the next just to move each one a few centimetres. Not only is the energy used more efficiently by focusing on one, but when you and others look at the progress that’s been made, one method of change will look like nothing much is different. By focusing on one boulder at a time, the amount of progress is obvious and spurs us on to the next one. We know we can do it. Now imagine that instead of just one person being responsible for moving the boulders, a whole organisation is. This is the role of school leaders. They choose the boulders and they have a much higher chance of success if they focus their energy.

In most behaviour policies there are too many virtual boulders to push. Even the behaviour policies that I’ve read that are more specific in their descriptions of expectations, are invariably a list of things that don’t happen in the school but the school leader wishes they did. Below is an example of a Policy/Practice document and this is key to both defining and realising your expectations.

The Policy/Practice Document

DOWNLOAD YOUR OWN WORD VERSION HERE

The highlighting shows which parts of the policy are actual school-wide practice, which are our current priorities, and which are chosen priorities for some point in the future. Expectations highlighted in green are embedded across school with above 85% fidelity. This means more than 85% of staff use the routine and more than 85% of students know the routine across the school.

We then choose two to three priorities to embed next and highlight them in amber. We don’t choose a hundred things. We choose no-brainers like how to stop groups or children and the language used to teach appropriate noise levels, stuff that every teacher will need. (Later, when you’re embedding harder stuff like metacognitive approaches, then you may decide on specific responses to students who say they are stuck, for example.) These are the routines we’ll have assemblies about, that each class will spend lesson-time embedding, that posters in school will advertise, that will be mentioned in briefings and staff meetings, and whose associated language will be heard ringing out across school for weeks.

How do we know when a routine is embedded? Simple – we ask the children. One of my jobs when I’m working with a school is to talk to two students from each class for two minutes. I ask them, for example, how their teacher stops them when they want the class’s attention.

Here’s an example list of my findings before training with the staff.

• My teacher stops me by:
• Sounding a klaxon
• Counting down from 50
• Shouting “BE QUIET”
• Clapping
• 1-2-3 Eyes on me
• Slowly sobbing and saying, “Please be quiet, I’m retiring in the summer…”
• Shaking a tambourine
• I could go on. There are thousands.

In one primary school I collected over thirty different ways to get children’s attention. This isn’t good. With the Policy/Practice document above you can decide which routines and expectations to embed across school and measure to what extent they are embedded.

Then we’d feed the results of our research back to staff. We won’t call them out. We’ll just feedback the whole school fidelity percentages. We need to give students and staff much more time to embed routines than we think. Here’s an example of the data. The first one shows what we’d collect. Notice I don’t even name the classes.

This one shows what we’d send out to staff.

My post last week was about how it’s the ‘weigh-in’ element of Weight-Watchers that makes it effective. The Policy/Practice Document is the equivalent of the recipes and the monitoring is the equivalent of the weigh-in. We need both.

The most important bit

Staff need to know that the monitoring is there to make life easier – for everyone. Imagine you’re an NQT and your school gives you a Policy/Practice document like the one above. It simply lists five or six school routines that you know your new class will know. Likewise, those poor, beleaguered colleagues that cover PPA will know that nearly every teacher in school stops their class in the same way (perhaps not every time, but certainly often enough for the class to respond to the instruction instantly).

Consistency. You want it. The students want it. Ofsted want it. This is how to achieve it.

If you’d like a copy of the Policy/Practice document in Word/ Google Doc format or would like a free Behaviour Policy Review, just email me at greg@futurebehaviour.co.uk.

The post Your behaviour policy is rubbish. Here’s why. appeared first on Future Behaviour.

I’m writing this email while a ‘Focus partner’ gets on with their work in Vienna. Focusmate is a virtual, video-based coworking platform that matches determined procrastinators with other determined procrastinators. I’ve lived with me for my whole life and I know I’m good at getting urgent work done, I’m even better at getting important, urgent work done but awful at getting important non-urgent work done. I’m on the road a lot but I sometimes work at home. Trying to finish my book is important but non-urgent. That’s where 50 minute sessions with an online partner come in. We both commit to a specific task to complete in the session. No answering emails, Whatsapp, YouTube ‘research’ or any other focus-ruiners.
There is science behind this approach. “Focusmate integrates 5 behavioural triggers to achieve a flow state:

• Pre-commitment
• Implementation intentions
• Social pressure
• Accountability
• Specificity in task definition”

This is exactly how I help schools to embed long-lasting changes to school-wide expectations of behaviour.

When it comes to school organisational change, we tend to be good at the equivalent of recipes and calorie-counting advice, but much less effective with supportive weigh-ins.

In next week’s newsletter, we’ll look at how Future Behaviour’s Policy/Practice document helps schools achieve their aims effectively and supportively.

Want more information straight away? Just reply to this email.

Until next time,

Greg
www.futurebehaviour.co.uk

PS I wrote this article in less than 20 minutes because of my levels of focus. Give Focusmate a try.

The post Why Weight-Watchers Works – and what we can learn about organisational change appeared first on Future Behaviour.