Trial run of behavior contracts

On January 25th, I did my first attempt with behavior contracts.

Part of giving them the contracts includes talking with them about what they mean, and why they, and not the other students were given them.

With each student, before they received the contract (which is just an incentive chart with 30 blank squares on it) I told them that it was a tool to help them remember not to talk out in class. I let them know that they were getting it because they were having some trouble staying quiet during class.

They were given the directions that they could draw a happy face on a square for each time that they either raised their hand or that they were going to talk, but then remembered not to. I did not link any kind of incentive (like class money) to this chart, because I didn't want more happy faces than they earned just for the class dollars. Instead I simply told them that their goal was to get as many happy faces as they could before phonics was over.

As you can imagine, having this conversation with students one on one takes some time. More time than I had allowed between math and phonics. So this first day was only a trial run, with only three boys receiving these contracts: N, J, and T.

I felt that with N and J, this first day went extremely well! N only talked once in the whole phonics period, when his average was 2 to 3 times. J also did very well with this contract, where he only talked out twice in the whole lesson, when his previous average was close to 4. Also interesting for these two boys is that neither of them made many happy faces, the behavior contract seemed to work simply because they were more conscious of their own actions.

You'll notice that I did not include T on the first day going well. I don't think that he fully understood the purpose of the contract. He made 20 happy faces (compared to N's 2, and J's 5) but he talked out 5 times during the lesson. Compared to his average of 2/3, it was a worse day for him than the previous three!

Yet, even with this failure among the successes, I felt that this first attempt went very well.