March 8th, 9th, 11th, and 16th

As I said in the last post, the week of Open House I had a phonics lesson where I pulled out all of the stops, and it was extremely effective.

So for all four of the dates in the title, I maintained the same strategies. Each of the phonics lessons had students writing personal behavior goals in the morning, five dollar prizes possible, chance for popcorn kernels towards our party, and behavior charts.

It is consistently helping our talking stay low, and all of the students that are special focuses are doing well with them as well. The most that any of the seven have talked out during these four dates is three times in a lesson, which is still an improvement over where we started.

A more telling sign is the total talking out times for the class during the lesson. I started with an average of 30-40 times total talking out incidents during a lesson, and these four lessons were extremely low at 9, 18, 21 and 15. See the chart below (the spike on 2/8 was when I found that the novelty of the behavior charts had worn off and I needed to readdress the situation):



Their positive behavior has spread to other subjects as well, and the art teacher who comes in once a month even commented that the class has made such a vast change that it is like "night and day" with how they were in the beginning of the year.

Another interesting thing that I noticed at the end of these four days of tracking is that the boys who have been using behavior charts no longer need this tool to maintain their quiet working. They have developed self discipline without having to give themselves happy faces for not talking.

I decided after seeing more than one day with no happy faces on most of the cards, but quiet boys that they had outgrown this extra intervention, and so my lesson on March 19th no longer used this tool.

They were still able to do well, and the class as a whole only talked out 10 times, and most of those 10 shout outs were not from the boys I have been focusing on. Three of them talked out once, but that was it, all the rest of the talking out incidents were from other students.

I feel much more successful as a teacher now that I am able to get and maintain order over my class this year. I know it will become more difficult as it moves closer to summer, but I hope that the students have learned enough self control that we will be able to still be a quiet working class up until the last day of school.