As a parent and a teacher I think it is very important to teach children to monitor their own behavior.  I hope you will try some of the ideas that I have used in classrooms and with my own children.

Once I retired from my everyday job, I wanted to make sure I did not lose touch with children and what they needed behaviorally to do well in school and in life. I decided to do some substitute teaching.  Most of the schools I went to did not have a school-wide discipline program. Each teacher used his/her own strategy for keeping the children on task.  I was basically on my own in terms of discipline.  After teaching at a high school with a particularly rambunctious group, I asked one of the students if the class behavior was typical or were the students more unruly because I was a substitute. “Oh no,” she assured me. “We are always like that.”   I was a little surprised and so I asked her what the regular teacher does to keep a handle on the students.  She looked me up and down, thought for a minute, and then pursing her lips said, “Well she’s a lot bigger than you and yells a lot louder.”

The next time I went to substitute, I was armed with my own behavior management plan where the children would learn to control their behavior and not rely on me to do it for them. My next job was in a middle school with class of, once again, high spirited youngsters.  They quickly showed me the class discipline plan.  Each student has a sheet of paper and they were given checks if they were inappropriate.  At the end of the day, they would get a star if they had behaved all day.  I told them we would not be using that today.  This was distressful at first because they all wanted to get stars at the end of the day.

I noticed that all the desks were positioned to face the teacher except for one.  This child’s desk was turned away from all the others and I asked him why he was sitting apart.  He smiled and said he talked too much so he had been sent to an island by himself.  He was only turned away from the others and still was able to interact – which he did a lot.  He was actually more like a peninsular than an island.  I told him while I was here he could rejoin the mainland.

It did not take long to identify the behavior problems in the classroom.   Everyone spoke whenever they had the urge, everyone seemed to move around at will, and everyone expected me to be mean.   So I set some class rules.  First rule, I wasn’t going to be mean and I would not yell.  Second rule, raising their hand and getting called on was important because they were interrupting each other.  So for now, until they could stop interrupting, we would use the old hand raising thing.  Third, if you need to go somewhere, bathroom, drink, sharpen pencil, get something, please ask. Not because I am going to say “no” but because I will get distracted when someone starts moving around and then I lose track of what I’m doing. And that was it. Rules were done.  I didn't ask for a lot of input on the rules which I would have done if I was going to be there for longer than a day.  Just keep it simple-I was just the sub.

I wanted the students to control themselves and not rely on me.   I gave each student a post-it note with these instructions.  Every time you want to blurt out and you don’t (you control yourself) give yourself a check.  At the end of the morning, I will collect the notes and see how well you are doing.  It was a very powerful lesson for all the children because when they wanted to talk and didn’t, you could see the internal physical struggle they were using control themselves.  I was able to praise them for “not talking out” and then invite them into the conversation.  When I collected the post it notes at noon, I spoke to each student about how they were doing.  Some students had a filled their papers with checks. Those students were the ones who really needed to modify that behavior.  So even though they still would talk out, they were apparently controlling themselves a lot.  Whew – can’t imagine what that would have been like if they had not kept some of their behavior in check. Other children only had a few checks – those were students who were in more control of their behavior.  But all the children became aware of their need to control their behavior and the class ran very smoothly and everyone was happy.   When they came back from lunch I returned the morning sticky note with a message about how well they were doing and how much I enjoyed them. They were each rewarded with a small piece of candy and a very pleasant teacher.