Struggles
Finding the time to fill in the paperwork and dealing with the students is the most common issue raised with this system.
Managing the system can be lightened by using a number of simple methods.
Photocopy top and tailed green sheets for particular lessons where you want to make an impact with good behaviour. Have the date, class, teacher’s signature, reason for the sheet and the action taken (Praise or praise and sticker) already completed. If you need to personalize them, circle the appropriate behaviours yourself. Give these sheets out as you go during the lesson. Get the children to write in their names and to sign.
During a ½ term, I would expect to see around 50 green sheets for each student ie 6-10 a week or more if the class is in training.
Avoid giving whole class green sheets as they begin to lose their value. Let the children take them home that evening. They can stick them in the next day.
Use your TA to photocopy the sheets and even to fill them out for you as they are given out. These sheets are the easiest to manage.
We send them home to start making the link between school and parent in a positive way rather than the phone call home for poor behaviour which historically is all some parents get! Hopefully it gives us a platform on which to build good relationships when we meet the parents in the school and enables a more positive discussion. It also gives us a hook to get out of a negative situation with parents should the situation arise.
As for negative behaviour sheets, as staff, we would need to find the time to deal with these behaviours anyway and using the sheet system allows us to keep the punishment appropriately levelled and not to raise the stakes unnecessarily. If you get a presenting behaviour, keep it at that level. The corporate levelling is a vital facet in showing fairness to students and parents.
It is important to keep behaviours in perspective and not to let them accumulate until you explode. Dealing with behaviours yourself is essential to building relationships and boundaries.
It is not the length of the sanction or the severity of punishment that will change the student's behaviour in the future, it is how the time is used that it crucial.
A short word after a lesson may be all that is needed to reset the relationship and expectations for the next lesson. So a planned, private five minute conversation can have a more positive impact on the child than more punitive measures