Dear Kid Whisperer,

I am an old-school fourth-grade teacher who has been teaching for 25 years. I’ve always used a behavior chart where students have to pull green, yellow and then a red card when they act up. I try to give a warning before I have them pull a card. I call parents once the student pulls his last card. I feel like other teachers are being judgmental about my chart. It doesn’t really work, and I’m considering an alternative approach. Thoughts?

Answer: First, while I’m very much against behavior charts with every fiber of my being, I’m also against being judgmental about any way educators try to get positive behaviors from kids. You are doing your best. People should either offer to help or leave their judgment to themselves.

With this in mind, yes, throw away your behavior chart immediately. You are accidentally, and with the best of intentions, making your life, and the lives of your students, worse. You have created a system of warnings that is guaranteed to make behaviors worse. Each pulling of the card (three, potentially) and the extra verbal warning amount to four potential warnings for every kid every day.

Here’s some scary math if, let’s say, you have 25 kids in your room:

25 kids times 4 warnings each equals:

100 negative behaviors that can happen every day without you doing anything.

Under those conditions, I wouldn’t want to be within 10 miles of your room, let alone try to teach in it.

To make matters worse, calling home could be a reward for some of your students. As you have surely noticed, the 10% of your students who take 90% of your time do not care what kind of attention they get. They want you to call home.

Behavioral Leadership teachers across the country have classrooms where anything can happen at any time to their students who use serious or chronic negative behaviors, just like in life. They put a premium on building relationships and sharing control through explicitly taught procedures and strategies, which prevent a vast majority of negative behaviors from occurring. In addition, they mitigate negative behaviors when they’re not too chronic or serious. Then, if the behavior continues, they delay a learning opportunity that will teach instead of punish. Here’s how I would start with the mitigation level.

Kid is poking a classmate under his desk.

Kid Whisperer uses Confused Eye: He looks at Kid as if to say “Dude. You are awesome. That behavior is less than awesome. Therefore, I’m confused.”

Kid continues with the poking.

Kid Whisperer moves towards Kid.

Kid continues with the poking.

Kid Whisperer hovers next to Kid.

Kid continues with the poking.

Kid Whisperer (whispering so that only Kid can hear) Yikes. This is unfortunate. I’m going to help you do some learning later. (now to Kid # 2, the poke-ee, still in a whisper) Could you sit over there, please? Thanks.

Kid #2 sits in a spot more than one arm-length from Kid.

Later, at a non-academic time of Kid Whisperer’s choosing, Kid Whisperer will have Kid sit and practice not poking people. Since we don’t want to pull in the poke-ee to be used as a crash-test dummy, I volunteer to be used as such. Kid sits next to me and practices not poking me while I work on lesson plans. Intermittently, I reinforce the desired behavior by saying, “I noticed that your hands are to yourself” every few minutes. Since it’s not a punishment by which the goal is pain, but a Delayed Learning Opportunity where the goal is learning, Kid can draw, stare or read while he concentrates on not poking me.

Once time is up, I ask if he is an expert at being a non-poker. No lectures, no “Did you learn your lesson!?” since he showed me with his actions that he is an expert at being a person who doesn’t poke people -- an important life skill.

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