What I Have Had Time to Write About

Christine B. Malone
2/10/09
SPED 824 – Post
Article Critique #1
Horner, R., Sugai, G., Lewis-Palmer, T., & Todd, A. (2001). Teaching School-Wide Behavioral Expectations. Emotional & Behavioral Disorders in Youth. Fall, 77-79, 93-97.

Horner, et al, presented a very straight-forward and almost refreshingly obvious argument about, not only setting up behavioral norms in schools, but explicitly teaching those expectations to all students. Some of their data, especially the “Tertiary Intervention” graph (pp. 78), resonated with my own experience as a teacher and what I have witnessed in the front office of my school site. Simply making clear who needs the most behavioral resources, helps a school know where to start intervention. Most importantly, all children need to be taught, along with phonics, algebra and topic sentences, the school's expectations of them in their everyday school lives. As educators we can only complain for so long about how our students are not parented correctly or how they are a product of their environments (pp. 78). We have to take action and be proactive about teaching them what it is to be a caring individual and citizen in our global society.
Considering we have the attention of our student body for at least 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, we should be able to teach them how to behave as a part of a well-rounded education. As I read this article I continually thought about my current school site, which contains an elementary and junior high. Our principals are fantastic about, first, creating open relationships with all students. They do not just sit in their office, but are visible and available to teachers and students. At the beginning of the year they encouraged that all teachers repeated activities like lining up or transitions until students learned to do it respectively and quietly. This also included a lot of students being given referrals in the first month. As a result, our student body is pretty much “under control,” but I think the students still need understand exactly why they need to behave.
Soul Cafe was a regular assembly provided by a contracted company for the San Bruno School District and I attended a few while I was a student teacher. When I talked to my Mentor Teacher about the reasoning behind the intervention, she said that for a lot of San Bruno's children, there seemed to be a lot of violence and adverse behavior. Soul Cafe clearly outlined certain positive attributes and through role-play and skits students were given the language to describe their feelings, good and bad. They provided “I Messages” cards that all students used to resolve their own problems with each other and teachers even used the lexicon when talking about their own feelings to reinforce the program around school. I could see how giving the students the chance to learn about what is expected behaviorally and the words to help them to resolve issues, was key to a more respectful student body.
At my current situation, I believe the students know what is expected of them because the staff all seems to be on the same page, but they do not understand the reasoning. On the other hand, all the students with IEPs are completely integrated into the general education classrooms. With that, they are treated like all the other students and, for the most part, are expected to behave the same as the other students. In this scenario, as compared to my experience in a Special Day Class, there is less behavior from these target students. In fact, most of the students that frequent the principals' office are mostly students without special needs (even though we know every student has their own “special” needs).
All the same, the whole student body needs direct instruction on exactly how they need to act, in all areas on the school (IE: the playground, cafeteria, and hallways. pp.77). Since we have older students, they could even be involved in an Expectation Campaign and make posters for all the different areas of school. At the moment, especially since my school is a charter that prides itself on it's test scores, most of the day is spent on reading, writing, and mathematics. This takes well-behaved classrooms to achieve high levels of instruction. In all of this “rigor” I sincerely believe we are loosing site of our responsibility to teach children to be a whole person, including how to be a caring, respectable, and sincere human being (not to mention the lack of instruction in the arts). If the teachers are not teaching the core curriculum, they are planning with their team about what they are teaching next, or comparing data from regular rounds of assessments. The staff meetings are mostly about talking about data and professional development days have never been about what we, as a school, want to teach our student about positive attributes. Our school motto is “Everyone goes to College,” but a whole lot of people who attend college still do not embody the people skills to be a balanced individual, that cares not only out themselves, but others. This article provides sound and simplistic reasoning why we need to take the lesson time to help our students learn to be well-behaved on a school-wide level.