Positive behavior strategies are evidence-based, proactive approaches to changing challenging student behavior. Some examples of positive behavior strategies are pre-correcting and prompting and nonverbal signals.
Practices to support positive behavior
Create a classroom layout that supports students.
How to get started
- Provide flexible spaces like a reading corner to support different types of learning.
- Position furniture to ensure smooth transitions.
- Organize materials in safe and accessible ways.
- Seat students near peers who model appropriate behavior and who can ignore inappropriate behavior.
- Seat students near you so you can use strategies like active supervision and pre-correction.
Practices to support positive behavior
Post and define positive behavior expectations.
How to get started
- With your students, co-create classroom expectations that are observable, measurable, positive, and understandable.
- Limit expectations to three to five statements.
Practices to support positive behavior
Explicitly teach behavior expectations.
How to get started
- Plan, teach, and practice expected behaviors.
- Plan, teach, and practice routines and procedures.
- Reinforce and re-teach routines, procedures, and expectations throughout the year.
- Establish ways to monitor your classroom and frequently check in with students.
Practices to support positive behavior
Have systems to respond to behavior.
How to get started
- Acknowledge positive behavior when you see it. Research suggests making five positive comments for every correction.
- Provide rewards (when appropriate) for demonstrating positive behavior.
- Collect data to look at the causes of inappropriate behavior.
- Collaborate with specialists to use data to create supports for individual students.
- Explicitly teach and reinforce new skills aligned to appropriate behavior.
- Set competence anchors for students.
Practices to support positive behavior
Partner with families.
How to get started
- Gather information about students from families and caregivers.
- Engage the family when a student demonstrates challenging behavior.
- Follow up with families to share when a student is demonstrating positive behavior.
Build a trusting relationship between teachers, students, and families.
Instead of seeing behavior as a problem, you’ll show empathy by looking at students with compassionate curiosity. With this view, you can shift your focus from “fixing” students to understanding them. You can also develop a more collaborative relationship with students by working together to understand when and under what circumstances a behavior occurs.
Teach and reinforce new skills.
Once you understand why a student behaves a certain way, you can respond more effectively. You can teach new behaviors that serve the same purpose. Many social-emotional learning programs incorporate specific strategies for teaching behaviors, like how to follow directions or ignore peer distractions.
Prompt you to consider multiple reasons for behavioral difficulties.
Students might not have the language or communication skills to express what they need. Or the behavior could be a way to avoid a difficult situation or task. Some students behave in negative ways to get attention or to get what they want. In other cases, they may be reacting to an environment that isn’t supporting their learning. Or there could be a cultural difference. This may prompt you to take a culturally responsive approach to analyzing the behavior and your response to it.
How can families support this at home?
Behavior expectations might be different at home than they are at school. It’s important for families to know what’s expected in your classroom. Talk with families about the behavioral expectations in the classroom and the language you use to talk about behavior.
This will help families understand new phrases they hear or behavior changes they see. Also, families may want to use the same expectations at home. Share with them these parent-child behavior contracts to get started.
