Minor Behavior Tracking: Fill & Download for Free

Nope.I think it gives the appearance of working. A teacher with decent classroom management who is being consistent with clear rules and consequences will see results in behavior. But it's not the chart's doing.Let's say kids are moving cards or clips about all day. Oh, look, stuff is moving. That's great, but is general classroom behavior improving?There is some evidence to suggest these systems actually lead to worse behavior in upper grades.Here's your average classroom: the majority of the kids are probably not troublemakers. They will want to please, want to enjoy the class. If you set up clear rules and expectations and make sure the class knows them and have good management, you likely just won't have many issues. Sure, the kids won't be perfect, but that is life.Keep this class in mind and take a look at your average classroom color change behavior system, complete with an incident of your/you’re error.So, the majority of the class will begin each day at Ready to Learn. Perhaps one of them slips up on a rule. The clip moves down to Reminder and you remind of the rule, practice a bit. The day goes on. Maybe another kid is particularly on one that day and even marks down to Teacher's Choice, a consequence to let them know you mean business.Congratulations. You just wasted paper/time/money so Johnny can clip down to Orange, proof he had to sit in time out for 10 minutes.Ah, you say, but what about the bad kids? The ones on red Every. Single. Day.Dear teacher, I hope and pray they are the minority in your classroom. But the average classroom just isn't full of Red on the Chart Kids.Ever seen a behavior plan for those kids? This happy classroom clip chart you see above isn't dissimilar from a lot of these.Which means, you just took a system designed to help legitimate problem kids track their behavior and gave it to the whole class. Tier 2/3 behavior help. It's something the majority of the class doesn't need.Scary Sara is clipping down to Red every day? You have a bigger problem that the clip chart isn't helping. If it were, Scary Sara wouldn't be on Red every day. She needs more . But you just took what could have been a handy data format for her issues and displayed it to the whole class without doing anything else about it.Again, Tier 2/3 behavior support thrown to the whole class. Now what are you going to do to track Scary Sara's behavior at the next support Tier?Scary Sara's behavior tracking does not justify the whole class being involved. The chart does not “hide” her discretions among the rest of the class. The protect their feelings perspective actually isn't high on my radar or concerns list here, but really, we don't need to make a whole class chart for Sara or even Average Aaron who clips down to yellow or orange now and then and pretend it's for the whole class.Ah, you say, but what about the positive placements? Don't those counteract the negatives?Don't you have better things to do than deeply analyze how angelic this or that behavior is? And golly, how do you do that consistently without showing favoritism? Give the kids a compliment, a show of appreciation. Write a note or give a call home if you notice something awesome.The fact is, in a decent classroom, a majority of your kids won't clip down. If they need a reminder, does that really merit the effort and documentation of moving a color? These systems only “work” if you have good management. And if you have good management, do you really need a Tier 2 behavior system for everyone? Taking the time to change color, move clips, etc,.is distracting and interrupts the lesson more than a lot of other options. Kids and parents care less about education and even just general good behavior because the chart ends up being so consuming.There are better ways to handle and even document minor misbehavior. The chart instead only shows pretty goods and those who clearly aren't improving even with a fancy chart. The other kids need a lot more than the class chart.

Because we find out quickly that we are expected to mask or we’re flat-out abused and literally assaulted for our autistic traits. And, in a bizarre catch-22 those masking skills cause people to overlook us because their concept of autism is the one dimensional caricature of a literal pedantic young white male child that keeps being portrayed in media as a self-narrating zoo exhibit, so people don’t know how to identify autism in us when they see it (even though kids are happy to exclude us anyway because they can sense we’re not neurotypical anyway and instead of learning to grow up accepting ourselves and having compassion for ourselves, we have internalized ableism and call ourselves ableist slurs under our breath because other people do).It’s like people have no concept of what masking is and what functions it has and what it does to us. Also, when we can’t mask, we get told things like “don’t do that honey, it makes you look autistic” at the very same time, which is also screwed up. The level of invisibility and erasure we operate under is absurd. And the kids will bully you anyway because they see beyond the mask and alienate you once you have a bad day, even if people are so naive to suggest for you to overwhelmingly tell you to continuously hide your autism traits for fear of you being seen as different.Another thing is too, that social skills change as we go into our teen years, so we don’t get evaluated young until it starts causing issues which cause more internal mental health issues like depression, anxiety, ptsd, and eating disorders— that is, if we’re lucky and people find that connection and recognize it for what it is and don’t try to just flag us as having generalized anxiety disorder. Or people will burnout and hit the wall and shut down in early adulthood. Most of the time no though, people won’t recognize it.Also, with people infantilizing autism as a condition, there is a lack of people who can even evaluate adults— and those people oftentimes have even worse biases than people who evaluate minors because they erroneously think that autism will be identified by now (only the more obvious cases) and an adult presents differently than a young child but people aren’t conceptualizing that (because a person will have more skills at 30 than they will at 5 and most diagnostic criteria goes off of how a male child will stereotypically present).In all, I am privileged to have been diagnosed at 17, unlike a lot of my afab and women peers. Not everyone can afford a diagnosis or can find someone who will properly evaluate them accurately either. I don’t know what would have happened had my mom not had a co-worker that pointed out that my traits and behavior tracked with autism (this co-worker’s kid was autistic), and asked the psychiatrist who was treating my adhd for a referral for an evaluation. Heck, I know women who were diagnosed as being autistic at 60.

No, not at all.Homeschoolers are generally suspicious of the same "system" that teachers hate - standardized testing, increasing class sizes, decreasing recess and the arts, inappropriate uses of tracking (or not tracking), asinine rules only there to prevent people from getting sued, etc.They don't homeschool because they hate teachers, they homeschool because public school is not what it was when they were kids any longer and the resources exist for them to do a better/at least comparable job meeting their goals for their kids without "the system" having them for 6+ hours a day, 9 months of the year.I had students when I taught at prep school that I wished I could tell their parents to homeschool them - bright kids being held back by minor behavioral problems and a lack of accountability that I couldn't provide for my 60 or so students like they needed, or stressed kids who could handle the academics but hated the social drama of high school, or kids who didn't get enough sleep because we made them sit in classes for so many hours a day and then they did sports and drama when they could have self-taught the "school" material in half the time and had a well-balanced life.Now, all of that said, we do get rather upset at teachers who call CPS without cause when we pull our kids from their classes and we do get upset if our students who are coming in for one class or extra-curriculars are grilled, mocked, or stigmatized because they are homeschooled... but that's not about teachers, that's about people who are jerks, and unfortunately a few jerks do sneak in to the teaching profession.