Student behavior gets a bad wrap. Often focused on compliance and management, attempts at helping students to learn prosocial behaviors can be frought. Many of our typical "behavior expectations" are white-dominant culture norms and don't honor student agency and voice. At the same time, interacting with one another in a shared space and active learning self-management strategies are essential. Today we will consider how we can support positive student behavior with an equity lens.

There are three types of behavior expectations:

• Rules or Expectations: These are decided upon by people of authority. They could be your written "school rules" but they can also be district policies, laws that govern the school, fire code, etc.
  
• Norms or Agreements: These are decided upon by the group as a whole. These could be group norms you set at the beginning of a small group or classroom agreements for how we will treat one another.
  
• Unspoken Rules or Social Norms: These are rules supported and reinforced by a group of people, usually implicitly. The group of people could be a friendship group, club, culture, school building, etc. 
  

Here's the thing, all three of these types of expectations are always present. Sometimes I'll see someone write on twitter - "no more behavior expectations." Um, when that happens, we just push more into the unspoken rule realm. I would argue that doing so increases bias. 

When we consider the behavior expectations experienced by our students, the first step is to take a look at the rules in place and ask ourselves:

Do we elevate white cultural norms in our expectations? Can students be a part of your learning community and be themselves? For example, if a student has to cut their hair to participate in a sporting event or is shushed if they speak a language other than English, does that elevate their culture or expect them to conform to white cultural norms? I recommend that you read this article on How School Leaders Reinforce Supremacy Through Discipline and Behavior Expectations for an extensive look. The article also includes 10 Questions for Ensuring Equity in School Discipline.

After we've checked ourselves to make sure that the rules we are reinforcing are appropriate, we can work to support students in learning the expectations, routines & procedures. But wait, I thought expectations, rules, and procedures were bad? They don't allow students to be their authentic selves? Remember that we do need expectations, rules, and procedures to share a space and have a positive learning community. If you've ever tried to get 25 kindergarteners from point A to point B without losing anyone, you quickly realize why we walk in a single file line. When 600 high schoolers share a cafeteria, there will need to be rules about how to get your lunch quickly enough to have time to eat and what is expected for cleaning up your space. 

Delivery of explicit instruction for expecations, routines, and procedures allows students and staff to be clear about what is expected. It's important to also include feedback from a diverse representation of students (and their families) on behavior expectations and their implementation. I once had the honor of speaking with a few high school girls who talked about how dress codes were unfairly enforced at their school. They told me that a skinnier, white girl was rarely dress-coded for the same torn jeans that worn by students of color who had been dress-coded. 

Nobody's perfect, students will mess up. When that happens, we can view their behavior with a deficit lens and use punishment to fix their behavior. In reality, the situation is more complicated than that. The student may need an (appropriate) consequence but they also may need to learn a new skill. The other possibility is one we don't talk about, the one where the adult has an unconscious (or conscious) bias that is impacting their view of the behavior in the first place. 

Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, uses a Mindful Reflection Protocol to help educators in "a process of deep reflection that interrupts historically deficit views and response to students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds." Read more in the full protocol but the steps include:

• Describe the behavior or interaction
• Reflect on (your own) feelings
• Explain your interpretation of the student's behavior
• Consider alternative explanations (check assumptions)
• Identify one small change to reframe and respond differently
• Continuously revisit

Please share with me how you use an equity lens with behavior in your building. Do you have any effective strategies?

This week my co-author, Alicia Oglesby, and I had the honor of speaking with Laura & Kim from Counselor Accents.  We talk about our book, Interrupting Racism: Equity and Social Justice in School Counseling. We also tell the story of how we met, what made us write a book, how many times we've actually seen each other in person and what will make me walk away from it all and start a lemonade stand.

The real topics we discuss:

• equity vs. equality
• messing up
• student access
• bias
• what to do in return to school

We truly enjoyed our conversation with the ladies at Counselor Accents and I hope you will take a moment to listen and let us know what you think. You can find the episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Resolving conflicts with others may be life's greatest social emotional skill. Avoiding conflict, seeking conflict, mishandling conflict is tough for many an adult (raises hand). It's especially hard for kids who are also mastering a long list of other social emotional skills like self-regulation, managing strong feelings, and problem solving. Because of this, I've avoided peer mediation. Also, because I'm lazy because here's the thing - peer mediation is hard. It's not easier than handling it yourself. But it is valuable. It empowers your mediators as leaders but it also empowers the students resolving conflict to seek help from peers and to handle this tough thing.

As always, I've tried to include everything you need here to get you started. If you're interested in purchasing the materials ready made, you can find them on my TpT store all nicely organized for you.

Always start with core! We want our peer mediators to be wonderful conflict resolution leaders but that will work best if all students have the skills. In this series, we'll teach 2 classroom lessons on handling emotions and resolving conflict. 

Lesson 1

• Intro feelings - feelings can be big or small. Give students a list of feelings and ask them to rank in order of intensity. For example: bummed, disappointed, mad, angry, furious
• Domino Effect - show a cool video of dominos. Explain the concept of "domino effect" - it can seem inevitable, but remove one domino and the whole thing stops. This can happen with emotions too! 
• Cause and Effect - we each have actions that are related to emotions. For example, you are angry, you might shout; you are sad, you might cry, you are annoyed, you might roll your eyes. Some actions are healthy and some are unhealthy. We might need to use strategies to stop the dominos when we have unhealthy actions related to behavior. 
• Brainstorm Strategies - ask students to write strategies they use for managing emotions. Collect all post-its. Place posters around the room with different emotions and redistribute (appropriate) post-its to groups of students. Ask them to connect strategies to the feelings that would be the best fit. For example, deep breaths for angry or talk it out for nervous. 
• Role Play - if you have time, consider a role play to practice different strategies!

Let the fun begin! When peer mediators are selected, they participate in 3 small group lessons to practice their mediation skills and learn what it means to be a peer mediator. The entire peer mediation process will vary greatly from school to school based on logistics, so I've tried to include some ideas to help you think it through. 

Peer Mediation Practice 1
The first practice lesson includes an inclusion activity and introductions. At this time, we establish norms and really work on working as a team. We spend time thinking about the importance of reputation of peer mediators:

• What does reputation mean?
• Why is reputation important?
• What characteristics make a good mediator?
• What does confidentiality mean?
• Is condifentiality important for peer mediators? Why?

As a culminating activity, we make posters advertising peer mediation to hang when we're ready to start accepting "clients."

Peer Mediation Practice 2
Time to practice! Using the steps of conflict resolution from Lesson 2, we practice peer mediation in groups of three. One person is the role play peer mediator and two people play participants. Each group will have the same scenario for each of three rounds. I created "Let's Resolve our Conflict" table tents to support the process. Following each round, prompt students to give feedback on the role play with sentence starters:

• It was really helpful when you __________________.
• I was confused when __________________.
• An idea to make our session even better is ________________.

In scenario 3, I tried to create a tough situation where the peer mediator may need to seek help from an adult. Some groups won't reach that conclusion but most of the time, at least one group will need help. This is a reason to celebrate! They will need help sometimes and that's OK. 

Peer Mediation Practice 3
We're ready for nuts and bolts. For practice 3, we go over the process and expectation for peer mediation. The process for peer mediation is very unique to your setting. Here are some prompts to consider when introducing process to your students:

• How will students self-refer to peer mediation?
• Can staff members refer students to peer mediation? can administrators choose peer mediation as a result of a discipline referral if both students agree to it?
• When will peer mediation take place?
• How will you document which students participate and the outcome of their participation?
• How long will each peer mediation last?
• What is the schedule for peer mediators? Will multiple sessions occur at once or will mediators rotate through one at a time?
• Do you plan to use conflict resolution notes (taken by mediators during the session), agreement cards (participants write their agreement as a reminder), post-resolution surveys?

​Finally, we spend some more time practicing with mediators thinking up their own scenarios. If you feel like your mediators aren't ready, add more practice sessions until they are!

I think it's important to consider the goal of peer mediation when reflecting on its success. For a long time, I thought it was supposed to be a time saver for me - that students working with other students would help me to get more conflicts resolved with less time. Yeah, that is definitely not the case. Most of the time, it's the same amount of work but, this time, students are getting more out of it because the goal is really learning to resolve conflicts independently. It's actually not about me, go figure. 

As always, I've tried to include everything you need here to get you started. If you're interested in purchasing the materials ready made, you can find them on my TpT store all nicely organized for you.

Recently, I've been hearing a lot of push back on the idea of Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) as a framework for tiered behavior support. I was kind of curious, because really, if you are implementing MTSS, you aren't far from being a "PBIS school." So I asked around. The biggest complaint? Reinforcers. Lots of people think PBIS and they think tickets/dollars/dojos with school stores and big huge individual reinforcement initiatives. 

Guess what? Nobody has time for that. I mean, I guess they do, but I was never up for it. At the schools where I've worked, we've implemented Class Compliments. Just like it sounds, classes can earn compliments for any whole-class behavior that happens outside of their classroom: walking in the halls, time in specials, cafeteria, playground, etc. When the class earns 100 compliments, they earn a reward like pajama day, extra recess, or lunch outside. Easy peasy.

To introduce, we had the counselors and administrators go to each room for a "kick off." We explained the system, gave each class a compliment card, and hyped up the rewards. The compliment cards changed through the years but always had 100 squares/stars/circles that could be colored in when the class returned to the classroom. Anytime the class was out and about, they could earn compliments. To help you out, I've included one at the bottom of this post (may not be visible on mobile). 

We also had to hype up the program with our staff. Compliments are only fun if you earn them! We had to get in the habit of saying "Mrs. Atkins, your class is walking so nicely down the hall." We wanted the compliments to be specific to the positive behavior. In specials, classes could earn up to 4 compliments each class. All of the specialists had different procedures for how this was handled. My favorite was to have a compliment for four specific behaviors and give the compliments specifically for those behaviors. For example, cooperating with your classmates. 

Over the years we got creative! We had a bulletin board that had a football field. For every 100 compliments, your team player would move to the next yard line. Classes that reached 1000 compliments would have their jersey retired. The jerseys were cut out of poster board, had the class' photo on it and all the students got to sign it. About 4-5 classes out of 41 had their jerseys retired each year so it was a big deal! I sure wish I had a picture of it for you, it was super fun.

​How do you support schoolwide behavior at your school? I'd love to hear some new ideas!