Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Pillar Pride in the Hallway!




Welcome back to school! I hope everyone had a refreshing holiday break and that you are re-energized and ready to be back at school! Today is our first day back from Christmas break. To start off our new year on the right foot, we are beginning the year by reviewing hallway expectations. We want to be T.R.R.F.C.C. in the hallway!!

To teach the behavior that we want our students to exhibit in the hallway, we held a series of "mini" assemblies throughout the day to teach and model the hallway behavior we want to see. We held assemblies throughout the day for two classes at a time, and we held the assemblies in the area that we want the behaviors practiced - in the hallway. The principal, family-school coordinator, secretary, and one of our Character Counts Superheroes acted out the assembly. The message we got across was simple - that we expect to see good behavior in the hallway! The script was fun, we got to model the bad behavior and then our superhero saved the day and modeled for the students good hallway behavior!!

We also have made posters to place in our hallways to remind students of their hallway behavior. The posters are a visual reminder of what the hallway expectations are. We also introduced a school wide expectation for the noise level in our building. These posters will be placed in all of the classrooms as a reminder about the noise level expectations in our building.

These mini assemblies were an opportunity to teach this skill to all the students in our elementary buildings. Now that we have taught the skill, when a staff member sees a student NOT following the expectations, we will RE-TEACH the expectation and not scold or punish them for not following the expectation. In order for this to work, the entire staff needs to be on board with this.

When a staff member re-teaches the skill, it should take no more than 1 minute. The staff member will take the child to the poster in the hallway . . . ask them which one of the expectations the aren't following, and then practice it. Just as the intial teaching of this skill occured in the hallway, the re-teaching should occur in the setting that the behavior needs to occur.

After our assemblies today, our hallway behavior was much better! I am sure we will need to continue to reinforce and revisit this skill throughout the year, but so far we are off to a great start!! Happy 2011 everyone!

No comments:

Post a Comment