Check out Behavior Notes-
Behavior Notes is a very cool site. The goal is to help you proactively manage behavior rather than reactively track discipline. What a concept! The site is designed to help you quickly document student behaviors- both negative and positive!
Here is a quick overview of the site information:
School administrators and teachers, are feeling increased pressure to manage student behavior. In particular the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) of 2001 requires schools to insure that all students meet a minimum standard.
To this end many schools and school districts have started training their teachers on how to document behavior while utilizing behavior management. The hope and promise of behavior management training programs is that schools will be able to identify students with special needs early on and get students the help that they need. Behavioral documentation provides schools with a record of previous efforts.
There are two critical challenges to successfully implementing behavior management and behavioral documentation.
No Time
The first challenge is providing teachers with a practical, simple way to do the documentation. Teachers who feel overworked and underpaid often feel they are spending more time doing paperwork than teaching. For the few teachers who are willing to invest the necessary time, this usually means writing notes by hand at the end of each day. Hand written notes are time consuming, inconsistent, and sometimes even illegible. With all of these problems, even those teachers who start writing notes with the best of intentions usually stop when they don't see results.
No Reporting and Analysis
The second challenge, assuming that behaviors have actually been documented, is leveraging that information. Simply documenting student behavior is not enough if you don't do something with it. If you can't easily retrieve and analyze the information that has been collected then it doesn't do you any good to collect it in the first place. Handwritten notes, or even Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, are not going to help in identifying and helping students that need special attention.
For behavior management to work it must not only be possible to readily retrieve information about a student, but also to compare that student to their class, school, and grade level. It must be possible to normalize the information on a student by comparing classes and schools to each other. Only then can a behavior management program be effective in bringing teachers, parents, specialists, and administrators together to address students needs.
Have a look for yourself: www.behaviornotes.com
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