Abstract
Classroom management is one of the top rated concerns of general educators and administrators and the main reason that classroom teachers are reluctant to include students with special needs in their classes (Lyon. Vaaassen, & Toomey, 1989). If teachers are to be successful at teaching and including students with disabilities, then they need powerful and practical behaviour management tools at their disposal. With the goal of transferring responsibility for behaviour management from the teacher to the students, coupled with its demonstrated effectiveness and flexibility (McDougall, 1998; Reid, 1996), a self-management intervention represents an appealing strategy to promote inclusion.
This presentation will describe the classwide peer assisted self-management program and how to implement this in a general education classroom. Using peer-assisted beaming in a game format, 7th grade students learned to monitor and evaluate their own behaviour with the help of a partner and earned social praise and team points for doing so. Data will be presented on the effectiveness of this program in increasing on-task behaviour and use of social skills of targeted students and the class as a whole. In addition, a teacher who has implemented' this programme will describe the "how-to's" of self-management. Including how to adapt the program to their needs, and extend it from behaviour to academic performance and homework completion. A complete manual with lesson plans to train students, steps, and materials to implement the PAL Game is available.
CWPASM is a peer-assisted self-management program based on two existing research-proven interventions: total class involvement in teams of peer partners from ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) (Greenwood, Delquadri, & Carta, 1997) and self-appraisal and self-monitoring from Young and colleagues' (1991) self-management program. It was designed to help students learn to follow classroom rules, use appropriate social skills, and work productively within a teacher-managed, peer-assisted reinforcement system, gradually shifting responsibility from the teacher and peer-partner to the student. CWPASM involves instruction by the teacher in self-management, social skills, and self-monitoring activities and a reinforcement system to increase the frequency with which the behaviors were performed (Mitchem & Wells, in press; Mitchem, Young, West, & Benyo, in press).
Teaching students to self-manage and play CWPASM generally consists of two lessons requiring approximately 90 minutes of instructional time. Lesson 1 provides instruction and practice on the definition, rationale, and benefits of self-management, the ABCs of self-management, and the classroom rules. Lesson 2 includes a review of the classroom rules and provides students instruction on how to evaluate their behavior, mark and match point cards, and report points. We describe the steps in more detail below.
Definition and benefits of self-management. It is important to provide students with a definition of self-management and a description of the benefits of self-management to the students. We tell our students: "Self-management means being responsible for managing and controlling your own behavior so that you can accomplish the things that you want. Your behavior should be acceptable to others and not infringe upon their rights." We ask students to provide examples of how practicing self-management can benefit a person throughout life.
A, B, C's. The A, B, Cs stand for Antecedent, Behavior, and Consequence. In order to self-evaluate behavior, students must understand how behavior is triggered and the results that follow a behavior. Students should be able to apply the ABCs using appropriate terminology to both positive and negative school and home examples of this behavioral cycle. For example, the student is told to study for a math quiz the next day (Antecedent), he watches TV instead (Behavior), and fails the quiz the next day (Consequence).
Review class rules. Students preparing to practice and implement self-management must have a clear understanding of each class rule, including the teacher's expectations regarding each rule. It may help students understand if they label each rule as an antecedent and provide both appropriate and inappropriate responses or behaviors. Students can quickly apply the ABCs to the rules through role-play.
Rating system and evaluating behavior. The rating system is designed to allow students to quickly rate their own behavior and their partner's behavior. The three levels provide the teacher with a built-in fading mechanism. That is, as the students first learn how to evaluate their behavior, they have more opportunities to practice this. As they become more proficient, students rate themselves less frequently. For example, students may begin by rating themselves four times a period or every 10-15 minutes. After demonstrating understanding of self-management, they may rate themselves twice a period, then once, and finally not at all.
Assign partners and teams. To help make CWPASM an enjoyable intervention, students should be allowed to choose their partner. However, to make it effective, some teacher selection may be necessary. We asked students to list three peers they would choose for a partner. We then partnered students based on our knowledge of personalities as well as their preferences. Each week partnerships are randomly assigned to two teams. Teams are designated by color, blue, or white, and partnerships are indicated using their previously assigned number. To save time and materials, we color coded the point cards blue and white and laminated them so that they could be reused.
Mark and match cards. The teacher identifies the time interval for cueing students to evaluate behavior and mark cards. For example, if students are being evaluated four times, the teacher divides the instructional period into four to determine the cueing interval. The students should only require a couple of seconds to evaluate their behavior using the rating system and enter their rating on the point car. At the same time, the students also evaluate their partner's behavior and record the rating on the point card. Instruction continues until the next cueing interval when the process is repeated. Cueing may be a silent cue, such as a hand motion, or an audible cue, such as a bell. Students earn points for appropriate behavior with a bonus point for accurately evaluating their behavior by matching with a partner.
Reporting Points. Partnerships earn points for their team, the composition of which changes weekly. The team that earns the most points is announced the winner for the day and the team that wins most often during the week gets to choose from a selection of class activities on Fridays. This may be adapted to suit individual classrooms.
Fading procedures. It is critical to fade the procedures gradually once the students show proficiency with evaluating their behavior and matching with their partner. Typically, extending the interval between cues works well in this situation. After moving from four cues, through two cues, to one cue, the cards may be removed and the teacher may choose to verbally prompt students occasionally by asking if they are self-managing.
Classroom management remains a major concern of teachers and administrators despite the existence of effective, research-based behavior management tools. Because general education classrooms have large numbers of students, a broad mix of abilities, and often a wide range of teacher abilities, some behavior management strategies are not seen as feasible by general education teachers. Teaching students to self-manage and monitor their own behavior on a classwide basis can be a relatively low effort strategy.
References
Greenwood, C.R., Delquadri, J.C., & Carta, J.J. (1997). Together we can! Classwide peer tutoring to improve basic academic skills. Longmont, CO: Sopris West.
Mitchem, K.J., & Wells, D. (in press). CWPASM: Adaptations and implications for rural educators and a step-by-step guide. Rural Special Education Quarterly.
Mitchem, K.J., Young, K.R., West, R.P., & Benyo, J. (in press). CWPASM: A classwide peer-assisted self-management program for general educators. Education and Treatment of Children.
Young, K.R., West, R.P., Smith, D., & Morgan, D.P. (1991). Teaching self-management strategies to adolescents. Longmont, CO: Sopris West.
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