Good Behavior Management Isn't

Teachers need an evidenced-based engine for teaching good behavior

If you’re reading this, have a great weekend!

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Good behavior management literally isn’t! It’s not management. Good behavior is something to be taught and created, just like anything else we hope our students learn during the year.

Too often, we fail to adequately teach behavior, maybe because we think of it as something to be managed. We don’t manage our class’s knowledge of letter-sound correspondences, ocean ecology, or Medieval Mali. We don’t manage their ability to subtract, write a sentence, or read a paragraph. Accordingly, we shouldn’t merely manage their ability to be kind, consider others, pay attention, and work hard. It is our job to teach and create the behaviors that students need to be successful in school and in life.

We literally get to create the class we want to have. If we want them to read widely, be curious, write proudly, and be considerate, we have all the opportunities we need to teach them do those things and be those people. So, when high school teachers complain about their class not doing homework, or college professors whine about undergraduates “incapable” of reading books, or elementary teachers complain about a chatty class, we are just telling on ourselves. If our students don’t or can’t perform the behaviors they need to prosper, it is because we haven’t bothered to teach them. (Because if we had, they would know. As ever, without successful learning, no teaching has occurred) Many of us understand and even find joy in the job of teaching students the knowledge, skills, and behavior they presently lack. Others, however, often would rather lower their expectations (and then complain about it) than teach the behaviors some students might need to meet a higher standard. When students don’t or can’t, it is our job to teach them to, and it is our fault if they fail.

So, we need good “first response” tools for teaching behavior. Just like we have go-to, evidence-based practices for improving our class’s academic achievement, we need an evidence-based tool we pick up when we need to improve behavior. We can teach much of school behavior through routines and expectations. We make something routine and a social norm, and kids automatize the behavior and perform it consistently without wasting any cognitive effort. Lots of things fit into this category: raising hands to speak, not talking over others, respecting personal space, taking care of classroom materials, speaking with appropriate volume, and other things particular to a given instructional routine.

There are countless tips and tricks out there for establishing and maintaining clear routines and consistent expectations. Making eye contact, scanning the room, being seen looking, positive narration, waiting for 100%, cold call– the list goes on. Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, now in its third iteration, has done an excellent job codifying these and making knowledge about strong teaching widely available. These techniques help things go well, function like we want them to, and make us better teachers. Many techniques are intuitive and common sense; others are subtle and hard to notice without being explicitly taught. The sum of these techniques really does make a difference when done well. I am always on the hunt for this type of advice, always working hard to fine-tune these techniques and use them more consistently. Sometimes, though, it can feel like driving a fine-tuned F1 car with great steering, tires, transmission, aerodynamics, and brakes but with a treadmill for an engine.

In search of an engine

Environment shapes behavior. The most important environmental factor influencing behavior is the feedback students get from their peers. Yes, the teacher’s actions matter; all those techniques matter. The peer environment matters more. Are college professors better at behavior management than high school teachers? Of course not, it’s just that the selection bias at work in terms of who attends college, who registers for their class, and who attends each class meeting does a lot of the work of shaping the peer environment for them. We usually call it classroom culture. Or school culture. And teachers do lots of things to shape it and nudge it, including many of those strong teaching techniques. Fortunately, there is also a well-researched behavior intervention supported by several decades of strong evidence that is entirely focused on structuring the peer environment. It's called the Good Behavior Game, and it should be our tool-of-first-resort whenever we are teaching a new behavior in our classrooms. Good teaching techniques are all the aerodynamic optimizations on our F1 car, and also the brakes and the transmission and the tires. The Good Behavior Game is the engine.

What is the Good Behavior Game?

While the Good Behavior Game can be implemented and customized in many ways, it always has five core elements:

1. The class is split into teams.

2. The teacher sets clear criteria for successful behavior.

3. Teams get strikes for any member not meeting the criteria.

4. Teams are given feedback when receiving strikes.

5. Teams win by not exceeding some predetermined number of strikes when the game concludes. Any winning team gains access to reinforcement.

Studies on the Good Behavior Game began in the 1960s when it was one of the very first class-wide behavior interventions looked at by the still-young field of behavioral analysis.¹ Some of the largest studies of the game were conducted by Sheppard Kellam in Baltimore City in the 1980s and 1990s, with longitudinal follow-ups continuing into the late 2000s.² The game has been studied in classrooms at every level, from kindergarten to undergraduate, with countless variations of target behaviors, team size and quantity, game duration, reinforcers, and forms of teacher feedback. The game works incredibly well, quickly, and consistently.

A quick example

Let’s imagine we want to improve how well students read with their partners. How could we use the Good Behavior Game to achieve that?

“You’re reading Chapter 11 today with your reading partner. What might lose your team a point during partner reading?” you ask.

Everyone raises their hands with something to add because you’ve previously used the game to teach All Hands Up, and you’ve used good techniques to teach the instructional routines of our reading partners.

“We could lose a point for being too loud.”

“Not switching each paragraph or arguing about whose turn it is.”

“We could lose a point for not tracking the text while our partner is reading.”

“Not looking at the book.”

“Having a side conversation instead of reading.”

“Getting up without permission.”

“You all got it. When I say go, open to page 93 and begin. What page?”

All hands shoot up.

“Everyone?”

“93!” the whole class says.

“Great,” you say. “Ready? Go!”

Everyone starts. As you circulate listening to partners, you see an infraction. You go by the whiteboard to erase a tally.

“Cheetahs, tracking your partner’s reading.”

A few minutes later, “Koalas, quiet voices.”

Then, “Foxes, only talking to your partner.”

Whenever a team loses a tally, the kids in the team look at the offender with an admonishing glance. One boy even says to his partner, “Come on, let’s focus, we got to win.” Mostly, though, the students are just reading with their partners with no obvious interaction with the behavior intervention their teacher is running.

At the end of the reading partners, all teams have managed to win. You erase all the remaining tallies and replace them with a little star by each team’s name on the board.

“Every single team won!” you say. “The prize this morning is silent tag. You have ten seconds to silently find a spot. Ten… nine… eight…”

Customizable and flexible

Just like car engines, the Good Behavior Game has a lot of variables to tune and play around with. Let’s look at each of the five core features, and look at how we might customize it.

1. The class is split into teams.

In a typically sized classroom, your teams could be as few as two or as many as five or six. We only want one or at most two difficult students on each team. We want that whenever those students perform the target behaviors correctly, they get positive peer feedback and their team is able to win. We want to teach these students that when they behave correctly, peers like it and will like them. This is how we create a peer environment that teaches the behavior we want it to teach.

The prize for winning is really for the other kids– the ones who would probably behave correctly anyway. The real reinforcement for the struggling student is how the structure of a motivated team creates a peer environment. When their team wins, they will typically get more “credit” from peers because their peers know they are the weak link. We can set up the size and composition of our teams to make this as likely as possible.

2. The teacher sets clear criteria for successful behavior.

With good teaching techniques, we typically will have done this already, but turning our expectations into a game with points forces us to be perfectly clear about success and failure. We have to clarify all the gray areas, otherwise the game will not be “fair,” and kids will justly let us know. Our behavioral expectations become rules for the game. If we fail to specify a rule and try to take a point for it, we are not being fair. This is true, of course, even when not playing the game. If students fail to meet unstated expectations, we have only ourselves to blame. The game can help force us to be clear about what successful behavior actually is.

We can set whatever criteria we want in our classroom. The game doesn’t care about what the target behavior actually is. We can use the game to teach silent listening, sitting on the rug, reading with partners, or raising hands; but also things we may not typically think of as behaviors: using correct punctuation, answering in complete sentences, including textual evidence, or beginning paragraphs with clear topic sentences. Any academic skill that students can do independently is also a behavior we can expect them to perform independently, and we can use the game to teach them to consistently apply these skills. Of course, part of learning any skill is being able to transfer it to multiple contexts and begin to generalize the skill, so the game is a valuable academic teaching tool when we use it to teach students to apply what they’ve learned.

3. Teams get strikes for any member not meeting the criteria.

There are several variations for recording points that have been studied, and it’s not super important which we use. They all make sense in different contexts. We can give teams points to start and take them away whenever rules are broken. We can also start teams with nothing and write strikes when rules are broken. These are more or less the same thing. I slightly prefer to erase points mostly because I find it faster and easier to erase a tally than to find a marker and write one. Either way, these are subtractive systems where the goal is to avoid getting points. I find subtractive scoring makes sense when the target is continuously good behavior and to avoid discrete misbehavior (calling out, chatting, putting hands on others, etc).

The game can also be played additively where getting points is good. For example, if every team member used a period at the end of their sentence, the team could get a point. In this case, teams would win by exceeding a point total by the end of each edition of the game. This makes more sense when the behavior we want is discrete and only done when prompted: raising hands to respond to questions, answering questions in complete sentences, or using punctuation at the end of a sentence.

4. Teams are given feedback when receiving strikes.

We can vary how we give feedback. We can do it nonverbally by adding/subtracting points, we can also do it verbally. Typically, the feedback should be a positive reminder of the rule that was just broken and framed as a reminder to the whole team. Why? Because we want the peers to identify the rule-breaker, not us. When we say, “Koalas, talk only to your partner,” we want them to look around their team and give some form of feedback to the guilty party. Critically, it also makes it clear that the team has lost something. If we say, “Margaret, talk only to your partner,” team members may not even notice they have just lost a point if they didn’t see us change the scoreboard. It also is just more invasive and makes it more of a teacher-student interaction when our goal is to create peer interactions. This is why feedback is framed positively and given to the whole team. I typically try to deliver it with an air of disappointment, like I really want to give the team a prize, and I’m sad I have to take away a point.

It’s also important to consider what teacher behavior this type of feedback is replacing. Without the game, the misbehavior is either met with individual admonishment (“Margaret, talk only to your partner”) or whole class reminders (“Class, talk only with your partners”). We get to replace the former with a less invasive and less confrontational interaction, but we also replace the second with something more targeted. A whole class reminder for an individual’s misbehavior is often either too vague and lets the individual escape any accountability or, conversely, provides too much attention to the individual and lets or forces them to take up a rebellious role. Referring to teams is a helpful balance between individual accountability and noninvasive reminders. Remind the team, and the kids will create individual accountability.

I also end up using team names all the time just to line the class up or provide narration or praise:

• “Cheetahs got straight to work on their multiplication. And Dolphins, too. So great!”

• “When your team is called, silently get your snack. Koalas, go. Foxes. Dolphins.”

• “Cheetahs, Foxes, and Dolphins have all begun writing their first sentence. And now Koalas, too. Everyone’s writing, love that!”

5. Teams win by not exceeding some predetermined number of strikes when the game concludes. Any winning team gains access to reinforcement.

This is another hugely customizable and powerful variable. We can make the winning score as difficult or as easy to achieve as we like. We can also make the winning prize as reinforcing or as minor as we like. We can do all sorts of tricks here. As a general rule, we always want every team to be able to win, and we want the reinforcer to be as convenient as possible such that it motivates the class to care if their teammate messes up.

Some people have concerns about extrinsic rewards because they’ve been told about studies where rewards lead to a decrease in intrinsic motivation. Without wading into that debate, I would just offer that if our worst-behaved students could be intrinsically motivated to follow classroom rules, they already would. Are we just going to wait and hope they figure it out? This is like hoping something clicks for our struggling readers. Wait-and-see is borderline unethical when we have the ability to help now.

Secondly, I would advise that the winning reinforcers can be very, often trivially minor: line up for recess first, participate in a classroom game, or get extra choice time. At one point in my classroom last year, the bonus reward for the one team that did the best each day was access to our good crank pencil sharpener. It doesn’t take much.

Common Issues and potential troubleshoots

Regardless of how or where we implement the game, there are some predictable hiccups that can arise. One of the great features of the game is that we have lots of ways to adjust those interlinked contingencies to troubleshoot problems.

Saboteurs

Usually, early on in using the game, an already struggling student will adopt the role of a saboteur, where they will deliberately ruin their team’s chances of winning. After all, this is what they are used to doing in class: intentionally misbehaving to gain peer attention, even if it is negative. It may come easier to them than playing to win the game. In these instances, put the saboteur on their own individual team. This removes their access to peer attention and also makes it very easy for them to win whenever they want to. If they fail to win, they will sit out while everyone else gets to participate in the reward, and none of their peers will care they missed it. This tends to be motivating enough that they start playing to win. Once you prove to them that they can fairly easily win, they can rejoin the team.

Blame and negativity

Sometimes, either early on or after teams have been with each other for too long, teams are excessively negative when they lose a point. This can cause them to lose morale and they seem to give up and the game temporarily collapses for them. Here, we need to teach them how to be good teammates just as if it were a team sport. We can teach strategies for winning the game such as staying positive, encouraging teammates, and not being too harsh on people when they make mistakes. If teams have been together for too long, it may also be appropriate to mix up the teams and try new dynamics for much the same reason as we change desk arrangements.

Morale collapse

Teams can also collapse after it becomes impossible for them to win an edition of the game. For example, if they lost all their points and won’t be able to win the reinforcement. They feel they have no reason to follow the rules. This is a signal we need to tweak something, and it’s good to understand all the variables we can adjust. Maybe reinforcement is not strong enough, or the point total was too low to begin with, or the team dynamic is too challenging. Maybe the game lasted too long, or we need to expand our teaching of the behavior because they’re not yet skilled enough to perform it consistently.

Build (Peer) Relationships

Probably the single most important factor influencing behavior is the environmental feedback each student gets from their peers. The Good Behavior Game is a set of linked contingencies that let us structure the peer environment to provide students with accurate, immediate, and targeted feedback. This is super beneficial for our kids who are struggling to learn how to behave with less obvious environmental cues. One way to view the game is that it is a scaffold for helping struggling students access positive peer regard. We create this artificial, relatively simple game that makes it clear and fairly easy for anyone to appropriately gain positive peer attention.

Typically, our students most prone to misbehavior struggle to access peer attention through appropriate means. This can be why they are willing to receive sanctions from adults just to get a reaction from peers. The Good Behavior Game is really a game for our struggling students, in effect creating a contingency of “Do this (simple, clearly explained) thing, and everyone will like you.”

I haven’t said anything about the long-term benefits of the game as an intervention, though that has been studied as well. In some of those follow-up studies, researchers found playing the game in first grade led to a reduced risk of young adult substance abuse and high-risk behaviors.³

So, I now sort of think of the Good Behavior Game in the same category as I do explicit literacy instruction. Both make certain that everyone learns what some students intuit. And, just like letter-sound knowledge and decoding skills, the ability to develop positive peer relationships is too important to leave to chance.

1. Barrish, H. H., Saunders, M., & Wolf, M. M. (1969). Good behavior game: effects of individual contingencies for group consequences on disruptive behavior in a classroom. Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2(2), 119–124. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1969.2-119

2. Werthamer-Larsson, Lisa & Kellam, Sheppard & Wheeler, Leonard. (1991). Effect of first-grade classroom on shy behavior, aggressive behavior, and concentration problems. American Journal of Community Psychology, 19, 585-602. American journal of community psychology. 19. 585-602. 10.1007/BF00937993.

3. Kellam, S. G., Wang, W., Mackenzie, A. C., Brown, C. H., Ompad, D. C., Or, F., Ialongo, N. S., Poduska, J. M., & Windham, A. (2014). The impact of the Good Behavior Game, a universal classroom-based preventive intervention in first and second grades, on high-risk sexual behaviors and drug abuse and dependence disorders into young adulthood. Prevention science: the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research, 15 Suppl 1(0 1), S6–S18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-012-0296-z