Mental Health & Wellbeing Page

Recap on how we manage behaviour

 As a school we have been a School Wide Positive Behaviour School for a a number of years. This training has provided a suite of evidence based practices for our school to adopt to create a culture where all children can learn and grown and all staff enjoy their work and celebrate the achievements of our school community.

When we clearly identify and teach our behaviour expectations in the classroom, playground and school environments we create the safe, predictable routines that make school fun, safe and more enjoyable.

Encouraging Expected Classroom Behaviour

Effective classroom settings promote expected behaviour by:

• explicitly teaching expected behaviours, procedures, and routines

• preventative prompts or pre-correction

• explicit feedback on behaviour, including high rates of behaviour-specific praise

• tangible reinforcers and group contingencies.

Feedback and praise 

Specific, timely, and constructive feedback about academic learning is a well-established feature of good teaching practice (Hattie, 2012).  Feedback promotes learning and supports engagement and motivation.  Feedback helps students to know what they are doing well, establish their next learning steps, and select the strategies that will help them to solve problems and achieve goals. For most students, constructive feedback and acknowledgments serve as positive consequences. Positive consequences reinforce or strengthen behaviour, making it more likely to occur in the future. 

 Increasing the use of specific positive, feedback when students display expected behaviour helps to focus attention on the desired behaviour, provide performance feedback and strengthen teacher-student relationships (Maag, 2001).

At Surfside we use tokens as tangible and specific acknowledgement of desired behaviours.  You may have heard all about our token time, but be unsure exactly how it operates.  Below is a list of things to better understand the way we praise students and use tokens at Surfside PS.

Top ten things you need to know about tokens!

1. Tokens are earnt inside and outside the classroom when students demonstrate our school values of Respect, Honesty, Teamwork and Achievement.
2. They support our SWPBS framework to develop a positive, safe and supportive learning culture.
3. Tokens are ‘earned’ not given and teachers use behaviour specific praise that is linked to our school values. An example of this might be “you have earnt this token for teamwork by including others in your game today.”
4. Our expectations of students should be inclusive of individual abilities, for example, one student may receive a token for completing 2 sentences and another child may receive a token for finishing a whole page of writing. 
5. Students will keep track of their own tokens and once they have reached their goal they can ‘cash in’ for agreed token time activities worth 10, 20 or 50 tokens.
6. Tokens will be stored in individual student containers and are not on display for the whole class to see.
7. Earnt tokens will be tracked once a week by the classroom teacher and class data tracked. Student monitors could help with this. 
8. Students aim to earn 10 tokens per week. This is not prescriptive, as many students may earn more or less than 10. 
9. Tokens can be cashed in a time that suits individual classroom teachers this is usually every second Friday afternoon when assembly is not on.
10. Accumulated individual tokens can be exchanged for a single token of greater value e.g. 10 individual tokens can be swapped for a single token card worth 10. 

You might like to ask your child this week what the best thing they have earnt with their tokens has been as we have a range of different options to choose from which have been co-created with teachers and students.  These range from movie screenings and class chip lunches to 5 mins of iPad time and mindful colouring.