Identify a challenging classroom behavior such as tardiness, inappropriate use of
technology, or excessive talking. Use your textbook and at least 1 scholarly resource to
describe and defend 1 strategy for counting and 1 strategy for graphing the behavior.
Discuss how your chosen strategies are most appropriate for the behavior described, the
student’s grade level, and the classroom environment.
Excessive talking is something we most definitely will always see across the board. Students
enjoy this time of being social butterflies in school. We read in chapter five about the
importance of counting behaviors and how that will help us gather information on the child's
behavior, when it occurs and how we can fix it. Our book says this, “Therefore, ABA is based on
direct measurement of behavior because we are counting and recording students’ behavior before,
during, and after implementing interventions in classroom situations. Note that it is insufficient to
count and record behavior only once before and after implementing an intervention. This procedure
is similar to pretesting students at the beginning of the year and posttesting them at the end of the
year. Instead, the process of counting and recording behavior should be frequent and continuous.”
(Maag, 2018) As stated it is so important to keep up with this strategy of tracking behaviors because
it allows us as teachers to change how the student is behaving. By doing so this keeps us from
having error in our tracking process of the behavior. By recording the behavior frequently it may
even help us terminate the issue that we are having within the classroom. In our book, it includes
different systems of recording behavior that can help within the classroom. Two authors believed
that it was important for teachers to understand ALL of the systems. The recording technique that
stuck out to me the most was the Latency recording. Latency recording measures how long it takes
before the excessive behavior begins. So looking at excessive talking we can use examples like
having students work on their “in-class work” and telling them it is meant to be silent. We can then
record however many times a week we decide to do this, how long it takes before the student begins
excessively talking, along with how many times you have to redirect and tell them to stop talking.
According to our book it is extremely important to have a visual graph when it comes to observing
behaviors. Having a visual graph allows us to see where and when the behavior is occurring and
helps us better intervene to stop these behaviors all together. A great plan to move this around, and
leave no room for error, would be for the teacher to place the students name on the board; the ones
that are having the issue with excessive talking. Each time it happens the teacher will place a tally
mark against the students name. At the end of class she/he will be able to tally it out and see when
the behavior occurs and how often. The tally marks will be what the teacher is able to graph out
when creating her graph. The design that stuck out to me within our text was the AB styled graph. A
is where all of the documentation of behavior occurs and phase B is where all of the implementation
of intervention begins. By doing this, it may make it easier for us to discover WHY the actual
behavior is occurring. The way the book describes the advantage for this type of graph is that it
allows for a quick and efficient way to correct and work with behavior management. According to Dr.
Barry Parsonen, “ To complicate things further, both teacher and pupils bring into class experiences
and issues from the wider ecological systems in which they live and function e.g. the rest of the
school community, home, family/whanau, community and the wider world. Simply targeting
interventions at individual children in the classroom may not actually solve a classroom behaviour
problem. “( Parsonen, 2012) This article was a very fascinating read and gave many different
evidence based interventional options. Even though we were talking about graphing and
documenting, a large part of the reason we do this is simply for intervention reasons. The goal is to
stop the behavior or figure out why the behavior is occurring. Jennifer Gonzalez is a teacher and
posted an article called, “When student won’t stop talking.”
One of the suggestions she brought forth
was that some students actually do not understand what excessive talking is referring too. She laid
out the scenario of her class writing in their journals. She had told them that they needed to be quiet
so that everyone could focus. She said before long one student raised their hand and while she was
working with that student, a few more raised their hands. One student was already finished and then
the talking began. She says this, “I hear it from teachers all the time. One of the things they don’t
teach us in our education courses is just how freaking much students talk, and how hard it can be to
quiet them down in order to get anything accomplished. A big part of good classroom management
is building good relationships with your students.This one is going to be harder for teachers to
believe, but bear with us here: “No talking” may not mean exactly the same thing in different
contexts, and if your students are talking more than you want them to, there’s a good chance you’re
working with different definitions.” (Gonzalez, 2017) Even though this article had nothing to do with
graphing or taking the behavior information, I found it awesome that a teacher was so real about
how to handle students. It was helpful to see how others viewed taking care of excessive talking
within the classroom.
The Bible says this about correcting behaviors, “Preach the word; be ready in season and out of
season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction.” (2 Timothy 4:2, NIV) It is
important as we begin to teach or continuing teaching, whatever our path may be; to be patient when
correcting behaviors. There is nothing more frustrating than having a student who excessively talks
or does not pay attention when you are teaching something important. Not only does it affect you
and that student, but it also affects all the other students.
References:
Gonzalez, J. (2018, September 20). When Students Won't Stop Talking. Retrieved from
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/student-talking/.
Parsonen, B. (2012). Evidence-based Classroom Behaviour Management Strategies.
KAIRARANGA, 13(1), 1–8. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ976654.pdf
