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Great book to introduce Break chair

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What if.....A student refuses to go to Break Chair

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What if.....A student refuses to go to Break Chair

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Quick article

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Question: I've had pretty good success using time-out with most children. I have children go to time-out to regain their self-control as they start to lose it. But what about the child who just refuses to go to time-out when told to? I keep trying different things, and nothing seems to work. Any ideas? Answer:
This is something that most teachers can anticipate facing from time to time. A key in handling these situations is to avoid power struggles as much as possible, since they are counter-productive for everyone.

A whole-class review of time-out

A first step, even when there is only one resister, may be to review for the whole class the goals and procedures of time-out. There are three essential things to accomplish in this review:

Remind the class that everyone forgets the rules sometimes and that time-out is a way to calm down, remember the rules, and regain control so we can take care of ourselves, our classmates, and our classroom.

Model again, and have children demonstrate, how to go to time-out and what to do while in time-out.

Remind children that while a classmate is in time-out, they have the crucial role of leaving the student alone so s/he can refocus. Have children demonstrate this helpful behavior if needed.

A conversation with the resistant student

After this re-teaching, I would sit down with the resistant student individually and ask what s/he understands about the reasons for time-out. I might say "Tell me one good reason to have timeout in our classroom."

Then I might say "Tell me one reason you think some kids might not like to go to time-out." The answer may reveal possible reasons for the student's own reluctance. To work best with students who resist time-out, we need to know why they resist. Is it a problem of shame or fear? If so, is it a developmental issue? Remember, for example, that seven-year-olds are generally terrified of making mistakes and being wrong, and that older students may have a heightened sensitivity to being singled out and made visible to their peers.

Modifications in language and procedure

Knowing what's beneath the student's resistance may guide us in handling the situation.
Sometimes simply avoiding using the word "time-out" helps. Rather than using that term, which can have a negative connotation for some students, I handed one student a red card (a system used by referees in soccer, for example). With another student, when I tugged at my ear, it meant "go to the table and take a five-minute break." Some teachers say "take a break." One middle-school teacher says "take a vacation."

Often students respond to modifications in how time-out is done, especially modifications they helped devise. Here are some possibilities:

A modification in the time-out place. Children who fear exposure or criticism may be more willing to go to a table, which can feel less conspicuous than a designated chair. Some children like to use a special time-out pillow. Teachers might give them two choices for where to use the pillow.

A modification in how to keep track of time. Children who have an inaccurate sense of time and think that time-outs last "forever" may respond well to having a timer, hourglass, or other physical time-keeping object they can hold.

A modification in task. Children who don't like sitting still may have an easier time collecting themselves if they can do something with their hands. Finger knitting, doodling, and holding a soft stuffed toy have worked for some children.

A backup plan

For students who are more oppositional and become confrontational when refusing time-out, it's important for teachers to make it clear that time-out is a must-do, not a choice. When the teacher sends students to time-out, students must go. They may have some input about where or how, but not if, time-out is done. The teacher therefore needs to be ready with a backup plan. If a student simply refuses to go, what happens?

In the Responsive Classroom approach, teachers have a pre-arranged buddy teacher. When a
student refuses to go to time-out (or continues to have problems during time-out), the teacher sends for the buddy teacher, removing herself or himself from direct interaction with the student and thus preventing a power struggle. The buddy teacher comes to take the child to time-out in the buddy teacher's room. Removed from the stimulation of their own classroom and away from the action in which the misbehavior was occurring, students often have an easier time collecting themselves. If time-out in the buddy teacher's room isn't enough to help the child regain self-control, another adult is called to take the student to time-out in the principal's office or another designated cooling-off place in the school.

In using this sequence of steps, our message is this: "I am willing to help make time-out work for you so you don't have to be afraid or be extra mad. But when teachers ask you to go, you have to go. That's your job. Either you go in the ways we practiced, or Ms. _______ will come take you to her classroom. And if that doesn't work, then Ms. ______ will come take you to the office."

Some children will never test their teacher's seriousness about sticking to this sequence of events. A few will. With the testers, there may be a scene the first time. (In tough situations, teachers have been known to take the rest of the class to the library or some other place while an administrative support person works with the child.) Most children test only once.

Ongoing time-out practice and reminders

Keep in mind, though, that even after children are done testing, they may need practice and reminders to anticipate and prepare for the plan that's been put in place. Go over it step by step. "What happens when I say 'Jessica, time-out'? What will you do? Where will you go? How will I know you are ready to come back?" I would have Jessica send me to time-out, using the agreed-upon words or signals. I would model going to time-out in an appropriate way, then ask her to model it. I would carefully go over all the positive goals of time-out and practice getting still and calm.

Time-out is one way to help children develop self-discipline. For those children who resist and struggle, we must be inventive and flexible. I encourage you to be resourceful but also to remember that limits are necessary for the well-being of the class as well as that of the individual student.
Ruth Sidney Charney has taught children and teachers for almost 30 years.
Tags: Challenging Behaviors, Time-Out

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Refusing to Go to Time-Out | Responsive Classroom

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April 2002Question:I've had pretty good success using time-out with most children. I have children go to time-out to regain their self-control as they start to lose it. But what about the child who just refuses to go to time-out when told to? I keep trying different things, and nothing seems to work.

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Quick article

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Scholastic published this article on the Responsive Classroom approach to rules and logical consequences for the August 2003 issue of Instructor magazine. It was reprinted with permission on the Responsive Classroom website, September 2003.

Kathryn Brady, Mary Beth Forton, Deborah Porter, and Chip Wood are the authors of Rules in School, from which this article was adapted.

Model the Behavior You Want to See

From the first day, lay the foundation for a successful year by letting students know what behavior you expect. Modeling classroom routines takes time, but it's time well spent! By creating a sense of order, predictability, and trust in your classroom, you send the message that respect, kindness, and learning will prevail.

These first weeks are the time to establish signals for quiet, set guidelines for class discussion, and introduce the basic daily routines of your classroom: lining up, taking out and putting away materials, and what to do if students finish work early.

Children are able, even eager, to rise to high standards of behavior, but they need to know exactly what those standards are. Often we assume students already know what we expect of them, when they may not. When you use the technique of explicit modeling, you make your expectations clear and easier for students to meet. Here is a modeling procedure to follow:

Name the behavior. "Sometimes when we're busy working, I or someone else in the classroom will need to get your attention. Here is the signal we use. The speaker will ring this chime. When you hear it, freeze in place. When the speaker says 'You can melt,' you can return to what you were doing."

Demonstrate the behavior. For example, ask a child to ring the chime, then model freezing in place and turning your attention to that child.

Ask students what they notice. "You stopped talking and put down your book." "You looked at Zach until he said 'melt.'"

Ask for student volunteers to demonstrate the behavior. Then, practice the behavior as a class.

Modeling is not only a successful strategy, it's quite fun and helps children develop their assertiveness and empathy skills.

Create Rules with Your Class

"Kids are far more interested in following rules they help to create. It's that simple," says Gail Zimmerman, a second-grade teacher in Boston, Massachusetts. Many teachers would agree. Have faith that children can make sense of rules and want to follow them.

Rules give children a sense of security and belonging, especially rules that they view as reasonable and fair. Start by talking to your class about your hopes for the coming year and ask them to articulate their own goals for the school year. Encourage them with specific questions: "What's important to me at school? What do I want to get better at? What do I care about?" Younger children can share their hopes and dreams verbally, and then draw pictures of their most important hope. Older children can move from the initial conversation to writing in their journals.

Sharing individual goals for the year produces a meaningful context for creating classroom rules. Ask: "What rules do we need to make our hopes and dreams come true?" Generate a list of preliminary rules together, emphasizing that the rules are there to help everyone succeed. Help children to frame their ideas in the positive: for example, suggest changing "Don't be rude" to "Use a friendly voice."

Finally, work with students to categorize the rules into a few simple global rules, as discussed in the next point.

Keep the Rules Simple

Walk into any classroom using the Responsive Classroom approach and you'll see a chart of three to five rules, such as "Respect each other," "Take care of yourself," and "Take care of classroom property." Rather than listing all the possible dos and don'ts, these rules act as guiding principles and remind students in a global way of what they should do. Broad rules foster ethical thinking and the practice of self-control by giving children the opportunity to apply general behavior expectations to various situations.

After working on the process of creating the rules together, celebrate your final short list of rules by having children make a beautiful poster display of them. Then publish the rules in a letter home to families, inviting support.

Teacher Language Is Powerful

The language we use is one of our most important teaching tools. What we say and how we say it carry tremendous weight in the classroom. Our language can build children up or tear them down. It can model respectful and caring social interactions or just the opposite. Effective language encourages and empowers children to respect and follow the rules, rather than criticizing for not following them.

Effective teacher language:

Is simple, clear, and direct.

Is genuine and respectful.

Focuses on the specific actions of the child rather than the child as a whole person.

Avoids qualitative or personal judgment.

Shows faith in the child's ability to follow the rules.

Sometimes the most effective teacher language is to say very little. A visual or verbal cue may be all that is needed to help a child get back on track.

Use Logical Consequences

Children will break the rules. They will forget, become unsure, and test limits. All of your proactive strategies-everything from discussing hopes and dreams to using careful teacher language-have built a strong foundation for a caring learning community. Be ready to follow up with effective reactive strategies-most important, the use of logical consequences.

Logical consequences are a way to help fix problems that result from children's words and actions when they break or forget rules. They help children regain self-control, reflect on their mistakes, and make amends for them. Logical consequences should be respectful of the child, relevant to the situation, and reasonable in scale. Here are three types to consider:

"You break it, you fix it" can be used to mend emotional messes as well as physical messes. A child can rebuild a block tower after accidentally knocking it over. A child can repair hurt feelings with an "apology of action" by doing something to soothe the injury, such as drawing a picture or playing a game.

Temporary loss of privilege is a simple way to help a child remember to use that privilege (art materials, group time) responsibly. Losing a privilege for a class period or a day can help a child pause to remember or relearn a rule.

"Time-out" or "Take a Break" is a strategy to help children learn self-control. A child who is disrupting the work of the group is asked to leave for a few minutes. This gives the child a chance to regain composure and rejoin the group when he's ready.

Take Time for Reflection

No matter how carefully we lay the groundwork for a positive classroom community, we know that there will be times in the year that try our patience and goodwill. There will be moments, perhaps even many moments, when it's a struggle to think of a logical consequence when a child breaks a rule, or to find the teacher language or the calm voice you want to use.

Forgive your minor slip-ups. Like the children, we will make mistakes, and like the children, we need to be able to go back and try again. When you can, give yourself a minute to "take a break," or at least a deep breath. Remember to ask for the support you need from other teachers, and to offer your support to them.

Sharing your ups and downs can help you find the humor in a situation. At the end of the year when you reflect on the rules as a class, you'll see the difference. As one child said of a classroom that took this approach: "People are nice to each other in this class, and it is a nice place to be."

Tags: Classroom Rules, Logical Consequences

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Everyday Rules That Work! | Responsive Classroom

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Scholastic published this article on the Responsive Classroom approach to rules and logical consequences for the August 2003 issue of Instructor magazine. It was reprinted with permission on the Responsive Classroom website, September 2003.Kathryn Brady, Mary Beth Forton, Deborah Porter, and Chip Wood are the authors of Rules in School, from which this article was adapted.

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As a classroom teacher I looked forward every year to teaching students all kinds of academic concepts and skills that would enable them to be engaged and successful in their learning. Organizing book clubs to get them thinking about themes and character traits, guiding research on how animals adapt to their environment, teaching the rock cycle or multiplication-I relished them all. And there was one other thing that I enjoyed teaching just as much: positive time-out.

Beyond Responding to Misbehavior

Many teachers know how to use time-out not as a form of punishment, but as a judgment-free, matter-of-fact way to respond to a student's misbehavior while maintaining the momentum of learning in the classroom. But what's even more powerful is that we can use time-out as part of our efforts to teach students to self- regulate-to recognize when they're getting frustrated or just losing focus, and to give themselves a break so they can regroup and return to productive learning.

It was Martin, a third grader I taught, who gave me the opportunity to learn how this strategy can be used for self-regulation. Martin was a happy but easily frustrated child. When confronted with a difficulty, his tension would quickly build into crying and yelling. At first I used time-out only as a response to his outbursts. Gradually, however, I figured out how to teach Martin to use these breaks himself to prevent outbursts.

Through that experience, I learned these key steps for guiding children toward developing self-regulation skills.

Introduce Time-Out as an Aid

I carefully presented time-out as something that can help anyone stay calm and focused. I introduced it after establishing class rules with students and discussing the rules in a way that gained their investment. I then told them that everyone forgets or has trouble following the rules sometimes, and in this classroom, when that happened to someone I would help them out in several ways, including using words or a nonverbal cue to remind them, having them come sit next to me-or having them step away from the action to pull themselves together.

I then modeled so students were certain what going to the break area, staying there, and returning should look and sound like. All this helped establish that taking a break was not a punishment and paved the way for students to use it themselves as an aid to maintaining positive behavior. (To learn more about teaching positive time-out, see " What is Responsive Classroom Time-Out" and Rules in School.)

Act Before Frustration Builds

When I first started using this technique, I tended to wait until a child was clearly out of control. Over time, I learned instead to have a child take a break at the first sign of tension. For example, one day while conferring with students during math workshop, I looked up to check how Martin was doing with his multiplication problems. It was clear that he was getting frustrated because his brow was furrowed, his pencil was tossed off to the side, and he was staring hard at the math problems while sighing loudly. For some children these might just be signs that they're working through something they're stuck on and not necessarily reason to intervene. But I knew Martin well enough to recognize that for him, these were sure signs of an outburst about to happen. I calmly walked over to Martin and told him to take a break.

The advantage of directing a child to take a break early like this, before the furrowed brow grows into yelling and a red face streaming with tears, is that the child usually recovers faster and is spared the unsettling feeling of having had an outburst in front of everyone in the class. More importantly, it shows the child how effective taking a break can be, which encourages them to choose that option themselves in other frustrating situations.

Observe Children Carefully

Of course, to know when a child could use a break means we need to learn what tends to trigger their tension and to recognize their signs of frustration, and that requires careful observation.

For example, after watching Martin closely for a few days I saw that certain things quickly frustrated him: difficult math problems, being unable to do something the first time he tried, and feeling that his classmates weren't hearing him. As for his signs of tension, besides the wrinkled brow, cast-aside pencil, and hard stare, there were the clenched fists and the color in his face slowly becoming deepening shades of scarlet.

For other children, the triggers could be too much noise or too much sitting, feeling bored or feeling hungry, and signs of tension could be anything from hard frowning to frenetic pencil tapping. Every child is different, so the key is to observe carefully and look for patterns.

Teach Children to Give Themselves a Break

To learn to voluntarily take breaks, children need to recognize when they're getting upset or starting to lose focus. We can help them. The day that I told Martin to take a break during math workshop, as the class settled into reading time after recess, I checked in with Martin privately to explain what I had noticed and why I thought he needed a break. I shared with him what his frustration signs looked like to me and asked if he had noticed the same thing. The whole conversation took less than a minute.

Like some children, Martin did not initially recognize his triggers or his signs of frustration. Over time, with reflective conversation, I helped him become aware of his triggers and connect his feelings to his observable signs. As Martin became more self-aware in this way, we were able to rehearse taking a break. During an afternoon workshop time, when Martin tended to be calm, we'd pretend he was noticing his signs of frustration and he'd walk over to the break area to calm down. These rehearsals took just a couple of minutes and were critical to his eventual ability to self-regulate in real moments of frustration.

Other children may already be aware of how they exhibit their emotions. Even so, they may still need help understanding that when they notice their signs of tension, it's time to take a break. Sometimes it's enough to hold occasional whole-class discussions about this. Other times teachers need to practice one-on-one with individual students as I did with Martin.

Teach a Calming Strategy to Use While Taking a Break

Although Martin began taking breaks when he got frustrated, he was slow to calm down and sometimes would still turn bright red and burst into tears during the break. Clearly, if children like Martin are to get the full benefit of time-out, we need to teach them some calming strategies to use while there, such as deep breathing, doing wall push-ups, or visualizing a favorite place. Having a small basket of things on hand like stress balls for children to squeeze and puzzles that can take their minds off their frustration can also help.

With Martin, I named a few of these strategies and asked which he thought might work for him. He wanted to try deep breathing, something he'd tried before as a way to recover from his outbursts. I knew, however, that I'd have to scaffold this skill for him because his previous attempts to breathe deeply were actually quick shallow breaths taken while still persevering on what had initially fueled his frustration.

I suggested a strategy that the school psychologist had taught another student-blowing soap bubbles. But not just any bubbles. While taking a break, Martin was to blow the biggest bubble he could. This accomplished two things. One, it encouraged him to take long, deep breaths. Two, it turned his focus away from what was frustrating to the task of blowing the biggest possible bubble.

A final word about calming strategies: It's important to help students connect their use of a calming strategy to their regained feeling of calm so they'll see how the strategy helps. This can be as simple as saying, "I see that deep breathing helped you feel calm again" when they return from their break to their previous classroom activity.

When Self-Regulation Becomes a Habit

If we consistently and skillfully guide students to use time-out for self-regulation, we'll gradually see them put this tool to good use. Not only that, we may see them begin to apply the strategies to situations they face in the course of their day, without having to physically remove themselves to the break area.

One day while conferring with groups on their fractions work, I looked up to check on Martin. As he was talking to his classmates about the problem they were working on, his brow wrinkled-a sure sign of his frustration. I watched for a moment more to see what he would do next. He put up an index finger to signal his classmates to wait a moment. He then turned around, took a few deep breaths, turned back to his classmates-minus the scrunched brow-and continued conversing calmly with them. That's when I knew that helping Martin self-regulate his response to frustration was really working.
Tracy Mercier is a Responsive Classroom consultant. She has taught grades three, four, and five in diverse classrooms in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

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Time-Out & Teaching Self-Regulation | Responsive Classroom

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As a classroom teacher I looked forward every year to teaching students all kinds of academic concepts and skills that would enable them to be engaged and successful in their learning. Organizing book clubs to get them thinking about themes and character traits, guiding research on how animals adapt to their environment, teaching the rock cycle or multiplication-I relished them all.

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What is Responsive Classroom Take a Break

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What is Responsive Classroom Take a Break

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Quick article

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When used calmly, consistently, and respectfully, Responsive Classroom time-out can be a valuable strategy for helping students develop self-control while keeping the classroom calm, safe, and orderly.Santiago is at the interactive whiteboard, showing the class his solution to a math problem the teacher challenged them with.

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Video on how to introduce the logical consequence of Take a Break.

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Classroom Management Strategies To Take Control Of Noisy Students

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A first and a third grade teacher use a positive, respectful time-out to help children get back on track when they're just beginning to lose self-control. **Sub-titled ***FOR PURCHASE INFORMATION OR TO REQUEST PREVIEW OF THE FULL LENGTH VIDEO FOR PURCHASE CONSIDERATION PLEASE EMAIL info@kineticvideo.com

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Guidelines for teaching and modeling Take a Break

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Guidelines for teaching and modeling Take a Break

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Prerequisites:

1.     Hopes and Goals are written by students.

2.     Establish and agree upon classroom rules.

3.     Teach Logical Consequences

Logical Consequences

1.     You break it, you fix it.

2.     Apology of Action

3.     Loss of privilege

Take a Break is a loss of privilege.