What were some moments where you considered student motivation before choosing an intervention? What is your interpretation of the results?
The most frequent moments where I intervened with student behavior was during instructions, here we would all be gathered together forming a circle. This was when I was providing specific information necessary for our activities and I needed all students to be able to understand what we were going to be doing. Believing that some distracted students were motivated by attention seeking, I attempted indirect methods of intervention. Sometimes tapping them on the shoulder or standing next to them all the while continuing to address the whole group with instructions. For some students, this worked and nothing further was needed; for others it proved to only be a temporary reprieve from distraction. These students were my most challenging; those with continuous high energy and movement which then pulled other students off task.
The most successful moments with one student resulted when they were directly paired with an adult. I’m not sure why this worked, maybe it was the direct attention, a firmer sense of stability within our group or perhaps distancing them from other distracting influences. Yet his focus proved temporary whenever we would reconvene as a collective group and the 1 on 1 pairing would disintegrate. I was approached throughout the week by the student’s full-time classroom teacher and advised about known behaviors and prior conversations and agreements which had occurred prior to arriving this week. Despite the student’s agreement to strive towards best behavior, they seemed to forget the pact throughout each day.
In hindsight, what could I have done differently that may have changed the course of this week for all my students? I would have aimed to make our community agreement stronger from Day One. Seeking to assure all students had an equally heard voice and felt comfortable holding each other accountable for our collectively agreed upon community standards of behavior and communication. Reaffirming the community agreement each day via reflection and perhaps even modification could have also helped with all students behavior management. Ideally this would have created a sense of ownership for all the students and created stronger interpersonal ties.