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Imagine someone asked you to lift a Volkswagen above your head, and said they’d give you $1,000 if you did.
Odds are, you wouldn’t be able to do it. Not because you don’t want the money, but because you haven’t built up the strength to do something like that.
The point is, incentives aren’t worth much if we’re missing the right skills for the task at hand. And in early education, that’s worth keeping in mind as we think about how we teach behavior to young children.
You’ve probably heard about behavior charts or recognition boards, if you haven’t used them yourself. There are a lot of variations on these, but at their core, they’re charts you hang in your classroom to promote certain behaviors, and incentivize children into demonstrating them.
But Jessica Minahan, a licensed behavior analyst, special educator and author, believes we can make these tools much more effective — and less stressful — for children. As she explains, that starts with looking at how we build up self-regulation skills.
“What's missing for me is the awareness that children aren’t misbehaving on purpose. They’re doing it because of underdeveloped skills, not because they’re lacking an incentive,” she says.
In this piece, we’ll take a critical look at behavior charts and recognition boards, and how we can tweak our approaches to self-regulation and behavior management in early education.
And to start that off, we’ve got to go back to the very building blocks of behavior.
Behavior charts and recognition boards aren’t quite the same thing, but they’re related. They’re both tools that try to encourage certain behavior by using incentives: If you’ve been a calm, quiet listener all week, you might get a sticker next to your name, or you might just get recognition from your name going up on the board.
In an early education environment, you might see a behavior chart used to promote things like:
With behavior charts, children can get penalized for not meeting those behavior goals. You might have a sticker or a point removed from your name — or if you’re in the ‘green zone’ for good behavior, there’s a risk of getting knocked down to yellow.
While behavior charts have gotten their fair share of critique from educators, recognition boards propose a more positive alternative: They use positive reinforcement only. Children can’t get ‘demoted’ or penalized, only celebrated when they show the desired behavior.
But in the bigger picture of behavior guidance, recognition boards still fall short. The core problem, Jessica explains, is that these systems don’t do enough to build the fundamental emotional skills that children need to control their own behavior.
“When we don’t teach self-regulating skills, or if we don’t look for the reasons behind children’s behavior, it’s easier to slip into this thinking that children just aren’t motivated to behave, and that an incentive will fix things. The reality is much more complex than that,” she says.
Children’s behavior is a deeply complex, personal thing. If we’re trying to capture that behaviour in a chart, or grouping a whole class together, we’re at risk of oversimplifying things.
“Especially at young ages, children just develop so differently. We see this with motor skills, language skills and academic skills too,” Jessica says. “There’s a lot of variability in children’s development at this age, so I don’t think it makes sense to compare them to each other with a chart.”
There are plenty of reasons why young children might have trouble following along with a behavior chart or a recognition board. Let’s consider a few factors:
But Jessica is careful to point out that you don’t need to have any particular diagnosis or learning disability to have trouble connecting with a behavior chart or a recognition board. In early education, there are plenty of reasons why these incentive-based tools don’t work.
“With behavior, one size just does not fit all, so we really need to dig into the roots of children’s behavior. This starts with avoiding making assumptions that children are willfully misbehaving, and instead looking at what skills they might still be missing,” she says.
If we want children to learn good behavior, we need to give them the right tools for the job — which means putting more focus on self-regulation skills.
Self-regulation is the process by which children learn to get a handle on their own emotions. In early childhood, that means learning basic skills like:
• Finding ways to calm ourselves when we’re upset
• Dealing with frustrations without having a tantrum
• Adjusting to unexpected changes in our routine or surroundings
In the scope of this short article, we don’t have time to explore all the different ways to explore and teach self-regulation to young children. But as they relate to behavior charts and recognition boards, it’s important to know that self-regulation is the bridge between talking about good behavior, and actually being able to practice it.
If we dive right into behavior charts without first building up those self-regulation skills, Jessica says that we risk creating a new source of anxiety for children.
“Suppose we’re teaching children to keep their hands to themselves. Have we taught the child the self-regulation strategies they need to be able to do that?” she asks. “If you don’t teach the skills to children when they’re struggling, and then you show them a chart that shows that they’re behind the other children, it’s got a bad effect on their self-esteem.”
In the UK, the National Health Service estimates that as many as 5 percent of children under age 12 are dealing with anxiety disorders. In the US, around 7 percent of children have an anxiety diagnosis, and that number’s on the rise.
And while we don’t have any studies on it yet, we can assume that the pandemic has only made everybody’s anxiety worse.
That’s all the more reason for being careful with behavior charts and recognition boards, and the way they can exacerbate that anxiety.
Even when we aim for positive reinforcement, like with recognition boards, children can still feel left out or ashamed for not meeting a behaviour goal. It’s hard for them to recognise that they’re missing some self-regulation skills, so they process that shortcoming as an internal failure.
As Jessica explains, this can worsen children’s anxiety, which then leads to a difficult behavioral spiral:
“When our anxiety goes up, our self-regulation goes down. It’s harder to think of those de-stressing techniques, and it also becomes easier to think negatively about ourselves. Over time, children can start to think they’re just not able to behave well, and that it’s their own fault,” she says.
That’s why especially now, we’ve got to put extra focus toward how we help the little ones build up their emotional and self-regulation skills.
As Jessica points out, you don’t necessarily have to toss your behavior chart out the window. Rather, it’s about building up our knowledge and skills, to fill in the gaps where a chart alone might fall short.
If you’re looking for a better route toward behavior guidance in your own early education environment, there’s plenty of resources out there for you. One place to start is looking at Jessica Minahan’s own blog posts and publications — she’s written a lot about behavior management strategies, and how they work in real life in your classroom.
Jessica also recommends Massachusetts General Hospital’s Think: Kids initiative, which has plenty of resources on how we can take a more empathetic, constructive approach toward helping children through behavioral issues.
And down below, we’ve got some tips on how you can get better behavior in your own classroom:
• Think about behavior in terms of goals, not rules. It’s more encouraging to work toward goals, and helps children understand that behavior is a work in progress. When we use rules, we’re more inclined to police children for ‘breaching’ these rules, which isn’t always so constructive.
• Focus on self-regulation skills, not behaviors themselves. If you set out a goal, you should give children the tools they need to achieve them. Exploring behavior goals should also mean discussing the self-regulation techniques and emotional skills that we need in order to show that behavior.
• Take children’s names off the chart. Instead of tracking who made it and who didn’t, you can use a board to promote self-regulation skills for the whole classroom — but without the pass/fail element that can cause anxiety.
• Make a “decompression corner” in your classroom. This isn’t a time-out or a penalty. Rather, it’s a space where children can decompress and distract themselves from whatever’s frustrating them, which is a big skill for regulating our emotions.
Guidance from the Danish Health Ministry, translated in full to English.
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The full recommendations from a working group of over 70 nursery chains in the UK.
Please note: here at Famly we love sharing creative activities for you to try with the children at your setting, but you know them best. Take the time to consider adaptions you might need to make so these activities are accessible and developmentally appropriate for the children you work with. Just as you ordinarily would, conduct risk assessments for your children and your setting before undertaking new activities, and ensure you and your staff are following your own health and safety guidelines.
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