Student Behavior Resources

Fullmind’s Positive Psychology Toolkit

Create Relationships: By providing eye-contact, active listening, smiling, and keeping a positive demeanor students feel like you have their best interest in mind and, in turn, become more open to feedback.

Encourage / Engage / Enlist: Become your student’s best advocate by using their interests to engage them in new content and skill-building that are applicable to their needs and interests.

Design Solutions Together: Allow opportunities for student input when developing solutions to ensure that your student feels like a valued member of the academic environment. Hear all suggestions and evaluate together the pros and cons  to identify the best solution.

Provide Logical Consequences: Make discipline a positive teachable moment. Drawing from love and logic, design consequences that align logically and fairly to the behavior issue. These should always be communicated before-hand so that the student is aware of the cause and effect of their actions.

Communicate Expectations: Student success is defined by the Educator’s expectations. In order to provide students with the best opportunity to thrive, all assignment expectations should be shared ahead of time, along with exemplars and available supporting resources. 

Focus On What You Want: Using academic language that reinforces expectations and student goals continuously  throughout instruction reminds students of best practices for success. Attention goes where energy flows, so reward the behavior you want, while handling quietly and proactively any misguided student behaviors.

Redirect / Reframe / Refocus: When students become disengaged with instruction, redirection helps to remind them of the purpose for the lesson. Reframing the objective for the student, or  allowing student choice can help re-engage them in the curriculum.

Focus on Higher Order Thinking: Keeping the essential question at the forefront of instruction helps to connect the lesson content to the greater unit topic. Open-ended questioning supports a student’s creative thinking and capacities to develop cross-curricular connections.

Fullmind encourages our Educators and students to explore challenging and sensitive material in a safe and supportive environment. However, some of the content and material in your content area may cause discomfort and upset for students that have been traumatized.  Content warnings can be verbal or written notices that precede potentially sensitive content to empower students to challenge themselves and take control of their self-care and learning.  Content warnings should be specific so students can appropriately prepare for the material.   

“Content warnings and trigger warnings are not intended to censure instructors nor invite students

 to avoid material that challenges them. On the contrary, warning students of challenging material 

can help their engagement by giving them the ability to take charge of their own health and learning.”

- Inclusive Teaching, 2017

To learn more about inclusive teaching and best practices for creating content warnings visit An Introduction to Content Warnings and Trigger Warnings