Clarifying Expected Behavior

Tiered Fidelity Inventory Item 1.3: Behavioral Expectations

Why Define Expected Behavior in a Curriculum?

The curriculum is based on determining the social skills and behaviors you expect all students and staff to learn and display. These provide a vision of the successful student and lead you to clarify what are the preferred social behaviors. They offer a framework to guide staff decisions about discipline, and create the conditions for an aligned staff, increasing consistency in your efforts with students. They allow you to teach proactively and to provide students and parents with a positive message about discipline. They also help to validate teachers’ procedures and requests. When there are school-wide expectations, the procedures of teachers are not perceived as arbitrary but a direct outcome of school-wide valued behaviors and expectations held by all. Perhaps most importantly, they show students how they can be successful (U.S. Department of Education, 2014).

Components of a Social Behavioral Curriculum

Expectations are a direct outgrowth of your beliefs and your vision and mission. They, in essence, operationalize your vision and mission. First, three to five overarching schoolwide social behavioral expectations are defined and agreed to by all staff. These are valued social skills and behaviors for success at school and eventually in life (e.g., respect, responsibility, caring, etc.).

Once you have identified these 3-5 broad schoolwide expectations, you will then need to define the expected social behaviors or rules which are what students do specifically to achieve those expectations. These tell us how we want students to act. This process involves clarifying or defining specific behaviors/ rules for different settings in our school. In essence, you need to describe what respect, responsibility, and caring, etc. look like in:

1. All settings of the school

2. Non-classroom areas (hallways, cafeteria, recess, etc.)

3. Classrooms

In addition to expectations and rules, procedures will be defined in non-classroom areas and in each classroom. Procedures are the methods or process for how things are done. Procedures break down rules into teachable steps. When procedures are taught to fluency they help students form routines to efficiently and smoothly accomplish tasks.

Defining schoolwide expectations, non-classroom and classroom behaviors/rules and procedures creates a full curriculum to allow you to proactively teach success, and to also address any problem behavior that may occur across any school setting.

• A matrix that shows your school expectations and behaviors/rules for all settings, non-classroom areas and perhaps your classroom behaviors/rules.

• The non-classroom procedures that will be posted in those settings and printed in staff and student handbooks.

• The classroom behaviors/rules align with the schoolwide expectations and are posted in each classroom.

• The lessons taught to students to learn the classroom behaviors/rules and procedures.

Once the products are developed, a plan to share the entire curriculum with families should also be implemented.

Defining Specific Behaviors

• Observable

• Measurable

• Positively stated

• Understandable

• Always Applicable

How to Develop a Social Behavioral Curriculum

There are some things to consider when developing all components of the social behavioral curriculum.

• The curriculum should be preventative in nature. What do successful students do? What is the vision we have for this success? What will we teach to prevent problem behaviors from occurring?

• It should define those behaviors that address current problem behaviors. Office referral data and staff, student and family perceptions can help determine current behavior problems. These problems can then be turned into positive behaviors to teach by asking, “What do we want students to do instead?”

• When defining specific behaviors/rules they should be:

  • observable–behaviors that we can see,

  • measurable–we could actually count the occurrence of the behavior,

  • positively stated–things to do to be successful,

  • understandable–student-friendly language, and

  • always applicable.

• Incorporate existing school resources such as social skills curricula, bully prevention curricula, conflict management materials, etc. into the social behavioral curriculum. Existing materials that have proven to be effective in teaching students expected behaviors can and should be embedded into the framework of this social behavioral curriculum.

• Engage staff in the development of the social behavioral curriculum. Seek their input and ideas by having them complete the activities shared in this workbook.

• Seek student and family input. As components of the social behavioral curriculum are being developed, take action to get ideas from students and families. Their perspective of behavioral expectations and skills to be taught are critical to create a social behavior curriculum that is responsive to the culture of all students and families.

Resource: Establish, Maintain and Restore Relationships