BehaviorFlip's Blog

Perspective

As the teens and tweens that I’ve worked with would say: “we're trying to stay on our big brain behavior” as we learn and grow our relational capacity.

behavior

Motto for This School Year: Connection

Connecting with students is not a new idea; we know that strong connections and relationships leads to greater student success. But with new content, remedial skills to catch up on, and state testing looming, teachers feel mounting pressure to start with content right out of the gates.

behavior

I Didn’t Sign Up for This: Teaching Through the Eyes of Trauma

The ability to identify a student’s behavior as a response to an experience and not just deeming a child as “bad” is a skill-set that most educators do not have because they are not teaching through a trauma-informed lens.

actionable

School Safety Starts with Engaging the Disengaged

If a Kindergarten teacher, a principal, or counselor has a gut feeling that the child is going to struggle, why aren't we being more intentional with interventions to help that child find success?

actionable

Crisis or Opportunity?

Instead of seeing this social-emotional need in schools as a crisis; what if we looked at it as an opportunity?

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Adult SEL: a Lifelong Process

Our students and children are growing up in a time when they are bombarded by opinions, ideology, and pressures from social media. They deserve to have adults in their lives who are fully cognizant of the process that social and emotional growth is over a lifetime.

actionable

How Do You Show Up?

Yes, students come in with their own stories, their own issues, and their own brain states. However, the way we show up has a direct impact upon whether that student is going to be able to regulate their system and engage in learning, or escalate their response system and show up as behavior issues.

behavior

Shifting Conversations about Behavior from Anecdotal to Actionable

Part of the problem is at many schools, behavior is anecdotal. They don't have a system to track behaviors, even small ones, like a cell phone. So once they all came together, a chat about academics quickly changed with anecdotal mentions of a behavior pattern happening in every class.

behavior

A Practitioner's Point of View: How Our School is Implementing BehaviorFlip this Year

When I began looking at the data entries for each day, the script had flipped. I would say that 90-95% of the entries being made by teachers were now positive, with very few negative events occurring.

behavior

Never Lose Your Humanity

At times in education, we can become so engulfed with our schedules, stressors about the job, meeting deadlines, increasing student achievement, instructional practices and more, that we forget the one vital thing that keeps us all connected to one another, and that is our humanity.

behavior

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. That's How Much a Second Chance Costs You.

"...my options were limited in the schools I worked in, as they had traditional discipline systems in place. My options were one of two, I could: 1) Ignore the behavior and pass the buck to the next teacher, or 2) Situation-dependent, write the student up and/or send them to the office."

behavior

A Short, Simple List to Support Student Voice

The most strategic teachers embed student voice in the classroom without having to announce it. There doesn't need to be a banner that says, "I'M HERE TO LISTEN TO YOU." No grand gesture should be needed for students to know, "YOUR VOICE IS WELCOME HERE."

behavior

To my Fellow Educators, We are the New Alchemists!

Going back to how things were pre-pandemic is my greatest fear, as inequalities, disproportionality issues, and lack of engagement will continue, because as an institution, we have not placed enough value on the concepts that really impact student outcomes.

behavior

Stuck in a Silo: A Teacher's Struggle to Address Student Behavior

But even up until last school year, in spite of the benefits of technology on my side, I still struggled with the same issue. I taught in a silo.

teaching

When Teaching Became Important

Since 60% or more of my students, who sat speechless successfully for 50 minutes per day were failing, it became clear that silence was not to solution to classroom learning.

children

Heart-Centered Classroom Management

This blog was contributed by Lindsey Acton, Director of New Teacher Member Experience at Kappa Delta Pi, former classroom teacher, and author of Throwing Rocks. For fifteen years and fifteen

Tips for Families During Uncertain Times

Guest blog by Nicole Vidiri Silva As we are all too well aware, we are facing an unprecedented challenge as global and local communities react to the coronavirus pandemic. In

The Empathy Crisis

Nicole Vidiri Silva, M.S., LMSW Put simply, empathy can be defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. Yet how does one more completely describe

Wisdom of a Young Teacher

Jason was driving the young teacher crazy. He seemed to bounce off the walls, and wouldn’t sit still. And when his teacher confronted him about his behavior, the situation

Let's Try Box: A New Tool for Regulation

A big part of my job as an administrator is working with students who struggle with regulating their emotions based on any number of events. As anyone who has ever

A Teacher's Journey Through Hacking School Discipline

As a veteran teacher, I am constantly trying to find ways to grow and change so that I can become a better version of myself each year. I am also

Saying 'Yes' as a Strategy

One of the best things that we can do to help students that have experienced trauma is to maintain a positive learning environment. Students need to feel safe, welcomed, and

Behavioral Data is as Important as Academic Data (maybe more)

Schools need a consistent system for collecting data and managing student behavior, as well as establishing school-wide measures of success. This system needs to be easy to understand, easy to

The Behavior Gap

Superintendents have immense pressure from national, state, and community entities to increase test scores. This pressure trickles downhill to building administrators and teachers, even being part of their formal evaluations.

The New Privacy Law That Will Protect Students

An exchange student uses your school's website to apply for admission. An alumnus who lives in France responds to a reunion. A faculty member spends a sabbatical in Germany and