Self-Management

Increasing Students' Awareness of their Own Behavior

Students who tend to exhibit disruptive behaviors might be unfamiliar with the school and classroom behavioral expectations or unaware of the consequences of their behaviors for themselves and others. Active teaching of schoolwide behavioral expectations in a variety of settings tends to raise students' awareness of what behavior is appropriate and what is inappropriate. If students continue to behave inappropriately, the following elements of self-management might assist in encouraging them to work toward better managing their social and academic behaviors.

Goal Setting. Setting realistic, specific, and adequately challenging goals can help students stay focused, on task, and motivated and can facilitate access to regular reinforcement. Each goal should be both challenging and attainable. A goal that is unreachable quickly turns into a source of frustration and discouragement. A goal that demands little to no effort can easily be ignored. The completion of each goal should be possible within a clearly defined timeframe that allows students to anticipate reinforcement for a job well done. To facilitate monitoring of students' performance, each goal should be formulated in observable and measurable terms so that students can easily discern their progress toward achieving the goal.

Self-Recording. Observing and documenting one's own progress makes learning exciting. Self-recording allows students to produce concrete evidence of their performance of the target behavior to demonstrate their progress toward their goals. Students can use several self-recording tools, such as computerized data collection programs, paper checklists, tally sheets, counters, or charts. Once they have been instructed in the proper use of the self-recording tool, students can begin recording their performance of the target behavior either when prompted to do so by the teacher or each time they perform the target behavior. Selfrecording is likely to increase students' awareness of their own behavior and result in behavioral changes.

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