Behavior

Use Reinforcement Surveys to Improve Behavior Plans

Behavior plans can fail miserably if we don’t have incentives that students care about. Despite that, we often stick a prize box in front of them and expect that to be motivating. When I stopped to talk to students about what they liked, I got good results. I’ve got even better results when I used …

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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Counseling Interventions for Anxiety

Without knowing you, I know that there are some worriers on your caseload. I’m sure that you are regularly looking for engaging activities for anxiety that will help your students. That’s probably how you wound up on this post. Well, dig in. This post has 6 key skills you want to cover in individual sessions …

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Social Emotional Learning

5 Essential Social Emotional Learning Activities

Are you wanting to teach social emotional learning skills and are not quite sure where to start or where to fit it in your schedule? Start out adding in some simple routines that will help students practice social emotional skills throughout the day. Here are five SEL tools I think should be in every elementary …

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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Help Students with Anxiety with KICK Plans

In every classroom there are students with anxiety. Counselors and teachers can support these students with a simple school-based intervention that will take them step by step through managing their worries. Students will learn how to create a plan for recognizing their anxious thoughts and challenging them. Hello KICK PlansKICK stands for four steps: Knowing …

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Behavior

Important Classroom Changes to Improve Student Behavior

I worked with a teacher, let’s call her Ginnie, who had the biggest heart and the worst classroom behavior management strategies. Very quickly into each year, multiple kids would be on behavior plans and she was modifying everything for everyone. It came from such a good place, but it was exhausting and not helping her …

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Social Emotional Learning

10 SEL Activities for Upper Elementary

So you are looking to add social emotional learning activities to your upper elementary classroom, but aren’t sure where to start? It doesn’t have to be complicated or another boxed curriculum. Focus on adding simple SEL routines to your day and engaging activities like the ones below to help students practice age-expected SEL skills. 1. …

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Individual Counseling

Plan Individual School Counseling Sessions with Counseling Maps

You are getting ready to start seeing a student for individual counseling. You know what to do for the first and second session. But then what? What’s your plan to get them to meet their goals and exit counseling? Without a plan, I see two things happen: You see the student for individual school counseling sessions …

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Behavior

How to Develop a Behavior Plan

When did you learn to how to write a behavior plan? Was it during your first year in your job? I must have missed the class in grad school where we went from all the theory behind challenging behaviors and actually learned to intervene. You missed that one too?  What I did learn quickly was that …

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