School-Wide Strategies for Managing Hyperactivity

Hyperactive students tend to have a very high energy level, act impulsively and can be behaviorally distracting. They may fidget, play with objects, tap pencils so loudly against their desk that kids from across the room look over at them, or blurt out answers to teacher questions before the instructor is even finished asking them. When working with students who are hyperactive or impulsive, teachers should keep in mind that these students are very often completely unaware that others view their behavior as distracting or annoying. Teachers working with such children can greatly increase their own effectiveness by clearly communicating behavioral expectations to students, by encouraging and rewarding students who behave appropriately, and by being consistent and fair when responding to problem student behaviors. Here are teacher ideas for managing impulsive or hyperactive students who display problem motor or verbal behaviors:

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Strategy Guide: Using Paired Reading to Increase Fluency and Peer Cooperation

In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. Likewise, this strategy can be used to pair older students with younger students to create “reading buddies.” Additionally, children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a text that they have already read, for continued understanding and fluency work. This research-based strategy can be used with any book or text in a variety of content areas, and can be implemented in a variety of ways.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategy Guide: Using the Jigsaw Cooperative Learning Technique

In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and texts to allow for learning that meets the diverse needs of students but keeps student groups flexible. The research that originally gave credibility to the jigsaw approach—creating heterogeneous groups of students, diving them into new groups to become expert on a topic, and then returning them to their home groups—touted its value as a means of creating positive interdependence in the classroom and improving students’ attitudes toward school and each other.

Material Type: Reading, Textbook

Strategy Guide: Using Partner Talk to Strengthen Student Collaboration and Understanding

In this strategy guide, you’ll learn about Partner Talk—a way to provide students with another learning opportunity to make learning their own through collaboration and discussion. Partner Talk can be used for assessing classwork, making connections to prior knowledge, discussing vocabulary, or simplifying concepts. One of the main goals of the English Language Arts Common Core Standards is to build natural collaboration and discussion strategies within students, helping to prepare them for higher levels of education and collaboration in the workforce. In today’s classrooms, students are using complex texts and are being asked to use a variety of strategies and provide evidence-based responses. Partner Talk is a best practice that gives students an active role in their learning and scaffold the experience for students.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Positive Peer Reports: Changing Negative Behaviors By Rewarding Student Compliments

Some students thrive on peer attention-and will do whatever they have to in order to get it. These students may even attempt intentionally to irritate their classmates in an attempt to be noticed. When students bother others to get attention, though, they often find themselves socially isolated and without friends. In addition, teachers may discover that they must surrender valuable instructional time to mediate conflicts that were triggered by students seeking negative peer attention. Positive Peer Reporting is a clever classwide intervention strategy that was designed to address the socially rejected child who disrupts the class by seeking negative attention. Classmates earn points toward rewards for praising the problem student. The intervention appears to work because it gives the rejected student an incentive to act appropriately for positive attention and also encourages other students to note the target student's good behaviors rather than simply focusing on negative actions. Another useful side effect of positive peer reporting is that it gives all children in the classroom a chance to praise others-a useful skill for them to master! The Positive Peer Reporting strategy presented here is adapted from Ervin, Miller, & Friman (1996).

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Teacher Praise: An Efficient Tool to Motivate Students

Teacher praise is one tool that can be a powerful motivator for students. Surprisingly, research suggests that praise is underused in both general- and special-education classrooms (Brophy, 1981; Hawkins & Heflin, 2011; Kern, 2007). This guide offers recommendations to instructors for using praise to maximize its positive impact.Effective teacher praise consists of two elements: (1) a description of noteworthy student academic performance or general behavior, and (2) a signal of teacher approval (Brophy, 1981; Burnett, 2001).

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Build a Student Motivation Trap to Increase Academic Engagement

Motivating a reluctant student to complete schoolwork is not easy. In a typical classroom, students can choose from a number of sources of potential reinforcement (Billington & DiTommaso, 2003)--and academic tasks often take a back seat to competing behaviors such as talking with peers. One way that teachers can increase the attractiveness of schoolwork is by structuring lessons or assignments around topics or activities of high interest to the student (Miller et al., 2003).In fact, with planning, the teacher can set up a 'trap' that uses motivating elements to capture a student's attention to complete academic tasks (Alber & Heward, 1996). Here is a 6-step blue-print for building an academic 'motivation trap' (adapted from Alber & Heward, 1996).

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Handbook on Family and Community Engagement

This handbook is intended to provide educators, community leaders and parents with articles that outline best research and practice around schools and family and community engagement. It offers a roadmap to esnure that every student's academic, personal, social and emotional development is supported.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Sam Redding, Marilyn Murphy, Pam Sheley, Editors

Response to Intervention, Parent Resources

Families are critical partners in effective implementation of RTI. As states and school districts work to implement an RTI process that provides early help to struggling students, parents need to understand the essential components of RTI and the roles they can play in supporting their child’s success.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Homework Contracts: Tapping the Power of Parents

Students who regularly complete and turn in homework assignments perform significantly better in school than those of similar ability who do not do homework (Olympia et al., 1994). Homework is valuable because it gives students a chance to practice, extend, and entrench the academic skills taught in school. Parents can be instrumental in encouraging and motivating their children to complete homework. This homework contract intervention (adapted from Miller & Kelly, 1994) uses goal-setting, a written contract, and rewards to boost student completion (and accuracy) of homework. Students also learn the valuable skills of breaking down academic assignments into smaller, more manageable subtasks and setting priorities for work completion.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Communicating with Parents: Strategies for Teachers

Teachers strive to develop partnerships with parents to support student learning. Strong communication is fundamental to this partnership and to building a sense of community between home and school. This article provides a range of communication opportunities available to teachers, including the emergency use of technology. Barriers to communication are considered in conjunction with potential solutions.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Susan Graham-Clay

Building Parent-Teacher Partnerships: Classroom Tips

Good two-way communication between families and schools is necessary for students' success. Not surprisingly, research shows that the more parents and teachers share relevant information with each other about a student, the better equipped both will be to help that student achieve academically. Opportunities for two-way communication include: (1) Parent conferences; (2) Parent-teacher organizations or school community councils; (3) Weekly or monthly folders of student work sent home for parent review and comment; (4) Phone calls; and (5) E-mail or school Web site. This paper presents ideas for building parent-teacher partnerships.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Parent Engagement & Child Learning Birth to Five: The Getting Ready Project

Consistent with our focus on making differences in children's lives, CYFS conducts applied research on childhood education programs, child care services, social-behavioral interventions, family relationships and family-caregiver partnerships. We position children for academic success by establishing strong connections between families and schools while striving to improve those schools by preparing and improving their teachers.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Parent-Teacher-Student Discrepancies in Academic Ability Beliefs: Influences on Parent Involvement

Most studies examining influences on parent involvement focus on common demographic factors, such as social class or gender, and on elementary grades. In the present study, we investigated a more malleable influence, perceptions of ability, in the context of middle school. We examined how perceptions held by parents, teachers, and students concerning students' academic abilities affected parents' involvement and teachers' facilitation of school programs for involvement.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Patel, Nimisha; Stevens, Sharon

The School Community Journal: Open Access Journal

The School Community Journal is a refereed journal that includes research and field reports related to the school as a community of teachers, students, parents, and staff.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Smooth Classroom Traffic

This classwide program can help to reduce noise levels and head off disruptive behaviors before they occur.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Good Behavior Game

The Good Behavior Game is an approach to the management of classrooms behaviors that rewards children for displaying appropriate on-task behaviors during instructional times. The class is divided into two teams and a point is given to a team for any inappropriate behavior displayed by one of its members. The team with the fewest number of points at the Game's conclusion each day wins a group reward. If both teams keep their points below a preset level, then both teams share in the reward. The program was first tested in 1969; several research articles have confirmed that the Game is an effective means of increasing the rate of on-task behaviors while reducing disruptions in the classroom (Barrish, Saunders, & Wolf, 1969; Harris & Sherman, 1973; Medland & Stachnik, 1972). The process of introducing the Good Behavior Game into a classroom is a relatively simple procedure. There are five steps involved in putting the Game into practice.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Effective Teacher Commands

As classroom managers, teachers regularly use commands to direct students to start and stop activities. Instructors find commands to be a crucial tool for classroom management, serving as instructional signals that help students to conform to the teacher's expectations for appropriate behaviors.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

RTI: Improve Classroom Management Through Flexible Rules - The Color Wheel

The Color Wheel is one solution that enforces uniform group expectations for conduct while also responding flexibly to the differing behavioral demands of diverse learning activities. This classwide intervention divides all activities into 3 categories and links each category to a color: green for free time/ low-structure activities; yellow for large- or small-group instruction/independent work; and red for brief transitions between activities. The student learns a short list of behavioral rules for each category and, when given a color cue, can switch quickly from one set of rules to another.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

The Babe and I

This historical fiction story takes place in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression in New York City. Baseball was king and Babe Ruth was at the top of his game. In this story, a young boy and his father become a team as they both work to support their family.

Material Type: Lesson Plan, Unit of Study

Author: David A. Adler