Teaching Self-Control: A Curriculum for Responsible Behavior
Martin Henley is a professor at Westfield State College in Massachusetts. He created a curriculum for teaching students self control in the classroom. Martin and a team of elementary and secondary level teachers collaborated together and launched the Preventive Discipline Project in the early 90's. They researched and collected data for nearly 4 years.
Martin wrote a book, Teaching Self-Control A curriculum for Responsible Behavior.
They found that self control consists of 20 separate social skills. This curriculum provides a practical way for teachers to assess their students. It supplies you with a Self -Control Inventory that teachers can use to score individual students, and students use the self-report-forms to critique their own abilities. Teachers are teaching self control every day with students. Asking students to please be quiet, or sit in their seats, stop talking, etc... Some may call this classroom management, or discipline. Now a days it is called positive behavior support.
I enjoyed reading this article and when I have time I would like to purchase his book. I found it interesting that in order to have responsible behavior, students to have self-control in the classroom. This to me seems simple and practical. I like having different teaching strategies to calm a student down or prevent them from becoming agitated.
He mentions in the article about substitute teaching and how the students act one way for the teacher and another for the sub. So true!! I have feel each year I am improving on skills, strategies, and classroom management.
Hopkins, G. (2005). Teaching Self-Control: A Curriculum for Responsible Behavior. Education World
Lori,
ReplyDeleteIt is so interesting to hear about a curriculum to help students manage their classroom behavior. I feel that this book could be useful to every one of us that is pursuing our dreams of teaching. Behavior is a major part of the classroom and how successful one's teaching is. If there is a way to successfully manage my student’s behavior and help all my future students be successful, then I am interested in looking into it. Thank you for posting your recommendation!
Wow! Who knew that self-control consisted of twenty different skills. That is fascinating! The author is correct in the fact that we do teach self-control in a variety of ways to students. One simple way is asking students to raise their hands to speak. We know for students with impulsively issues that this is very challenging. Did the article talk about the reasons or benefits of teaching self-control? What was his perspective on why we should be taking the time to teach these skills?
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