Help Students Stay On Task with New Behavior Anchor Pages
Anchor Pages in Goalbook Toolkit, up til now, have covered grade levels spanning from K-12 and have covered the subject areas of reading, writing, and math. We are excited to announce that we’ve released Anchor Pages in a new content area: behavior.
This initial release is quite small in scope because we have taken a slightly different approach to these pages than the more academically focused pages. We wanted to differentiate these pages from the others because behavior isn’t formally assessed in the same way that ELA and math are. Rather than utilizing assessments to monitor progress, we opted to use benchmarks that clearly define whether students are making progress towards preferred behaviors.
What Does a Behavior Anchor Page Look Like?
Our team focused its attention on creating Anchor Pages that address on-task behaviors, with a critical focus on building skills that allow students to be independent. We were intentional about defining what autonomy should look like at various developmental stages and included strategies that align tightly with these stages. Thus, the differences that you will notice from grade level to grade level deal primarily with the expected level of assistance, setting, and expectations around the duration of time the student is asked to remain on task.
What is present in these Anchor Pages that we hope will help teachers and students succeed are easy-to-use resources that can be used in a variety of settings. We wanted to make sure that the resources were uncomplicated yet highly effective. We had three simple goals in mind as we created this new content:
- Help teachers and students build skills: Each quarterly objective gradually and logically pushes students towards independence through developing skills that are based on student interests.
- Help teachers and students visualize progress: Each assessment benchmark provides a visual representation of what mastery looks like and sounds like.
- Provide teachers and students easy-to-understand printable resources: Each objective contains a downloadable teacher-facing data-tracking sheet and a downloadable student-facing resource.
On-Task Behavior is About More Than Compliance
At the heart of these pages is the belief that, at any level, students are capable of analyzing how their thoughts and emotions affect decision-making and responsible behavior. Additionally, these pages operate in such a way that students aren’t expected to behave for the sake of compliance—they should be able to evaluate how expressing their emotions in different situations affects others. A great example of this is the grade 3–5 first quarter objective; it intentionally places students in scenarios where they are engaging in preferred tasks with peers which takes the focus off of the content and onto staying on task to cultivate positive interactions with peers.
Independence is going to look different at every level, and some students need a more explicit approach towards incorporating the tools to do it but we believe that it is possible for all students.
As with every Anchor Page, these have incremental learning targets that are supported by learning objectives that scaffold towards mastery and instructional resources that teachers can use to help them deliver rigorous instruction. As we continue to solicit feedback from teachers, we will be able to assess the efficacy of these pages and continue to develop them so they support teachers with goal-setting and intentional instruction around behavior.
Use Them Now!
K-2 On-Task During Academic Work
3–5 On-Task During Group Instruction
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