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Fred Jones: Tools for Teaching

 

 

Behavior and Grades Improve after Fred Jones Training:
A true story about change at Granite Hills High School in Porterville, California

Tools for Teaching Supplies Specifics for PBIS and RtI
The objective of Tools for Teaching for the past 40 years has been to develop specific classroom management procedures that prevent both discipline and instruction problems.

Creating Student Engagement
To create student engagement, the teacher must succeed in managing both discipline and instruction. If kids are goofing off, you wont get much engagement.

The Process of Growth and Change
Training is the easy part of effective professional development. The hard part is follow-through. Follow-through requires organizational change to support personal change.

Making “Say, See, Do Teaching” Affordable
In the Say, See, Do Teaching method, you tell students what to do, you show them what to do, and then you have them do it. The process is repeated as students learn by doing…one step at a time.

Tools for Teaching Implements Response to Intervention (RTI)
RTI is a multi-level system that focuses on the prevention of learning problems. It is designed to develop capacity for identifying, adapting and sustaining effective instructional practices.

Tools for Teaching Tips for Substitutes
Consider two different perspectives when applying Tools for Teaching to the job of substitute teaching. The first is when you are about to have a substitute. The second is when you are about to be a substitute.

Excellence on a Shoestring
Keeping our program alive and well in the face of budget cuts requires training that can be done on a shoestring, and support and follow-through that costs nothing.

Positive Discipline Management: Tips for Successful Implementation
Training is the easy part of effective professional development. The hard part is follow-through. Follow-through requires organizational change to support personal change.

Tools for Teaching Implements PBIS: Level 3
Tertiary prevention focuses on individuals who exhibit patterns of behavior that are dangerous, highly disruptive, and/or impede learning.

Tools for Teaching Implements PBIS: Level 2
PBIS defines secondary prevention largely in terms of individualized behavior management programs to eliminate persistent problems or group interventions to teach social skills.

 

About Fred Jones


Dr. Fred Jones received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UCLA, specializing in work with schools and families. While serving as the head of the Child Experimental Ward of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the UCLA Medical Center, he developed methods of helping children with severe emotional disorders. He also began pioneering research into classroom management in both regular and special education classrooms. While on the faculty of the University of Rochester, Dr. Jones continued to develop the non-adversarial management procedures presented in his books Positive Classroom Discipline and Positive Classroom Instruction.

Dr. Jones has studied highly successful teachers for more than 30 years. In the process, he has developed methods of classroom management that are both powerful and affordable for all teachers. His most recent book, Tools for Teaching, offers an updated description of classroom management in which the prevention of discipline problems and training children to be responsible place discipline management within a positive and affirming context. Tools for Teaching is supplemented by a Study Group Activity Guide which structures staff training at the school site (a free download from fredjones.com). Videos also are available that supplement training with modeling of both skills and coaching procedures. In addition, a Parent Edition of Tools for Teaching is available on DVD.
 

Tools for Teaching Implements PBIS
The objective of Tools for Teaching is identical to that of PBIS. Both seek to develop and implement effective discipline practices. Both focus on primary prevention in the classroom. Both employ applied behavioral research to build an advanced framework for classroom management.

Having Fun with Responsibility Training
In the previous segment, we mentioned that the two main types of PATs are enrichment activities and learning games. In this segment, we will give you some specific ideas for PATs. Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to generate preferred activities with the snap of a finger.

Eliminating Wasted Time
To make PAT work, you must first and foremost be a giver -- like any loving parent. You give PAT, and you give bonus PAT to train students to do the right thing. It is a win-win strategy. You are not forcing students to hustle. You are structuring a situation in which they choose to hustle. PAT with a Hurry-up Bonus is the alternative to 'nag, threaten, and punish.'"

Dealing with the Unexpected
No set of skills comes with a guarantee. Certain individuals in certain situations will respond atypically. In this segment, we will examine a type of child whose response to you meaning business will be the opposite of what you might expect.

Nasty Backtalk
If we think of discipline management as a poker game in which the student raises the dealer with increasing levels of provocation, then nasty backtalk is going all in. The student is risking it all for the sake of power and control.

Backtalk: When In Doubt, Do Nothing
The cardinal error in dealing with backtalk is backtalk -- your backtalk. Becoming involved with backtalk only makes the problem worse -- which produces our first rule of backtalk: It takes one fool to backtalk. It takes two fools to make a conversation out of it.

Responding to Backtalk
Think of backtalk as a melodrama that is written, produced, and directed by the student. In this melodrama there is a speaking part for you. If you accept your speaking part in the melodrama, it is 'show time.' But if you do not, the show bombs.

Meaning Business: Exploiting Your Power
Meaning business is the low-key, almost invisible way in which effective parents and effective teachers establish and enforce rules. At this point in our analysis of meaning business, we will examine power -- your power. To lead, you must be comfortable with power.

No Means No: The Importance of Consistency
The management of behavior problems will follow one of two paths in any classroom: If you are consistent, you can use smaller and smaller consequences to govern misbehavior. If you are inconsistent, you must use larger and larger consequences to govern misbehavior.

Teaching Rules and Routines
"Research has repeatedly shown that teachers with the best run classrooms spend most of the first two weeks of the semester teaching procedures and routines... A wise teacher knows that spending time on procedures early in the semester saves time and energy in the long run. Prevention is always cheaper than remediation."

Training the Class to be Responsible
Training kids to do what you want them to do when you ask them to do it is the side of discipline management we call Responsibility Training. The goal of Responsibility Training is to make responsible behavior in the classroom a matter of routine. In this brief summary of Responsibility Training, Dr. Fred Jones offers new options for classroom management.

Positive Discipline: Part 6
Rules carry a price. As teachers, when we look up to see one of our rules being broken, we face a moment of truth. Will we act -- or will we equivocate? In this column, Dr. Fred Jones examines the importance of meaning business, and explains how consistency, commitment, and calm can help you act like a teacher as well as think like one.

Positive Discipline, Part 5
Meaning business involves your entire being. It is mental, emotional, and physical. In this segment, Dr. Fred Jones discusses the mental aspect of meaning business. The mental part of meaning business, he says, centers on a clear understanding of consistency -- consistency when setting limits on children's obnoxious behavior. Effective teachers and parents are consistent, but they are consistent within the context of nurturance.

Positive Discipline, Part 4
For classroom discipline to be less work, we must approach it from the perspective of prevention rather than from the more traditional perspective of remediation and consequences. In this segment, Dr. Jones discusses a simple innovation in lesson presentation that can prevent discipline problems while accelerating learning. That innovation involves the use of graphics as an integral part of lesson plans.

Positive Discipline, Part 3
Incentives answer the question, "Why should I?" By managing incentives, we can increase the motivation of students to work hard while working conscientiously. But incentives must be used correctly, or they can create more problems than they solve. To use incentives effectively, you must have fun. The principle that ties incentives and motivation together is, "No joy, no work."

Positive Discipline, Part 2
While school discipline codes focus on large infractions, discipline management within the classroom is dominated by continuous small disruptions. It is a picture of endless "goofing off" and time wasting. Tools for Teaching might be viewed as an attempt to prevent the goofing off typical of most classrooms. As you might imagine, instruction and discipline go together.

Positive Discipline, Part 1
The logic of all school discipline codes is timeless: "The punishment fits the crime." The greater the crime, the greater the punishment. Look in your student handbook under the heading "Discipline Code" and you will find a "hierarchy of consequences," arranged from small to large. It begins with a verbal warning and ends with suspension and expulsion. Does it work?

Bell Work
Bell Work" is the work that students are doing when the opening bell rings. It's the work that separates the world of the classroom from the world of play. It's the work that provides purpose to the process of "settling in." Dr. Fred Jones explains how Bell Work can add teaching and learning time to your day.

Starting the New School Year
On the first day of school, the first question in students' minds is, "Who are you?" Their second question is, "Who are they?" Students do better in class when they are comfortable, relaxed, and "at home." A very good reason to devote the lion's share of your first class period of the year to creating comfort.

Omission Training for Behavior Problems
Omission Training in conjunction with Responsibility Training is as close to magic as you will get in behavior management, says Dr. Fred Jones. It has the power to all but eliminate reliance on such sanctions as office referrals and parent conferences. I have seen it bring an outcast child into the middle of the class sociogram in two weeks!

Having Fun with PAT
In Responsibility Training, students earn Preferred Activity Time (PAT) when they save time. Apart from curriculum enrichment activities, team competition is perhaps the most reliable and easy-to-use motivational "hook" in education. Anything can be taught in the form of a team game, and team games make terrific PATs. Included: Games you can play with students to "have fun with learning."

Teaching Students to Hustle
Responsibility training teaches students to be responsible about everything they do in the classroom. All the various forms of responsible behavior can be organized, however, under one heading: learning to be responsible with time. In this column, Dr. Fred Jones examines the procedures that train students to hustle to save learning time.

PAT: Learning to Give in Order to Get
To learn time management, students must have time -- time they desire; time they are willing to work for. "Preferred Activity Time" or PAT, therefore, is the time you give students to teach them time management and to give yourself the opportunity to teach. How much PAT do your students need? Dr. Fred Jones explains. Included: A grade-by-grade schedule for PAT.

Incentives Teach Lessons
The management of cooperation in the classroom focuses on giving students a reason to cooperate. If you want students to cooperate class after class, day after day, you must answer for them the question, "Why should I?" The answer to that question is called an incentive. For behavior management to be practical, we must answer that question for the entire class throughout the entire day at a low cost.

Meaning Business, Part 5
In the first four segments of this series, we examined the mental, emotional, and physical components of Meaning Business and the body language of classroom discipline. What happens, though, when the body language of Meaning Business produces the opposite of what we expect? How do we handle the exceptions to the rule?

Meaning Business, Part 4
When students confront you verbally, everything they are doing -- the challenge, the upset, the talk itself -- seems calculated to get you to do one thing -- to speak! Could there be a method to their madness? Dr. Fred Jones offers three rules for dealing with backtalk that leave students powerless -- and speechless.

Meaning Business: Part 3
Poker is a simple game. You either bet or fold. In the body language poker game, teachers fold when they turn a way from a situation before the students have folded. Students fold when they abandon pseudo-compliance and actually get back to work. You have to stay in the game until the students fold. Dr. Fred Jones provides step-by-step instructions on how to win at "body language poker."

Meaning Business, Part 2
Kids read body language. They are born with that ability, and they get better at it with each passing year. Dr. Fred Jones explains how you can exploit that skill by employing the body language of meaning business. Included: A step-by-step guide to completing "the turn."

Meaning Business, Part 1
Classroom management requires calm. You never will be able to manage another person's behavior until you can manage your own. A calm response to provocation can be learned. Because upset happens quickly, however, you have to learn to relax immediately and automatically when confronted. That takes practice.

Escaping the Paper Grading Trap
The paper-grading ritual, says Dr. Fred Jones, not only fails to improve student learning, it also cannibalizes the after-school time available for planning tomorrow's lessons with yesterday's clerical work. The more adept you become at building work check into teaching, the more responsibility students take for quality control, and the more your evenings are freed up for lesson planning.

Adding Motivation to Mastery
The question underlying the topic of motivation in the student's mind is, "Why should I?" If you answer that question successfully, you can get work from an unmotivated student. If you cannot come up with a good answer, you get nothing. Included: How the right incentives can motivate your students -- and free up your evenings.

Exploiting Structured Practice
In a previous segment of this series, we quoted Vince Lombardi, who said, "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect." A key part of teachers' jobs is to create perfect practice. Creating bad habits is the alternative. Teaching it right the first time is easier than breaking bad habits.

Teaching to the Physical Modality
Say, See, Do Teaching, says Dr. Fred Jones, reduces many of the learning and behavior problems that teachers face every day, by attacking structural problems that underlie the more common "bop 'til you drop" teaching approach.

Weaning the Helpless Handraisers, Part 2
Last month, Tools for Teaching looked at verbal modalities for dealing with those helpless students who sit through Guided Practice with their hands waving in the air, waiting to be personally tutored. This month, Dr. Jones discusses how to go beyond the verbal to the visual; explaining how a "Visual Instruction Plan" can reduce the duration of your helping interactions from 30 seconds to 5 seconds.

Weaning the Helpless Handraisers, Part 1
Ah, the helpless handraisers -- those students whose hands are waving in the air no matter what you do or say. Do you have a few in your class? You can break the cycle, says Fred Jones, and turn helpless handraisers into independent learners.

Rules, Routines, and Standards at All Grade Levels
"Investing time in teaching classroom rules, standards, and procedures is a classic example of proactive versus reactive management. Prevention is cheaper than remediation. But prevention is not free. You must invest 'up front' if you want to reap the dividends for the remainder of the semester."

Effective Room Arrangement
Classroom management expert Fred Jones identifies "three zones of proximity" and discusses how knowing what they are can help you "work the crowd" in your own classroom.