Status Update

My Action Research is successfully in progress. As of today, I have accomplished the following activities from my “Action Planning Template” and I am right on schedule.

Create Discipline Committee	Me and interested Staff	May 13, 2013	Discuss with staff	Discipline committee will help with collecting data and implementing Peace Builder curriculum.
Analyze staff survey	Discipline Committee  and staff	May 8, 2013	Staff survey	We will determine what other necessary actions will be needed. (Reteach students, reteach noon aids, etc.)
Create power point to show appropriate behaviors and rules for the playground.	Discipline Committee	August 2013	Rules, expectation, power point	Lead student expectations assembly and show power point presentation on student behavior.
Staff will continue to collect and log student citations beginning next school year 2013-14. I will collect and document citations.	Staff Me	Daily End of every month	Citations	I will determine if there is any evidence that student citations are decreasing. I document progress.

There were a few speed bumps made though out the course of my action research project.  For one, the first collection of student citations (to establish a baseline for the average amount of student citation collected in a month) was not an accurate collection because many teachers commented that the noon-aids just stopped giving them out because they either ran out of citations or “they just gave up” since it was towards the end of the year. While the citations collected did not give us a true picture of our school status, the data however, provided us  with what behaviors/rules that many students violated. This data helped us to focus on the specific behaviors/rules that we wanted to address for the following school year.

At the beginning of this school year, my principal and I collaborated and came up with ways to increase positive student behavior. We established three school-wide rules: 1. Be safe. 2. Be respectful. 3. Be responsible. From there we wanted to implement student assemblies each month to focus and teach each school rule per month. In August, our focus was Safety. I helped create a PowerPoint presentation to show correct and incorrect behavior on the playground, cafeteria, and classroom. This presentation helped students to understand what is expected of student safety.

In addition to each monthly assembly, we acknowledge students who exemplified correct student behavior. These students were also named the “Student of the Month.” We also wanted to encourage positive behavior by giving out “praise notes”. When a student was “caught doing the right thing and/or following the school rules” they received a praise note. At the end of the week, each class picked one student who received a praise note to get a prize from the principal. We also partnered with an “Anti-Bullying” program to teach students how to respond to bullying, how to not become a victim of bullying, and ways to foster positive relationships within the school campus. So far, we have been getting awesome results.