Georgia PBS Interventions - Florida's Positive Behavior Support ...

Enforceable Statements (Love and Logic Technique) www.loveandlogic.comSometimes the way we word things sets us up for failure in the classroom. Instead of saying “Clean upthis room right now and I mean it or you don’t get any recess.” We need to say things like “I’ll behappy to take you to recess as soon as the room is clean.”When we tell students what we are going to do it is so much easier to control the situation. I used torun a portion of the children’s Sunday school program with over 1000 children in one hour. We had tomove 1000 children between three activities: a) story telling, b) music, and c) life application. We hadapproximately 300 children every 15 minutes moving into each area with an adult to child ratio of 1-10approximately. This would have been like herding cats. However, we put two things into place: 1)Positive Behavior Support and 2) Enforceable Statements. We first taught the behaviors we expected.We had Edith Anne come in and model it for them- the wrong way and the right way. Edith Anne gotthe students to help her practice it. Then we caught them “being good”. We spent four Sundaysworking on this. Then we used Enforceable Statements. We will begin the storytelling as soon aseveryone is sitting “criss-cross” applesauce.We didn’t stand up there and tell 300 children to get quiet over and over; it would have never worked.The children did get quiet and we were known throughout the Midwest as church after church sentpeople to figure out what we were doing to happily contain 1000 children for an hour every Sunday. Wedid this for 3 hours straight every Sunday. We would have gone insane if we hadn’t figured out thebest way to do this.List three things you say all the time in your classroom:Things you say all the time:Example: Quit yelling and I’ll listen.Now Change it to an enforceablestatement:I’ll be happy to listen when your voicematches mine.Positive Interventions and Effective Strategies Riffel -© 2005 - 29 -