Behavior reflection sheets or “Think Sheets” are one of my secret weapons! I have many different versions of them in my resource room. They are printed, displayed, and ready for use. Behavior reflection sheets are forms that you can hand to your students who have had an “incident.”
Most often, I hand them to students on my caseload when they blow into my room because they need to (or were asked to) take a break from their general ed classrooms. Sometimes, I will pass them out to a student who is feeling emotional and needs to process. I even have a special think sheet for students who have done something that has made me proud and I want them to remember it.
You can read more specifically about how I set them up here.
If you have a social skills group, special ed room or a resource room, counseling room, or if you are a teacher who gets lots of “friends” taking breaks in your classroom, you need a think sheet. Not convinced? Keep reading.
3 Ways to get the most out of your Behavior Reflection Sheets:
1. Finding the Gaps in Student Understanding:
Use completed Reflection Sheets to inform instruction. When you sit with a student to recount the incident, you will often find out where the miscommunication lies. For example, a student illustrates their Think Sheet to show that he had hit a classmate because his classmate laughed. The laugh wasn't at him directly, more in his general direction. The student assumed it was because of a conflict they had on the soccer field and therefore had no choice.
I modified my social skills group content to include videos, questions, and full lessons about intention, facial expressions, and the verbalization of emotions.
2. Student-Guided Reflection:
Students will develop their social skills through self-reflection. Many times after a behavior incident students don’t know what has happened. It is difficult to identify and verbalize what caused their escalation. Having a structured and simple format for reflection builds self-awareness and social awareness. This can lead to opportunities for guided problem-solving. Think sheets help students to make connections between their emotions and their actions.
3. Data:
My favorite! Social skills data can be hard to come by, hard to quantify, and hard to communicate. You may know that a student has improved in friendship skills but, how do you share that? Behavior Reflection Sheets can be a big piece of the puzzle. Keep the sheets in your student's file. At the end of each month, review them. Use them to find patterns. Is there a time of the day that seems to be the most challenging? Maybe it’s a particular day of the week? A certain person or subject? Once you find a pattern you can put accommodations into place before the behavior occurs. Think sheets can inform IEP goals and help you plan interventions at high-risk time periods. Also, having the sheets completed by the students themselves can be a wonderful resource when conferencing with parents.
Creating a Behavior Reflection Sheet
A think sheet for elementary students is simple to create a needs just a few elements:
What I did…
How I was feeling…
How I made others feel…
What I should have done…
What I can do to move forward in the situation…
Having a Behavior Reflection Sheet that matches the accessibility level of your students is important.
Consider the following: Do you have readers or non-readers? Are your students highly verbal do they prefer to sketch? I like to display multiple versions of Think Sheets to give students some choice including a visual elementary think sheet, a sheet for readers, and a small book option.
When you teach your classroom routine for use of the Behavior Reflection Sheets you can have students explore each option. You can see my Behavior Think Sheets here or make your own! Either way, they can make a huge impact on your classroom culture by giving students a structured way to understand the connection between their emotions and their actions.