How much Golden Time should children lose?
Q: We use circle times and a weekly golden time, alongside other systems of rewards and time out. In the younger classes children lose a minute for wrong choices but a teacher in year 3 feels the children, as older pupils, should have a more stringent sanction and is currently using 10 minute blocks of time for each wrong choice. I am concerned but he is equally convinced the children are older and need a bigger sanction than the youngest. What are your feelings on this?
It is great that your school are using our weekly Golden Times…it is the pivot around which the whole model turns…but we have a lot of problems in trying to help schools to make sure it is truly ‘golden’…and not a rusty old time at the end of a Friday afternoon with a teacher who is marking their books having handed out some old bits of computer paper and jigsaw puzzles with bits missing!!! To make it truly golden – and therefore truly powerful – it does need to have different people in the room. We match up an older class with a younger class, invite older people in, invite parents in and generally make it Community Time. It therefore has very high profile…now to the question.
With young children we will use the golden sun and the sad cloud with one minute sand timers (see ‘Better Behaviour through Golden Time’). So, if a child breaks a rule we put the peg with their name on into the middle warning sun (this is a sun with a cloud going over his face). The child then has to choose if they want to come back to the happy sun by keeping to the golden rules or, if they break another rule they will go to the sad cloud.
At the older level, and this is very important, there has to be a yellow warning card placed beside the child (on the wall there will be an example warning card which above it says ‘Behaviour is your choice’. They then have the choice (if I find that children choose to break another rule regularly if often means that Golden Time is not exciting and motivational enough). It’s always very difficult when a member of staff wants to interpret things their own way. I think a compromise could be reached. For most children we do not leave the warning card down for very long – maybe till the coffee break or lunchtime. Maybe in his case he could leave the warning card down for a shorter time and then they lose the usual five minutes. (The only time children bypass the system is when they lose their temper completely and no warning card works – this is the only time they would be sent to the head and the incident written into an incident book and read back and signed by the child and the adult who witnessed the incident. This is a more serious scenario and parents may well be contacted – and it would probably need to be accompanied by a chill-out session to help the child calm down. In these particular incidents the child loses 10 minutes Golden Time as that is seen to be fair by the other pupils but the real consequences will be followed through from the incident book).
So, back to your teacher, perhaps you could show him my above ideas and see what he says, however if he is committed to his line of reaction, your best bet would be to help him make his Golden Time so absorbing and wonderful – that no children lose any – and then the 10 minute rule won’t matter!!! Just on another note – has your staff remembered that for all the children who do not lose any Golden Time – they will receive a Golden Time certificate sent through the post with their parents. This is the heart of the model as it means that all the middle plodder children are now celebrated. I hope all the above helps you and I think it is brilliant that your staff is all ready using it and that you are debating some important issues. So well done to all of you.
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