Lindsey Hancock Warden
Managing Impulsivity
Managing impulsivity is a habit that Costa & Kallick define as having a "a sense of deliberativeness" in their actions, from planning goals to managing behaviors, from preparing well to refraining from blurting out (Costa & Kallick, 2010). To introduce this important skill to my class, I decided to explicitly teach the lesson independently of our regular classroom content and used skits to teach about many different situations in which students might need to manage impulsivity. Then I reinforced this skill by engaging in several classroom activities over the course of the rest of the year and constantly reviewing the habit as I worked with students to set goals, track and manage behaviors, and plan for their academic futures. My students also demonstrated this habit to a high degree in the planning and execution of a class-wide literary magazine, the process for which I outline in this section.
Introductory Lesson & Activities
I explicitly taught managing impulsivity by using the lesson plan below. The most important aspect of this lesson for me was to ensure that my students could approach the topic of managing impulsivity from many different ways and areas of their lives. After all, this is a Habit that can apply not just to their school activities, but also to their personal relationships, athletics, and future goals.
After discussing situations in which we may not have managed our impulses well in the past, I group my students into four groups and give them situational descriptions for which they must perform a skit. As students work in their peer groups, I remind them that part of managing impulsivity is coming up with a plan and ensuring that every group member's ideas are honored.
As students activate their ability to manage impulsivity through the planning of their peer group skits, they must also think through their specific situation and identify areas where the character fails to manage his or her impulsivity. The skit topics are written in the handout below. As you can see from the handout to the right, these topics cover situations that students might commonly encounter: failing to prioritize homework/make-up work, reacting poorly to a teacher's admonishment, failing to plan appropriately for the future, and diving into a group project without working with the group to come up with a design and project objectives.
After creating their skits, each group performs their scenario for the class. As groups perform, individual students take notes using our class Seesaw app (below) over what each skit depicts, and how the situations could have been handled in ways that manage impulsivity.
This student highlights some key aspects of the habit, including managing time wisely, remembering norms and expectations, reacting to situations after taking some time to calm down, researching and gathering information, and planning projects before beginning them.
The Powerpoint that I used alongside this lesson is displayed below. This follows the lesson's line of asking students to consider situations where they acted impulsively, as well as to put the definition of impulsivity into their own words. However, it really takes thinking through the situations outlined in the skits for us to really be able to understand what managing impulsivity looks like.
After they have taken notes over each skit and we bring the lesson to its close, my students share how each of the skit scenarios could have been handled better and we work together to come up with the running list of norms on slide four to post in the classroom. These norms highlight six behaviors encompassed by managing impulsivity that we would expect each other to demonstrate and reflect on throughout the year. These behaviors are:
-
Plan ahead of time to meet your goals.
-
Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
-
Manage your time wisely.
-
Find necessary information before starting a project or activity.
-
Seek input from peer group before making decisions in group work.
-
Track your progress towards goals.
Reinforcement & Reflection
Reinforcement: Quarterly Goal Setting
An important skill to build up the habit of managing impulsivity is the ability to set goals, and design steps to reach them. The documents sampled below are examples of a goal-setting activity that I designed for my students to think about goal-setting in the context of virtues we had been working on in our Bible curriculum. They reflect on which virtues they admire and want to apply to their goals, and then write an explanation of how they can actually apply these goals. The assignment culminates with a visual representation of the student reaching their goals, which we then post around the classroom. I frequently direct my students to look at the wall where their goal is posted as we improve in managing impulsive behaviors, habits, words, and actions. When students are keeping their goals in mind, they are more likely to work on managing their impulsivity.
Reinforcement Tool: Impulsive Behaviors Intervention
I additionally used this classwide intervention to help my students manage their impulsivity, particularly with turning in (or failing to turn in) assignments and with appropriate behaviors. This simple form is sent home weekly, and allows the teacher to score each student's success in managing impulses. When I give a student an imperfect score, I write a comment to help them understand what they need to do better. While we do not write reflections every week about the classroom logs, I do frequently ask my students to post to Seesaw or write in their journals for bellwork and reflect on how successfully they managed their impulses during a given week. This log helps me inform my students of areas in which they can improve, and also promotes introspection and reflection as my students redirect their courses of action and constantly seek to manages impulses better.
Reinforcement: Student Reflections
Another important aspect of managing impulsivity is the ability to reflect on impulsive behaviors. On the left is one response to an end-of-year informal writing prompt that required students to reflect on areas that they needed to improve from that school year. This response was written by one of my most impulsive students, but she does engage in some reflection here and set reasonable goals for herself in the next school year while still acknowledging that she might not be perfect. Recognizing flaws is an important skill encompassed in this habit, and the student does a nice job of identifying her most impulsive behaviors and considering how she might improve. Of course, she still has work to do, but habits of mind can be built up over time.
My eighth grade students filmed themselves delivering their end-of-year reflections to play at our class celebration. The audio below features one of my favorite eighth grade reflections, in which one of my students details some of the impulsive behaviors he learned to resist throughout the school year and sets goals for his future based on this habit.
Managing Impulsivity
Literary Magazine
One opportunity that my students had to demonstrate their ability to manage their impulsivity was in the creation of a class literary magazine based around poetry that we were writing for our poetry unit. My students were very excited to get started when I showed them examples of my university's literary magazines. They loved the idea of being published authors, and many were also excited by the design elements of creating a literary magazine.
Of course, a project this huge cannot just happen overnight no matter how excited students are to get started. Part of undertaking a large, team project, and especially one that is designed for public consumption, is being very intentional in the planning. Rather than logging directly into the Shutterfly software and beginning the project, students had a large series of steps to complete before they could ever even touch the publishing software.
1. Students needed to edit their poetry drafts for publication. Rather than forming a class committee to select pieces for the magazine, I had my students each write a number of pieces around varying themes, and each was to be published in the literary magazine.
2. Create artwork or retrieve public domain images that compliment each poetry piece. This was still an individual task that students had to complete before they even gather in a class meeting to talk about the publishing.
3. Determine roles. For this project, some students had to be in charge of transcribing the class poetry into a typed format. Others took charge of selecting a theme and clipart for the publication. Another pair took charge of arranging the poems in the desired order in the publication software and arranging photographs and artwork.
4. Students had to engage their assigned roles. The transcriptions, artwork selection, and arrangements took several weeks for students to complete.
5. Students had to review their work. We used three class periods to post the sample magazine to the Smartboard, and review each page. Students made revision suggestions where necessary, and all changes had to be voted on.
6. I had a role in reviewing the final product, and creating some minor sections, like the forward, and the student biographies.
7. The students voted on one student to write and arrange the thank you page at the end of the publication.
8. The eighth grade students met to review the product, and vote on a selection of potential names that I had on a list.
9. Eighth grade students made some final artwork changes based on the voted name.
10. I sent home order forms, and the literary magazine went to publishing for students and families who ordered copies.
As you can see, this process was quite extensive. Students had to thoughtfully approach each step, and engage in a lot of planning along the way, in order to produce a quality product. Any rushing ahead would have resulted in a less-than-perfect publication, and since my students took a lot of pride in the idea of being published authors, they dedicated themselves to this work and managed their impulsivity effectively in order to create the magazine, a sample of which is attached below. You may zoom in to see the detail of my students' work, and to see the extent to which they worked in their individual roles to create a quality, team-build project.
Through this project, I feel that my students learned the value of managing impulsivity. While it might have been a lot of fun to jump into the interface and start dropping clipart everywhere, approaching this project impulsively would have resulted in a magazine that was not cohesive and looked sloppily done. Instead, my students effectively activated the habit of managing impulsivity to work together for a magazine that looks and reads as professional. This reinforces the importance of managing impulsivity to them in other aspects of their academics and daily lives.
Each image in this document was either sourced by my students from the public domain, included in our Shutterfly interface, or is a personal photo. My students' faces have all been covered.
Conclusion
In conclusion, managing impulsivity is an important habit that should serve my students well throughout their academic and personal growth. This habit promotes careful thinking and planning, whether a student is trying to manage a particular behavior, set goals for the future, or publish an entire literary magazine. By teaching an explicit lesson on managing impulsivity and providing many opportunities throughout the year for my students to work on this school, I ensure that they are able to effectively engage this habit when it matters most. Through their excellent literary magazine example, my students demonstrate that they can engage a range of habits, including managing their impulsivity, to create a great product. By working through each step and planning for a certain kind of outcome, my students learned through the publication of their literary magazine that sometimes working cautiously and with much planning is very beneficial.