How one high school turned around the behavior on their campus with LiveSchool – and you can too!
Caddo Hills had been in a period of fluctuation. In 10 years, they were led by four different principals. When leadership changes, student accountability and teacher expectations can vary dramatically.
This created an environment where discipline issues had developed into cultural norms, and the learning environment suffered. As bad as the situation had become, Caddo Hills still had a staff that cared deeply about its students and wanted to turn things around.
The spring of 2021 was a tipping point for Caddo Hills. They decided to make some dramatic long-term changes starting from the ground up. That meant finding a way to:
The search for those answers led the team at CHHS to LiveSchool. They have used LiveSchool to track 141K behavior events this school year, with 139K of that accounting for positive behavior reinforcement opportunities.
Tracking behavior? Check. Recognizing students for doing the right thing? Check.
But before we talk about refocusing the vision at Caddo Hills, we need to meet the team responsible for leading the charge.
Caddo Hills had been in a period of fluctuation. In 10 years, they were led by four different principals. When leadership changes, student accountability and teacher expectations can vary dramatically.
This created an environment where discipline issues had developed into cultural norms, and the learning environment suffered. As bad as the situation had become, Caddo Hills still had a staff that cared deeply about its students and wanted to turn things around.
The spring of 2021 was a tipping point for Caddo Hills. They decided to make some dramatic long-term changes starting from the ground up. That meant finding a way to:
The search for those answers led the team at CHHS to LiveSchool. They have used LiveSchool to track 141K behavior events this school year, with 139K of that accounting for positive behavior reinforcement opportunities.
Tracking behavior? Check. Recognizing students for doing the right thing? Check.
But before we talk about refocusing the vision at Caddo Hills, we need to meet the team responsible for leading the charge.
“We had a lot of great kids, but they were being totally ignored because we had to spend all of our efforts on the negative stuff.”
Will Squires teaches Engineering at CHHS. He has been on staff throughout all the changes in leadership and this is what he had to say about the situation in the spring of 2021:
“Students were frustrated. Teachers were frustrated. Really, we just had a lack of positivity on campus.” – Will Squires
But Will knew Caddo Hills was home and that was the only place he wanted to teach, so he set about finding a way to change things. With a lot of personal research, he found several behavior management platform options and took the proposal to the Principal, Justin Neel.
They chose LiveSchool for two reasons:
“The keyword on our campus is ‘data.’ LiveSchool helps us track the data we don’t want to see in the classroom…but more importantly, it helps us track the data we do want to see.” – Justin Neel
Will and Justin have led the way in transforming the entire school community of Caddo Hills. They are investing in workforce training for their students and technology enhancements for staff…but none of it would be possible if they didn’t address the behavioral issues on campus first.
That's not to say that success was immediate. However, the challenges they faced in the first year paved the way for the significant success they are now experiencing.
Justin knew that any program they adopted would need to pass the all-important test of acquiring teacher and student buy-in. It wasn’t easy at first. Caddo Hills had undergone a lot of change over the years, so the first year of adoption had to be about proving the worth of the program to the community.
In the first year, they learned several valuable lessons that led to the momentum they found in their second year:
The team learned that their behavior rubric was too specific and difficult for staff to use effectively. Every situation was unique which would then require a new addition to the rubric, which further complicated the process and skewed their data.
Instead, they decided to make the rubric more general, which simplified the process and allowed staff to use the LiveSchool comment feature to provide additional detail as needed. This approach allowed staff to focus on the most important behaviors and provide more personalized feedback to students.
The Caddo Hills team also realized that students needed more ways to earn and spend points. Initially, students found it much easier to lose points than to earn them. To address this issue, the team involved the students in the process of revising the rubric.
This way, the students had a say in what was necessary for their success, resulting in a more effective system that motivated students to behave positively and earn points.
Will and his team also realized that having a true and comprehensive picture of a student's behavior was extremely valuable for teachers when working through behavioral issues. When Justin would work with a student, often all he had to work with was the information on the discipline referral.
By using LiveSchool, teachers and administrators were able to see the behaviors that were being tracked by the rubric and the comments or notes that were added by other teachers or staff members.
This allowed teachers to gain a better understanding of the student's overall behavior and provided them with the necessary context to address any issues.
Caddo Hills is located in Norman, Arkansas and they offer courses for college-bound students as well as technology, vocational, and career-based classes. They recently shifted to a four-day school week and converted to a charter school. In the midst of all this change, they needed to track and improve student behavior.
When it comes to student behavior it is absolutely essential that teachers feel supported by school leadership. But as any veteran teacher will tell you, if the classroom teacher leans too heavily on that support, they will lose authority in their own classroom.
It’s a fine line for teachers to determine what needs to be handled in the room and what requires a call to the office.
The team at Caddo Hills developed guidelines to help teachers address this dilemma.
They created a behavior flowchart as a visual representation of how school staff should manage student behavior.
The Caddo Hills flowchart illustrates the appropriate response level to inappropriate behavior and who is responsible for managing the behavior. This helps Justin and his team support teachers by providing a clear and consistent approach to responding to student behavior.
The flowchart can also be used as a reference for teachers and students to review when discussing behavior expectations and potential consequences.
This serves as an important communication tool between the principal and the teachers. It provides a common language and understanding of how student behavior should be managed in the school or classroom.
This kind of protocol helped Caddo Hills cut into superfluous referrals that could be handled in the classroom while also giving teachers some standard options for addressing those minor issues.
But the protocol wasn’t just for negative behavior. The improvement at Caddo Hills isn’t from reducing negative behaviors…it’s from celebrating positive behaviors.
The leadership team doesn't just respond when teachers sent out an SOS call, they are also alerted when students go above and beyond in a positive way as well. The practice has become a tradition at Caddo that they are calling “The Hallway High-Five”.
In addition to The Hallway High-Five, Will and the team have created a token economy that is designed to motivate and incentivize high school students. Just like with the matrix, they polled their students to determine the types of rewards that their students really want.
These are all very small and cost-efficient items that students wanted in their school rewards store. Of the 137K points earned so far this year, students have already used 57K to purchase rewards so far.
For more on creating incentives for High School students you should check out: "10 Incentives That High School Students Will Actually Want"
Now that Caddo Hills has established what works for them they are seeing a buy-in increase from all stakeholders. Not only that, but they now have a true picture of student behavior to make informed decisions on.
Having a true picture of student behavior means having an accurate understanding of how students are interacting and behaving in the school environment.
This has helped Caddo Hills support students by providing targeted interventions to address any issues that may arise.
LiveSchool data can also be used to inform decisions about curriculum, instruction, and every other aspect of the school environment, helping to create an environment that fosters student success.
Caddo Hills had been in a period of fluctuation. In 10 years, they were led by four different principals. When leadership changes, student accountability and teacher expectations can vary dramatically.
This created an environment where discipline issues had developed into cultural norms, and the learning environment suffered. As bad as the situation had become, Caddo Hills still had a staff that cared deeply about its students and wanted to turn things around.
The spring of 2021 was a tipping point for Caddo Hills. They decided to make some dramatic long-term changes starting from the ground up. That meant finding a way to:
The search for those answers led the team at CHHS to LiveSchool. They have used LiveSchool to track 141K behavior events this school year, with 139K of that accounting for positive behavior reinforcement opportunities.
Tracking behavior? Check. Recognizing students for doing the right thing? Check.
But before we talk about refocusing the vision at Caddo Hills, we need to meet the team responsible for leading the charge.
Caddo Hills had been in a period of fluctuation. In 10 years, they were led by four different principals. When leadership changes, student accountability and teacher expectations can vary dramatically.
This created an environment where discipline issues had developed into cultural norms, and the learning environment suffered. As bad as the situation had become, Caddo Hills still had a staff that cared deeply about its students and wanted to turn things around.
The spring of 2021 was a tipping point for Caddo Hills. They decided to make some dramatic long-term changes starting from the ground up. That meant finding a way to:
The search for those answers led the team at CHHS to LiveSchool. They have used LiveSchool to track 141K behavior events this school year, with 139K of that accounting for positive behavior reinforcement opportunities.
Tracking behavior? Check. Recognizing students for doing the right thing? Check.
But before we talk about refocusing the vision at Caddo Hills, we need to meet the team responsible for leading the charge.
Caddo Hills had been in a period of fluctuation. In 10 years, they were led by four different principals. When leadership changes, student accountability and teacher expectations can vary dramatically.
This created an environment where discipline issues had developed into cultural norms, and the learning environment suffered. As bad as the situation had become, Caddo Hills still had a staff that cared deeply about its students and wanted to turn things around.
The spring of 2021 was a tipping point for Caddo Hills. They decided to make some dramatic long-term changes starting from the ground up. That meant finding a way to:
The search for those answers led the team at CHHS to LiveSchool. They have used LiveSchool to track 141K behavior events this school year, with 139K of that accounting for positive behavior reinforcement opportunities.
Tracking behavior? Check. Recognizing students for doing the right thing? Check.
But before we talk about refocusing the vision at Caddo Hills, we need to meet the team responsible for leading the charge.
Caddo Hills had been in a period of fluctuation. In 10 years, they were led by four different principals. When leadership changes, student accountability and teacher expectations can vary dramatically.
This created an environment where discipline issues had developed into cultural norms, and the learning environment suffered. As bad as the situation had become, Caddo Hills still had a staff that cared deeply about its students and wanted to turn things around.
The spring of 2021 was a tipping point for Caddo Hills. They decided to make some dramatic long-term changes starting from the ground up. That meant finding a way to:
The search for those answers led the team at CHHS to LiveSchool. They have used LiveSchool to track 141K behavior events this school year, with 139K of that accounting for positive behavior reinforcement opportunities.
Tracking behavior? Check. Recognizing students for doing the right thing? Check.
But before we talk about refocusing the vision at Caddo Hills, we need to meet the team responsible for leading the charge.
Every day, the LiveSchool Vision becomes reality.
