The Principal's Handbook

5-Steps to Reduce Office Referrals to Have More Time in Your Day
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Principal's Handbook, your go-to resource for principals looking to revamp their leadership approach and prioritize self-care. I'm Barb Flowers, a certified life coach with eight years of experience as an elementary principal. Tune in each week as we delve into strategies for boosting mental resilience, managing time effectively, and nurturing overall wellness.
From tackling daily challenges to maintaining a healthy work life balance. We'll navigate the complexities of school leadership together. Join me in fostering your sense of purpose as a principal and reigniting your passion for the job. Welcome to a podcast where your wellbeing is the top priority.
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Principal's Handbook. Today I'm going through my five step behavior blueprint with you to help you reclaim your time and reduce office referrals. And this is a freebie that I have that you can download. I'll put a link in the show notes, but this is a great tool for you to use
to reduce office referrals, and [00:01:00] I had the opportunity as a principal to see my office referrals go from 340 in a school year to 180. And so that was pretty significant. We were able to do that, , right before covid reduce those behaviors. And so we were really excited with the progress that we saw from implementing some, , different ways to reduce office referrals.
So that's what we're going to be talking about today because. Having office referrals all day is super stressful, and it really does take up a lot of your time. When I talk to principals about, being a better instructional leader or getting into classrooms, it really comes down to if they're dealing with behaviors all the time, if they're constantly putting out fires and being proactive, it's really hard to be an instructional leader in your building, and so.
My goal is to really help principals have more time, and a huge part of that is reducing office referrals,, . So we are going to get into five tips that I have today, and like I said, I really encourage you to [00:02:00] download this blueprint because I have a lot of amazing resources with each tip that you could use to implement in your building.
Okay. , We are going to start by just diving into each tip and I will, . Talk to you a little bit about how I use this in my building. So the first thing that I did that really helped with reducing office referrals was tracking office behaviors. So like I said, I started out with 340 behaviors and I started tracking behaviors.
When I was an assistant principal in my building before I took over as principal, because the principal I was working with was really starting to implement PBIS in the building. And so we knew to know if the PBIS was effective. We had to have data. We had to have data of how many kids are coming to the office, and we actually wanted to know who was being sent to the office, why they were being sent, when the incidents occurred, where it happened, what the cause was, and what discipline we were giving.
And so that's what we did. We created, , a [00:03:00] tracking system to collect data. Now, a good one is from PBIS apps called Swiss. We used this when I was a teacher, but , the district that I was in, we were the only building collecting data for behaviors. And so they didn't wanna buy a program for just one building.
So we actually created. A Google form. And I have to tell you, that worked really well. And the thing I liked about the Google form was I was able to modify it each year. So my assistants and I, we would make a copy of the form each year and tweak it to what we wanted to track. And so every year we got better and better at figuring out what the best things were for us to track.
And actually in my behavior blueprint, I have a Google form there that you can make a copy of it. Create your own Google form. So in that, I tell you exactly, , the things that I would track, but it was great to have that data because sometimes parents would come to me of kids with behaviors. If they were going to the doctor, they needed the data to send to the doctor, or, , if I had to suspend a kid, I had to [00:04:00] provide data of how many office referrals they had.
So there was just some things that I had to provide data for and I always had it in the spreadsheet. It was super easy to get and I could go back quickly. It was also great for parent conversations. , And then we could also see patterns and trends as well. So I. Having behavior data is really the first step to solving, , the problem and helping to reduce the behavior because you can take this behavior to your PBIS team, to your staff meeting and look at it and really come up with solutions on how to make this behavior better for students.
So that was my first step. That was how I. Started to reduce office referrals. The second step was really utilizing that behavior team. So like I said, I had A-P-B-I-S team, positive behavior interventions and supports. We had a tier one team and eventually a tier two team. But that tier one team, and it doesn't have to be PBIS, it could just be some sort of behavior or leadership [00:05:00] team in your school, but we had different representatives from grade levels and we really talked through that data, saw what was happening, and then looked at what we needed to be doing school-wide for that tier one.
How can we reduce those office level behaviors and having the support and ideas from teachers was. So helpful. One, it gave me buy-in from them that there was a problem and we needed to fix it. And two, they had better solutions because they were teachers, they were living it. They knew what needed to change and how we could change it.
So when you're thinking about your team, you wanna think about teachers that are really good with discipline. I had some teachers on there that I'm thinking of as I'm talking, who were so good at modeling and , setting up classroom routines and procedures. And they actually were great at. Teaching each other.
Right? And they would learn from each other during these meetings. And part of our PBIS, we even had the opportunity to send some of our teachers to local tier one classroom behavior [00:06:00] trainings. So making sure that teachers are teaching those expectations and that they really are modeling things for students.
Because if we're seeing that there's a lot of classroom behaviors being sent to the office. Then we have a problem in the classroom that needs to be fixed. But if we're seeing a lot of the behaviors come from recess or lunch, then that's a different problem. Okay? So that's where that data comes in and really utilizing that behavior team.
And I just wanna let you know too, in my behavior blueprint, I have a copy and paste email template that you can use. You can copy, you can paste it and send it out right to your teachers of who you wanna invite to be on your team if you don't have a team yet. But you can personalize it for you and it is ready to go.
It just makes it that much easier. And also a meeting agenda for your meetings based on what I used for my meeting agenda. So our third step is to create a behavior matrix. , This took a little longer for me to do with my staff, but I think creating this behavior matrix was really helpful because.
[00:07:00] A lot of times teachers ask me, well, how do I know if I send them to the office? Is this a classroom managed behavior or an office managed behavior? And so we really had to come up with a matrix that broke that apart for teachers so that they understood. And what we realized over time is it depends on the grade level, right?
In kindergarten, we had to do a lot of modeling and reteaching, especially at the beginning of kindergarten. They're not gonna send the kids to the office right away because. Kids are learning how to be in school. They're learning appropriate language in the way that they talk, right? , The way they treat each other.
It's common for kids to hit each other in kindergarten because they don't know to use their words to solve a conflict, right? So these are things that are different than a fifth grader doing it. So that was a conversation that we had to have on this behavior matrix. And another thing I want you to think about as you create a behavior matrix is you wanna be as clear as possible, but sometimes there's going to be gray areas.
I always told [00:08:00] staff when it came to threats, , if we are not sure you send them right to the office, unless it's like a non-specific, like I'm so mad, like. That I wouldn't even consider a super, , specific threat. They should really come to the office because
I don't want something like that to not be handled. And they go home and say a student threatened them and then , were never sent to the office. So just having these conversations I think are really good because teachers, I know, the teachers I worked with, they wanna make sure they're doing it right.
They want to feel like. They're allowed to send kids to you because sometimes they think that they're a bad teacher if they have to send kids to you or they're not able to handle their own classroom discipline. So, and then sometimes teachers send kids to you without even thinking that, and they send them too often.
So you wanna find that balance there. So if you download this behavior of Blueprint, there's also an editable tool where, , I give you a Google Doc with a behavior matrix and a PDF version that you can see what those examples look like. Step four here is [00:09:00] about empowering teachers to call parents. So this is really important in reducing office behaviors because I've noticed over time with teachers that a lot of teachers don't call parents as often as they should.
I know this because I was one of them as an elementary teacher. I was, , young as an elementary teacher. I hated tough conversations, which is funny to me that I ended up in administration. I. But I didn't wanna make a parent mad, and so if I didn't have to call, I wouldn't.
And so the problem with that though, is I missed opportunities to build relationships with parents and to let them know what was happening before it escalated to something else. Okay. So I really, really encourage you to empower your teachers to call parents before you call them. If I ever called a parent before the teacher, the parent was usually upset.
Set that the teacher wasn't calling first, because you have to remember that when the principal's calling, it's really getting elevated to the next level. So I created scripts that are in this blueprint that you [00:10:00] can actually have your teachers use when they call parents. But another tip I have here is , a lot of times if teachers were nervous to call a parent, one thing I would do is either coach them before they called the parent, or I would say, let's call together and then you can talk about it.
But when I'm talking, they can hear me modeling how I'm talking to the parent. And it really helped them, it seemed to help them feel supported and it usually helped the conversation. So that's one step that you can take. But the more you model for teachers about how to talk to parents, the more empowered they're going to feel.
And sometimes you'd be surprised. I had conversations with my teachers about things you can't say to, to about things you can't say to parents. Sometimes teachers who have been teaching 25 years. Would say things, , or bring up other students' names in a conversation and not realizing that's a, a FERPA violation and you can't talk to other parents and share student names.
So all kinds of conversations and just reminding [00:11:00] teachers all the time of things they can and can't say to parents and how we have those conversations and. Customer service. And we know some teachers are naturally really good at it. I had teachers that I learned so much , from when they talk to parents and then other teachers are not.
So those are the teachers we need to support more. , But another idea is I did principals, good news calls, have teachers do that, you know, normalize making those phone calls. , And the fifth step is using restorative practices to close the behavior loop.
I found this to be so helpful to really think about using restorative practices, and I have, , a podcast episode if you go back about using behavior academies. That's a really good one. I'll link it in the show notes where we actually talk about restorative practices with behavior academies. , I had the book and I actually had the authors of the book on that podcast, and that is a really, really good episode.
But really using restorative practices is important because if you make restoration part of [00:12:00] the process. Students become more aware of their behavior, why they did it, and they're more likely not to do it the next time. It also is great when you're talking to parents because when I talk to parents and explain the restorative practice of it, they always were more supportive of the discipline.
In elementary, you would tell parents your child's gonna have a detention, and a lot of times parents would be like, what a detention, especially if they're a first grader. But if you were explaining it's not about the detention, it's about them, taking some time to really reflect on the behavior or think about why they did it so that it doesn't happen again.
Parents are on board with that, they can understand that. So using restorative questions that you either talk through, and I use these prompts that I have in this blueprint, , with kindergarten, first grade, and then even with kids who are older who might not be great at writing, they might have OT issues or, , struggle with writing.
We would have this verbally or they could draw. , But I also did this as a worksheet where students could write out, you know, what happened, who was [00:13:00] affected, , what were they feeling at the time. Just these kind of questions. Really write it out, reflect on it. But the one thing you wanna be careful of here is you don't wanna get in a power struggle of making sure that they're doing this.
That's where the conversation piece can work. If you have kids who struggle with writing, because I've had. Kids with OT issues, who usually, , they had behaviors as well that accompanied that, and so writing was a trigger for them. So you don't want this to become a trigger, but the point is to have that conversation and to really help them reflect on the process and what happened.
And so you'll notice that it might not lead to immediate change, but I did notice over time this restorative practice piece of it was a huge part of being able to close the loop on the behavior and reduce our behaviors. So I just wanna go through those five steps again of how to reduce your office behavior.
So step one, you're going to track office referrals and track the data. I also have a podcast episode on this that I recommend Episode 57. , I did [00:14:00] with actually my assistant who helped me reduce office behaviors.
, We were talking about looking at PBIS data. Step two, utilize a behavior team. Step three, create a behavior matrix. Step four, empower teachers to call home, and step five, use restorative practices to close the behavior loop. So I really encourage you to download this free blueprint because this blueprint, like I said, has so many great resources that are going to help you reduce office referrals, and when you reduce office referrals.
You are going to find that you have so much time for other things , you have the time to get into classrooms and be the instructional leader that you wanna be. So take the time, download this. I hope you find it helpful and I would love if you reached out to me and let me know how you use this in your building.
. And if you like the show, please share this episode with a friend. Help them out. If you know a pri, if you know a principal who's struggling [00:15:00] with behavior referrals, keep in mind you have the power to shape your life according to the mindset you choose.
I hope you have a great week. I'll see you back here next time.