Pros & Cons of Behaviour Charts

Behaviour charts are a popular tool to motivate and teach children new skills. For over a long period of time, these charts have been in use with both parents and teachers alike. In recent years, there has been debate around the behavior chart and people are asking: are they really effective?

What is a behaviour chart?

A behaviour or reward chart is one of the most commonplace tools that teachers and parents use to motivate and teach children good habits. In its most basic form, children are rewarded for making progress on a skill that they are working on and conversely, it can be used as a form of punishment if rules are broken. Behaviour charts can also be used to track the frequency of a certain behaviours and can be useful for instilling daily habits and teaching adaptive skills to younger children.

Some common types of behaviour charts are:

• Star chart
• Rainbow chart
• Golf course chart
• Routine chart

Pros of behaviour charts

• Great tool for achieving specific learning objectives and tracking habits of children.
• Helps maintain order in the classroom or in your home without needing constant verbal reminders. This is especially useful in an active setting with different activities happening at once.
• Gives children a visual indicator of where their progress is in relation to their peers. When used correctly, this can create a supportive peer learning environment.
• For routines and chores, it helps to keep the peer group accountable to each other and serves as a checklist for tasks that need to be completed. This automatically also enhances teamwork skills while introducing a healthy amount of responsibility to each child.

Cons of behaviour charts

• A behaviour chart cannot provide teachers with a holistic overview or a tracker for a child’s learning and development.
• The chart itself does not replace the groundwork of relationship building with the peer group in order to cultivate clear rules and expectations.
• Publicly logging a child’s progress in relation to their peers could impact their self-esteem if not monitored properly and as a result it could limit their participation within the group.
• Some children are intrinsically motivated which makes having a visual indicator of their progress ineffective as a tool to encourage them to develop a certain skill. Understanding how each child is motivated should be the first step in making a behaviour chart.

How can you make a behaviour chart?

Understanding the components required to build a behaviour chart is useful for both parents and teachers to customise them to achieve a specific goal. Behaviour charts incorporate behaviour management strategies to support teachers in helping students understand the importance of rules as well as the rewards and consequences that come with following or breaking them.

Four strategies that go building a behaviour chart are:

• Positive reinforcement– Encourages children to perform a behavior by rewarding them for it. This supports learning by doing as good behaviour is validated through praise, acknowledgement or winning a prize!
• Negative reinforcement – Motivates children by taking away a negative consequence that is associated with a behaviour. A simple example is putting toys away to avoid being reprimanded.
• Positive punishment– Positive in this context means adding a consequence to an action. This is the most traditional way of disciplining a child and recent studies have shown that positive punishment comes at the expense of compromising relationships.
• Negative punishment– Taking something away as the consequence of a behaviour. An example of this would be reducing outdoor playtime when a child breaks the rules.

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