by Dr. Tim Grivois, Executive Director
Check-in/Check-out (CICO) is a common behavior support tool used in schools implementing Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS). It often works exceptionally well and requires relatively little time and effort.
CICO is ingeniously simple: Students participating in CICO meet briefly with a coach in the morning to plan a successful day. Then, teachers provide positive, values-centered, and—above all—brief feedback to students at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the day. At elementary schools, this usually happens between subjects, and at MS/HS, this is at the end of each period. Finally, the student meets with their coach at the end of the day to debrief and make a plan for tomorrow.
What is CICO? CICO helps youth make a plan and supports them in sticking to it.
However, traditional CICO also involves a Daily Point Card that students carry from teacher to teacher. After each class, the teacher assesses each participating student’s behavior against school values and provides guidance on how to improve.
What could go wrong? After all, what MS/HS students wouldn’t love to have hourly conversations about their behavior and carry the data from those conversations with them on a Daily Point Card throughout the day?
Nearly everything can go wrong, and it’s mainly the Daily Point Card’s fault. Students disengage from these kinds of behavior supports, and the PBIS community in general would be disingenuous if they didn’t concede that this has been an issue with Daily Point Cards for decades. Traditional CICO creates a system where students are incentivized to disengage, even when school staff do their best to keep conversations positive.
My advice? Please get rid of the daily point card and focus on the quality of conversations students have with their coaches and teachers. As long as you track whether quality conversations with students are happening at the scheduled times, you don’t need hourly behavior data. I was working with a school to improve processes for entering daily point card data, and we discovered that disciplinary referrals dropped tremendously as long as the conversations occurred.
The Daily Point Card didn’t matter at all. What mattered was that we were having effective conversations with youth when we promised them we would. So, we stopped asking students to carry cards, and nothing terrible happened. Not one thing.
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