BEHAVIOR PROGRAM
The core of Ocean State Academy’s overarching model — our Student Empowerment Movement — is the behavioral component of our program, which is consistently implemented school-wide. This intensive behavior modification system is driven by the concept of positive reinforcement, is informed by research-based approaches, and has been proven most effective with students with significant and complex behavioral needs.
Each classroom and educational setting on our campus offers a safe and structured environment with a clear set of established norms, guidelines, and expectations in place. Continual and systematic reinforcement is given when students meet target behaviors, and student redirection strategies are applied when they do not — all with the end goal of incentivizing the selection/habituation of pro-social, goal-oriented behaviors.
As we foster a sense of personal agency in our students, they realize that their choices are within their control. They are empowered to change their patterns of decision making — from self-defeating behaviors to self-promoting behaviors — and, in the process, change their own experience of the world.
We employ three primary methods to create this positive cycle of learning and appropriate behavioral development, all of which (1) minimize classroom disruptions and maximize time on task; (2) form mutually respectful bonds between staff and students; and (3) create a healthy school-wide balance between empathy and accountability.
1. Point-Level System: Throughout the school day, students earn points for initiating various positive behaviors and following teacher direction. These points correspond to attained levels of advancement, which carry with them both responsibilities, to stay on level, and rewards, for maintaining level. Rewards are granted in the form of privileges that matter to the students (like participation on sports teams, attendance on field trips, “Fun Fridays,” free computer time).
The levels themselves are age-structured: our primary students advance up an animal ladder, whereas our secondary students advance up a work ladder, just like they will in the real world. This is just one example of how Ocean State Academy correlates school learning to real-life settings in all ways possible. Students respond very favorably in this atmosphere of predictable, dependable cause-and-effect relationships, solidly internalizing the link between choices and consequences.
2. Peer-Modeled Culture: Each Ocean State Academy classroom is characterized by a student-oriented and student-managed culture in which our students are taught how to lead and support themselves and one another through peer mentoring, peer role modeling, and positively redirecting peers. Key elements of this culture include: creating an environment of cooperative learning and fellowship; dramatically decreasing the incidence of negative behaviors; and implementing a three-step process (analyze, prepare, execute) whereby the culture is in a sustained and perpetual state of development and improvement. These objectives are attained by such means as classroom norms, group activities, community-based interventions, and student-led community-building exercises.
3. Restorative Community: Our Student Empowerment Movement also features restorative community/restorative justice, which teaches youth to take ownership of decisions between right and wrong and the results that accompany those decisions. We involve the student’s entire support team in the restorative community practices that lead students to acknowledge harm caused, to consider the perspective of others, to take steps to repair the harm, and to prevent further harm.
Central to this concept is the idea of authentic accountability, which we instill in students to build and strengthen healthy relationships, to teach them to communicate assertively, to solve problems effectively, to resolve conflicts through mediation, and to overcome challenges with useful coping strategies that will serve them throughout their lives.