The use of stop lights in the classroom

Before you hang that stoplight up for the new school year in 2014, please put yourself on red for a minute or two. Rethink the idea that hanging a large paper traffic light in the front of the room, dotted with magnets or ice block sticks displaying each student’s name is ok. Rethink the concept that publicly tracking behaviour and doling out consequences based on whose behaviour moves them off of green each day is fair, kind, or appropriate. Please rethink.

I recognise myself in you. I once believed that giving students a “visual” for where their behaviour stood in my class would enable them to control it, that all children could control their behaviour, and that controlling behaviour was one of the most important tasks on my teacher to do list.

As a first year teacher, I remember ‘writing names on the board.’ That’s what I was told to do, and that’s what my teachers did when I was in school. But then I started paying attention to the hurt, the shame, the frustration, and even the apathy in the eyes of those students whose names appeared in chalk day after day. They were six and seven years old, and I knew they deserved better.

I absolutely understand why you want it to work. It’s a very big and very unwieldy job to be in charge of educating dozens of young children for six hours/day. But we both have to admit that a major part of the stoplight equation, even if it works, is shaming. And shaming children simply isn’t what we educators are supposed to do.

We also know the predictable pattern the stoplight creates. Think about how it feels to see your name, day after day, moving towards that red circle, broadcast to your peers and anyone who walks into your classroom. Those are the very children who struggle with “school behaviour,” and they deserve our support, not embarrassment.

Or you could think about how it feels to be 5 or 6 or 7 years old and to worry daily about your name being moved from its perch on green. I promise there are more authentic ways to get children to think about their behaviour and more compassionate ways to help children to develop those executive functioning skills. There really are.

I know you can put a halt to it because I did, and it wasn’t even that difficult. We simply started talking things out. I know you can do it because my current work takes me into so many wonderful classrooms, both public and private, urban and suburban, with amazing teachers in each of those categories who don’t use the stoplight or anything like it.