Brianna Pols
EDUC 474
Dr. Heins
03/29/2023
Case Study
Background Information
Student: Female student from concert band
Grade: 10th
Age: 15
Academic behaviors: The student performs well in band class and sits in the principal chair of
her section. She has strong knowledge of fundamental music topics and will sometimes volunteer
to answer questions in class. She currently holds a 3.08 GPA, maintaining A’s, B’s, and C’s in her
other core classes.
Social behaviors: The student is observably very social. When she enters the bandroom, she is
always speaking to various other band students. As she sets up her equipment, she talks to her
section mates and they are often slow in the set up process because of that. She tends to talk to
the members of her section the most outside of rehearsal, and they normally walk together out of
class. As far as her interactions with teachers, the student is polite and listens to instructions
when they are given to her directly. She is interested in making conversation with me before and
after class, and she has shown interest in learning more about saxophone from me.
Home life: The student lives with her Mom, who is her primary caregiver. My CT has informed
me that her mom has a history of using the student’s participation in band as a
reward/punishment for academic achievement. If the student is performing well in her classes,
her mom allows her to participate in band events. If the student is doing poorly in other classes,
her mom threatens to remove her from the band if she does not bring the grades up. My CT
believes that her mom threatening her removal from band has decreased the students desire to
participate in class, and may be the cause for some of her disruptive behaviors.
Description of Behavior
The student frequently talks to her neighbors during rehearsals about topics unrelated to
the class material and also has frequent talk outs. The student has on multiple occasions
encouraged the other members of her section to talk and whisper to each other, and also started a
game of telephone that made its way through an entire row during rehearsal. The student is
respectful to the teacher when she is being directly addressed, but anytime the teacher is working
with another student she begins talking to her section mates. This behavior is extremely
disruptive because she is seated in between the french horn and saxophone section, which means
she is directly influencing at least two sections to be off task during rehearsal time. When the
student talks out, it is disruptive to the classroom environment because it redirects students' focus
in a negative way. The talk outs also encourage other students to talk out and to each other.
Data Collection
Frequency Count Recording
Behaviors: The listed behaviors include frequency of talk outs and frequency of making
comments/starting conversation with peers. I tallied the total number of times the behavior
occurred during a 30 minute period.
Intervention: I will give the student a hand signal that we have agreed upon and make eye
contact with them. This intervention method was discussed with the student prior to
implementation and was decided to be the best option because the student did not want to be
verbally called out or write down the occurrences. As listed below in the chart, I added proximity
control on 03/06/2023, in addition to the hand signal.
Date Time Observed Frequency Count
Behavior occurrences: B
Intervention: I
02/07/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 6
02/09/2023 9:15- 9:45 am B- 7
02/10/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 4
02/13/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 6
Intervention Begins 9:30-10:00 am B- 5
02/14/2023 I- 4
02/16/2023 9:15- 9:45 am B- 5
I- 4
02/17/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 7
I- 6
02/21/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 4
I- 4
02/23/2023 9:15- 9:45 am B- 4
I- 3
02/24/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 3
I- 3
02/27/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 3
I- 3
02/28/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 3
I- 2
03/02/2023 9:15- 9:45 am B- 3
I- 2
03/03/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 4
I- 4
03/06/2023 9:30-10:00 am Starting on this date,
proximity control was added
with the hand signal for the
intervention.
B- 2
I- 2
03/07/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 2
I- 2
03/09/2023 9:15- 9:45 am B- 2
I- 2
03/10/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 1
I- 0
03/20/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 2
I- 1
03/21/2023 9:30-10:00 am B- 0
I- 0
03/23/2023 9:15- 9:45 am B- 1
I- 0
03/24/2024 9:30-10:00 am B- 0
I- 0
The frequency of behaviors is indicated by the “B” line, and the frequency of interventions is
indicated by “I”.
Description of Intervention
The intervention for this study started with a hand signal. Prior to the start of the
intervention, I pulled the student aside and discussed some potential options for intervention
strategies. I wanted to give the student the freedom to choose the strategy because both myself
and my CT did not believe she would respond well to an enforced strategy that she had no
control over, similar to many high schoolers. By allowing the student to choose the strategy, it
gave her more responsibility and stake in wanting to actually use it. Starting on 02/14/2023, I
began to use the hand signal in class with the student when the behavior occurred. The hand
signal we agreed on was the “quiet coyote” hand sign that some elementary school teachers use
in their classrooms. The student liked this because it was not extremely obvious to others, but she
would still get the message. Each time I gave the hand signal, I also waited until I made eye
contact with the student before dropping the signal. This ensured that we were both on the same
page. On 03/06/2023, I added an additional intervention because the behavior was not improving
at the rate I would have liked it to. I began to use proximity control along with the initial
intervention. I varied the interventions based on what we were doing in the ensemble. For
example, if I was working directly with the saxophones or a section near them, I would use the
signal. If I was working with the whole band, I would use proximity control to prevent the
behavior. I varied them in rehearsals as necessary.
Along with the main intervention tasks, I also tried a few other tasks. On 02/21/2023, I
gave the student a task to complete during sectionals. I told her to run the warmup and then I
would join them. I did this to give the student a sense of responsibility, and to see if that
approach would benefit the behavior management. This did help reduce the frequency of the
behavior. I was only able to do this once during the study, but it did inform me that the student’s
behavior would benefit from being put in a leadership role.
Results and Conclusions
The intervention used in this study was ultimately effective as evident by the reduced
frequency of started conversations and talkouts. The student averaged about 6 instances of the
behavior for the first 4 days of data collection, but for the last 4 days the student averaged at
about 1 instance of the behavior.
The initial intervention (hand signal) did reduce the behavior, but I decided to add
something new to the intervention on 03/06/2023 because although the student responded to the
intervention method I was using, but it was still not an automatic habit to behave appropriately
without me having to make direct contact with the student. I also wanted to add something new
to the intervention in order to reduce the behavior at a faster rate. I started using proximity
control along with the hand sign in order to reduce the instances of the behavior further. This
helped in that I no longer had to address the student each time the behavior occurred, but I could
still get her back on track efficiently.
One thing that I think went very well in this study was my communication with the
student before the intervention began. I believe that if I had not communicated with the student
prior to starting, I may have implemented an intervention that would have been ineffective and
potentially embarrassing for the student. The student, though outspoken to her friends and to the
class, gets easily embarrassed when being scolded for behavior, so the fact that the hand signal
was almost unnoticeable to the rest of the students was very helpful for her.
In the future, I would like to implement my intervention more thoroughly. The initial
intervention (hand signal) was effective, but I think if I would have started with the hand signal
in combination with proximity control, it would have reduced the behavior at a faster rate. I also
think that a useful technique in the future would be to have the student mark down a tally on a
sticky note every time they caught themselves talking to neighbors or out of turn. I think this
would be beneficial because it would give the student an opportunity to be more aware of their
behaviors. The intervention I did was teacher led, and was proven to be effective, but I think that
for long term and permanent effectiveness I should try to implement an intervention that is
student led.
