Behavior Improvement Plan · Case study: "Tee", Prathom 5 ESL

Benjamin Cunningham · Moreland University · ED504 · Behavior Improvement Plan for a case-study ELL · Prathom 5, Rattanaburi, Surin · October 18, 2026 · Shared with my Methods instructor

For submission in the module's format: the plan on the Moreland Behavior Management Plan template (Word), with the five numbered sections, the ESL Methods strategies and the reflection appended. This page is the full version with the data and the research. The case study is my own student rather than the module's "Renee" option, as the brief allows, because an ESL plan belongs with an English learner.

The student

Case study: "Tee" (a pseudonym; details changed and combined so that no child can be identified). Tee is eleven, in Prathom 5 at a government village school in Rattanaburi district, Surin, Thailand. He lives with his grandmother and a younger sister; his mother works in a Bangkok factory and comes home for the harvest and Songkran, his father works on the Eastern Seaboard. At home the family speaks Isan (the Lao of the Northeast); Tee speaks Thai fluently but reads it at about a Prathom 2–3 level, and in English he is at WIDA level 1, Entering: he knows the alphabet, some classroom words and numbers, and understands more than he says. He is up at five most mornings to move the family's cattle before school, and he eats at school for the first time most days. Presume, as the Methods brief asks, that Tee is an English language learner: in my room he is one in Thai and in English, and the plan is written so that the same Tee, arriving in a Washington, DC classroom with Isan and Thai and no English, would be served by the same logic.

Strengths first. Tee is the best oral storyteller in the class in Isan; he can hold thirty children with a cattle story. He is quick with money and weights at the market, knows the rice calendar better than I do, plays football with authority, and sings mor lam verses his grandmother taught him. The boys follow him. He is kind to his sister and to the youngest children at the school. Every strength on that list is a lever in this plan, because a behavior plan that only subtracts behaviors leaves a child with nothing to be good at.

How the plan was built. Two weeks of ABC data (antecedent, behavior, consequence) kept by me and my Thai co-teacher on the Step 6 incident form; the learner survey from Step 2; the strengths card and a home visit from Step 7, with my co-teacher interpreting in Isan; a conversation with Tee himself in Thai; attendance and arrival times from the register; and the Friday word-wall data. The grandmother signed the Thai consent for the data and the plan, as Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act (2019) requires for a child under ten and good practice requires for any child. The plan follows the functional behavioral assessment logic of positive behavior support (Crone, Hawken and Horner, 2015): define the behavior, find its function, teach a replacement that serves the same function, change the environment so the replacement works better than the problem, and measure.

Baseline: what the ABC data showed

Over ten school days (six English lessons a week, plus the transitions around them), Tee's six problem behaviors clustered around three conditions: the first lesson of the day; any task whose text was only in English; and transitions with no job for him. The most common consequence of each behavior was attention (laughter from the boys, a public correction from an adult) or escape (the task was quietly dropped). Both consequences were paying the behavior. The Maslow reading (Step 8) is consistent with the function data: physiological needs in the mornings (he has walked the cattle and not eaten), esteem needs around English text (he cannot do the task and will not be seen failing), and belonging and status needs in the teasing and the clowning (the boys' laughter is the currency he has). None of the six behaviors was dangerous. One (teasing) harmed other children and is the priority.

1. The disruptive behaviors (six), defined and measured

Priority order: B4 first, because it harms others and poisons the climate for the whole class's English; then B3 and B6, which are the needs behind most of the rest; B1, B2 and B5 are expected to fall as the first three are addressed, and are measured anyway.

2. SMART goals (seven)

Each goal is specific, measurable with a tool named in section 5, achievable from the baseline, relevant to the function of the behavior and to Tee's learning, and time-bound within one eight-week cycle (weeks counted from the plan's start on a Monday).

3. Target replacement behaviors (six), and how each is taught

A replacement behavior has to do the same job for Tee as the problem behavior did, more easily. Each one below is taught explicitly (tell, show, practice in Thai and Isan, practice in the real setting), cued before the moment it is needed (precorrection), and reinforced the first fifty times it appears (Cooper, Heron and Heward, 2020; Simonsen et al., 2008).

4. The strategies: prevent, teach, reinforce, respond

Antecedent strategies (prevent). Every English text Tee meets exists at WIDA 1 with a Thai gloss and a picture before the lesson (the ESLteacher.com builder makes the three-level version in twenty seconds); instruction is never longer than five minutes before a pair task; he has a job in every transition; the first lesson of the day is active and begins with food; the boys' table is split into pairs with jobs, and Tee's partner is Nok, who speaks Isan and reads Thai well, chosen for warmth; the signals are seen and heard; the schedule is on the screen; reading aloud is never demanded of anyone without rehearsal with a partner first; and the Isan line on the word wall is his to fill in, so that the language he is best at has status in the room.

Teaching strategies. The six replacement behaviors are taught in the first week as class routines, not as Tee's special program, with Tee given the roles that make him the model (card man, timer, door). The co-teacher runs the Isan role-plays. Self-monitoring is taught in week 2: Tee keeps his own tally of call-outs and hand-raises on a card; when his count matches the teacher's within two, he earns a bonus point, which trains accuracy and awareness (Bruhn, McDaniel and Kreigh, 2015).

Reinforcement. A check-in/check-out cycle (Hawken, Crone, Bundock and Horner, 2020): morning check-in with the co-teacher, a daily card with the six behaviors scored by lesson (0, 1, 2), afternoon check-out, the card home in the folder, and a Friday review. ClassDojo carries the same categories so the grandmother sees them; points buy nothing material: they buy time and roles (five minutes of football with me, the camera on the Friday stage, reading his class-book page to the P2 children, choosing the week's mor lam line for the pronunciation drill). Behavior-specific praise is private ("You used the card three times, that is exactly it"); public praise is for the group he is in. The ratio I hold myself to is four positives to every correction (Simonsen et al., 2008).

Response to problem behavior (the ladder). Call-outs are not answered; the next hand or card is answered at once. Wandering gets a silent point to the break pass. Refusal gets the gloss version and "do one, show me", not coaxing. A transition incident is redone calmly after the lesson, once, with the job restored next time. Teasing is the one behavior with a planned restorative consequence: a private conversation the same day in Thai with the co-teacher present (what happened, who was affected, what will you do), a repair the target accepts (an apology or a tootle slip for that child), and the Friday reading of tootles unaffected, because the goal is to make him the boy who notices good English, not to take the stage away. No public correction, no name on a board, no loss of break or lunch, no corporal punishment (illegal in Thai schools since 2005 and inconsistent with everything here). Safety plan: none of Tee's behaviors is dangerous; if pushing ever became hitting, the co-teacher removes the audience, not the child, the head teacher is told the same day, and the student support system's screening applies.

Online classroom. If the school closes, the same plan runs on Zoom and Google Classroom (Step 6): the help card becomes the raise-hand button, the break pass is a camera-off two minutes, the Thai-gloss task is posted before the lesson, the transition job is the chat monitor, the morning routine is the first five minutes with the co-teacher in a breakout room, and tootles go in the chat.

5. Culturally and linguistically relevant strategies, materials and tools

This section answers the Methods brief directly: the strategies that make the classroom more culturally and linguistically relevant for Tee, and the instructional strategies, materials and tools that support each goal. The frame is culturally relevant pedagogy (academic success, cultural competence and critical consciousness; Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally responsive teaching, which uses the cultural knowledge, prior experiences and frames of reference of students to make learning more effective (Gay, 2010), the neuroscience version of it, in which relationship and cultural familiarity lower the threat response that blocks learning (Hammond, 2015), and culturally sustaining pedagogy, which keeps the home language and culture in the room rather than using them as a bridge and discarding them (Paris and Alim, 2017). In second-language terms, every strategy is also a way of lowering the affective filter (Krashen, 1982) and of letting Tee use everything he knows in every language to learn (translanguaging; García and Wei, 2014; Cummins, 2001).

Making the whole classroom more relevant, not only Tee's seat. The trilingual word wall with the children's own lines; the three-level library with the village's stories in Box C; the Isan, Kui and Khmer greetings used at the door; the class agreements written together in Thai and English; the Friday stage with the district competition's own score sheet; the families as co-teachers of content (Step 7); the Buddhist and farming calendar in the planning (nothing demanding in the harvest); private correction as the rule for everyone, which is both good behavior management and respect for face; and the co-teacher as the Isan voice of every routine. A culturally relevant classroom is one in which Tee's English teacher knows what a buffalo is worth, and Tee knows that his teacher knows.

6. Methods to monitor the plan (eight)

The review cycle. Friday, ten minutes, me and the co-teacher: the week's card totals and tallies graphed on one sheet (a line for each goal against its target); one decision per goal (continue, adjust, fade); one line to the head teacher in the monthly page; one voice note to the grandmother. A formal review at week 4 with the grandmother and Tee, and at week 8. Fidelity: once a fortnight the co-teacher checks five things about me: gloss version on the desk before the task, call-outs ignored and hands answered, precorrection given before instruction, private not public correction, four positives to one correction. A plan that is not run is not a plan that failed.

7. Family communication (seven forms, platform and frequency)

The family is Tee's grandmother at home (reads little Thai, uses LINE voice notes), his mother in Bangkok (reads Thai, has LINE), and his father on the Eastern Seaboard (LINE, irregular). Everything goes out in Thai, by voice where reading is a barrier, and the first message is good news (Step 7). Nothing about Tee goes in the class group.

8. Team, timeline, fading and generalization

Fading. When a goal is met for four consecutive weeks, its card line moves from every lesson to once a day, then to Tee's self-monitoring only, then off the card; the jobs and the gloss texts do not fade, because they are not interventions but good teaching. Generalization. The replacement behaviors are class routines, so they transfer to the Thai teacher's lessons; the co-teacher shares the card with the homeroom teacher; the online version is written above. Team. Me (plan owner, data graph), the Thai co-teacher (Isan voice, CICO, family calls), Nok (buddy, with her family's agreement), the grandmother (morning routine, the tick), the head teacher (monthly page, student support system), and Tee, who signs the plan too.

Reflection: cultural and linguistic background, behavior, engagement and achievement

Almost everything that looked like misbehavior in Tee was language and culture meeting a classroom that had not been built for them. He called out because he knew the answer in Thai and had no sanctioned way to show it in a lesson that ran in English; he refused the worksheet because it was in a language he reads at the Entering level and refusal was the only way to avoid being seen failing in front of the boys; he mocked because status, in his world as in mine, is given and taken in front of others, and the room had made English the only currency and made him poor in it; he was late and asleep because he had been working before dawn in a farming economy the timetable ignores. The research says this is the ordinary case for an English learner, not the exception. Krashen's affective filter (1982) describes a child whose anxiety and low self-confidence block the input he could otherwise acquire; Cummins (2001) shows how schools that coerce children out of their first language produce exactly the disengagement they then punish; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco and Todorova (2008) followed newcomer immigrant students in US schools for five years and found that relationships with teachers, not initial English proficiency, best predicted whose trajectory held; and Goodenow and Grady (1993) found that a sense of school belonging predicted motivation and effort in early adolescents. Behind these sits the Thai case: Isan, the home language of a third of Thailand, has had low status in Thai schooling for a century (Smalley, 1994), so that a child like Tee has already learned, before any English teacher meets him, that the language he thinks in is the one the school does not want to hear.

The connection to academic engagement and achievement is direct, and I can state it as the mechanism of this plan. When the home language is a resource rather than a problem (the Isan line on the card, the buddy, the gloss text, the story told in Isan first), the affective filter drops and the input gets through; when the content is the child's life (cattle, the market, mor lam), the task is worth the effort and the child is the expert on something in the room; when the culture's rules about face are respected (private correction, public credit for noticing good English), the status he was taking by mocking is available for noticing instead; and when the family is in the plan in its own language and on its own calendar, the behavior at home and at school pull the same way. Each of those is an equity-focused practice, and each shows up as a number: words owned rising from nine toward forty while call-outs fall from eight to two is the same child, with the same brain, in a room that finally fits him. The evidence that this is not sentiment is in the literature on program design: students who keep their first language in school and are taught through it reach higher levels of English achievement in the long run than students taught in English only (Thomas and Collier, 2002), and in DC, where I will teach, the same pattern appears in the schools whose dual-language students are reclassified later but finish stronger (Umansky and Reardon, 2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy, in Ladson-Billings's definition, is not a kindness added to instruction; it is the condition under which an English learner's engagement, and then achievement, becomes possible. Tee's plan is my attempt to write that condition down as six behaviors, seven goals, six replacements, eight measures and seven ways to reach his grandmother.

References

• Bruhn, A., McDaniel, S., & Kreigh, C. (2015). Self-monitoring interventions for students with behavior problems: A systematic review of current research. Behavioral Disorders, 40(2), 102–121.
• Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson.
• Crone, D. A., Hawken, L. S., & Horner, R. H. (2015). Building positive behavior support systems in schools: Functional behavioral assessment (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
• Cummins, J. (2001). Negotiating identities: Education for empowerment in a diverse society (2nd ed.). California Association for Bilingual Education.
• Cummins, J., & Early, M. (Eds.). (2011). Identity texts: The collaborative creation of power in multilingual schools. Trentham Books.
• Dillon, M. B. M., Radley, K. C., Tingstrom, D. H., Dart, E. H., & Barry, C. T. (2019). The effects of tootling via ClassDojo on student behavior in elementary classrooms. School Psychology Review, 48(1), 18–30.
• García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press.
• Goodenow, C., & Grady, K. E. (1993). The relationship of school belonging and friends' values to academic motivation among urban adolescent students. Journal of Experimental Education, 62(1), 60–71.
• Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin.
• Hawken, L. S., Crone, D. A., Bundock, K., & Horner, R. H. (2020). Responding to problem behavior in schools: The check-in, check-out intervention (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
• Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Pergamon.
• Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.
• Lynne, S., Radley, K. C., Dart, E. H., Tingstrom, D. H., Barry, C. T., & Lum, J. D. K. (2017). Use of a technology-enhanced version of the Good Behavior Game in elementary school classrooms. Psychology in the Schools, 54(9), 1049–1063.
• Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.
• Personal Data Protection Act B.E. 2562 (2019), Thailand.
• Simonsen, B., Fairbanks, S., Briesch, A., Myers, D., & Sugai, G. (2008). Evidence-based practices in classroom management: Considerations for research to practice. Education and Treatment of Children, 31(3), 351–380.
• Smalley, W. A. (1994). Linguistic diversity and national unity: Language ecology in Thailand. University of Chicago Press.
• Suárez-Orozco, C., Suárez-Orozco, M. M., & Todorova, I. (2008). Learning a new land: Immigrant students in American society. Harvard University Press.
• Thomas, W. P., & Collier, V. P. (2002). A national study of school effectiveness for language minority students' long-term academic achievement. Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence.
• Umansky, I. M., & Reardon, S. F. (2014). Reclassification patterns among Latino English learner students in bilingual, dual immersion, and English immersion classrooms. American Educational Research Journal, 51(5), 879–912.
• WIDA. (2020). WIDA English language development standards framework, 2020 edition: Kindergarten–grade 12. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
• Tools built by the author and used in this plan: EnglishTeacher.com (practice app, Ploy Hears, printable word lists), ESLteacher.com (the three-level worksheet builder with Thai gloss), USAEnglish.com (the Story Telling championship, its score sheet, lesson plans and Thai parents' page), and the recorder at benjamincunningham.com/lep/vlog/. Photographs: the author's own.

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