Self-Management Strategies: Theory, Curriculum, and Teaching Procedures

This chapter defines SM behavior and its less inclusive classes, and illustrates their relationships. ¹ To insure clarity, three related classes of behavior are examined: cooperation, adaptation, and management.

At the most inclusive level, SM behavior is any behavior by an individual or group that facilitates the beginning, continuing, or ending of their task behavior within some task environment. Similar to any inclusive definition, this one only makes sense if its terms are clarified.

A task is any work assigned or undertaken by an individual or a group in a task environment, which is often called an activity in the classroom. The task is often something such as doing a worksheet in math, listening to a lecture, or reading in a group. Task behavior is the specific behavior required to perform the assigned task. For most classroom tasks, it is also called academic behavior. If the task is to work the problems on a math worksheet, the task behavior is adding, subtracting, and so forth. Yet performing task behaviors requires much more. It requires facilitation by SM behavior. In this context, facilitate means to increase the probability of the task behavior. Together, SM and task behaviors represent the universe of behaviors required to perform a task within some task environment, or activity.

The any behavior element of the SM definition divides into two inclusive classes. The first, activity SM behaviors, are intended to facilitate task behavior only within a specific or limited set of activities. For example, during a math worksheet activity, Wilber will have to gather the materials

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