Write up the behaviour incident before you go home

Write up the behaviour incident before you go home

The kids have gone. You have twenty-five minutes before the meeting. There is an incident from Period 4 that needs to be in Compass before you leave, and every time you start typing it, you either sound like you are on trial for something or like you are dobbing in a kid you actually like. This prompt is the fastest way I know to write it up so it lands as factual, calm, and useful to the year-level coordinator who reads it at 9pm.

The prompt

You are helping me write up a classroom behaviour incident for our school information system (Compass, Sentral, or Xuno). The audience is the year-level coordinator or head of house who will read the log tonight, and possibly the parent it gets shared with. Your job is to turn my raw notes into an entry that is factual, restorative, and defensible.

The output must:
- Be under 200 words in the main body.
- Sound like a professional teacher, not an emotional one.
- Distinguish clearly between what I observed and what I inferred.
- Use restorative language conventions. No labels ("disruptive kid"), no diagnoses ("she was being defiant"), no editorialising.
- Australian English throughout. Year 9, not 9th grade. No em-dashes, no en-dashes.
- Not open with "on this day" or "unfortunately". Start with the first observed action.

CONTEXT
- School type: [PRIMARY / SECONDARY], [year level]
- Subject and lesson: [e.g. Year 9 Science, Period 4]
- Student first name or pseudonym: [NAME]
- My relationship with the student so far: [ONE HONEST LINE. e.g. "generally warm, first incident this term" or "third incident this fortnight, patterns emerging"]
- Any home context I need to be gentle around: [ONE LINE or "none"]
- School behaviour framework: [e.g. Berry Street, PBIS, restorative practices, or "none formal"]

MY RAW NOTES (unedited, dot points fine)
[PASTE. Include what was said, what happened chronologically, what I did, what the student did in response, how it ended. Do not clean it up first. Include the ugly bits.]

PRODUCE, IN THIS EXACT ORDER. NO PRE-AMBLE. START WITH SECTION 1.

1. THE ENTRY. Under 200 words. Third person, past tense. Chronological. Every action attributed to a named actor. My response separated from the student's response. Ends with the outcome (moved seats, sent to head of year, restorative conversation, none) and any agreed next step.

2. THE OBSERVED / INFERRED SPLIT. Two short lists. What in my raw notes was observed behaviour, what was my inference about intent or state. This is for me, not for the log. I want to see where I might be reading into it.

3. THE ONE LINE I WOULD CUT. Point to the single sentence in your draft that a parent, a union rep, or a school leader could reasonably push back on. Rewrite it more carefully. Show me both versions.

4. THE NEXT STEP, IF ANY. One sentence. Do I need to email the parent tonight, flag with the head of year, wait and watch, or nothing further. Be direct.

RULES
- Do not tell me the student "must have been feeling" anything. You do not know.
- Do not recommend consequences unless I asked for them. That is not your call.
- Do not soften what happened. If a student swore, the entry says "used the word f---" not "used inappropriate language". Restorative does not mean vague.
- Do not add "the teacher handled the situation professionally". I will decide that.
- If my raw notes leave out what I said or did before the incident escalated, ask me for it in one line and wait. Do not guess and produce a log that reads as if the student escalated for no reason.

What it does well

The observed-versus-inferred split is the piece that pays off most, and the piece almost no teacher does on their own at 3.35pm. It is the difference between "Ella was being disrespectful" (an inference a parent will fight) and "Ella turned her chair to face the wall when I called on her the second time" (an observation nobody can argue with). The "one line I would cut" self-audit stops the model from smuggling in a phrase that reads fine on the log but will cost you at the meeting on Friday.

Where it falls over

The prompt can only clean up what you feed it. If your raw notes leave out what YOU said or did in the moments before the incident, the entry will read as though the student escalated for no reason, which is almost never the true picture. The prompt now asks for that context, but you still have to give it honestly, including the moves you already know were clumsy.

Second, the model will occasionally reach for the softest possible framing to be "restorative" and end up understating what happened. If a student threw something, the log should say the student threw something. Push back on any sentence that reads too neutrally to be true.

Try it like this

For a primary Year 3 low-level disruption you would rather keep out of the formal system: run the prompt but only keep the observed-inferred split and the "next step" line, so a pattern is visible in your own notes if it repeats in Week 5.

For a secondary incident involving a swear word directed at another student: paste the exact words, run the prompt, and read the "one line I would cut" section slowly. That is where phrasing about race, sex or identity most often needs a second pass before it goes into the system.

For a VCE class where the issue is academic integrity (a student pasted AI-generated work into a SAC): the raw notes are the timestamps, the evidence you have, and what the student said when asked. Ask for the SAC coversheet paragraph AND the incident log, in that order.

If you only have three minutes: dot-point the sequence of actions, the student's exact words, and your response. Skip the observed-inferred split for tonight. Log the entry, sleep on it, and re-read before you send anything to the parent tomorrow.

The most powerful thing you can do at 3.30pm on a hard day is not to process what happened, but to write it down accurately while it is fresh, log it, and go home.