Turn scribbled notes into a defensible behaviour write-up

Turn scribbled notes into a defensible behaviour write-up

The behaviour incident write-up is the piece of school writing nobody teaches you to do and everybody judges you on. It sits in the log. It resurfaces in the wellbeing meeting six weeks later, at the parent conversation next term, sometimes at a Fair Work matter in year seven's time. And most of them are written at 3:35pm on a Friday, one hand on the phone, one eye on the corridor, in whatever three minutes appear between the incident and the coach coming to pick up the Year 8s.

The two failure modes are familiar. Draft it too fast and you write a character verdict ("Jacob was disrespectful and defiant") that will not hold when a parent asks you to point to the actual words. Draft it too slowly and it turns into a paragraph of corporate mush ("a challenging period of dysregulated engagement") that says nothing and reads like every other write-up in the log. The prompt below is the compromise. Feed it your scrawl. Get back a five-line entry that is timestamped, behavioural, quoted where you can, and free of both character verdicts and cliches.

The prompt

You are helping me turn a set of rough, unstructured notes into a short, defensible behaviour incident write-up for the log at an Australian [PRIMARY / SECONDARY] school. The write-up will sit in the student's file. It may be read later by another teacher, by a wellbeing coordinator, by an assistant principal, by the student's family, or in a formal proceeding. It must be defensible on that basis.

You are working in the tradition that a good behaviour record is BEHAVIOURAL, not CHARACTEROLOGICAL. Timestamped, observable, quoted where possible. Never a verdict on the child. Never a diagnosis. Never a prediction.

CONTEXT I WILL PROVIDE
- Year level and class: [YEAR LEVEL, e.g. Year 8 English, Period 5]
- Student first name only (I will strip surname before pasting): [FIRST NAME]
- Time and place of the incident: [e.g. "Thursday Period 5, 2:15pm, in classroom during independent work"]
- Any prior context the reader will need: [OPTIONAL, e.g. "third incident this fortnight, previous two on the log dated ___ and ___"]
- Any known factors relevant to the write-up: [OPTIONAL, e.g. "student is on a learning plan for ADHD" or "student's grandmother passed away last week, family has notified the year level coordinator"]

MY RAW NOTES (unstructured, whatever I scribbled on the way to the office)
"""
[PASTE NOTES. TYPOS, FRAGMENTS, HALF SENTENCES ALL FINE. INCLUDE ANY EXACT WORDS THE STUDENT SAID, IN QUOTATION MARKS IF YOU CAN, EVEN IF THE WORDS ARE UNCOMFORTABLE.]
"""

WHAT I NEED YOU TO PRODUCE

A behaviour incident entry, exactly five sections, in this order, in plain teacher voice.

1. HEADER LINE
Date, time, class, location. One line. Nothing else.

2. WHAT I OBSERVED
Three to six short sentences. Behaviour only. What the student did, in the order it happened. If I gave you exact words the student said, keep them in quotation marks. Do not describe internal states ("was angry", "felt frustrated"). Describe the observable behaviour that led me to infer that state ("raised voice", "pushed chair back from desk", "left the room without permission").

3. WHAT I DID
Two to four short sentences. The de-escalation and behaviour management steps I took, in order. Include any reminders, warnings or redirects I gave, in the words I used them. Note the point at which the incident stopped, or the point at which the student left the room, or the point at which another adult was involved.

4. IMMEDIATE FOLLOW-UP
One or two sentences. What I did after the lesson ended. Who I told (year level coordinator, wellbeing, sub-school leader). Whether the family has been contacted yet, and by whom.

5. WHAT I AM ASKING FOR
One sentence. What I want the school to do next. A restorative conversation. A meeting with the family. A visible presence at the next lesson. A wellbeing referral. If I do not know what I am asking for, write "logging for pattern, no action requested at this stage".

RULES
- Australian English throughout. Realise, behaviour, colour, analyse.
- No em-dashes and no en-dashes anywhere. Commas, full stops, parentheses, semicolons only. Regular hyphens in compound words are fine.
- No character verdicts. Do not use: "disrespectful", "defiant", "disruptive", "attention-seeking", "manipulative", "aggressive", "rude", "lazy", "difficult". If my notes contain one of these words, translate it back to the specific behaviour I saw.
- No corporate cliches. Do not use: "dysregulated", "on a journey", "escalated situation", "unpacked the incident", "chose to", "made poor choices".
- No diagnosis. Do not attribute the behaviour to ADHD, autism, trauma, home life, or any other cause, even if a cause is likely. That is not my role in this write-up.
- No prediction. Do not write what the student "will" do next time or "always" does. Only what happened this time.
- If my notes contain something I probably should not have written down (an opinion, a snide aside, a comparison to another student), quietly drop it. Do not reproduce it in the write-up.
- If my notes are thin or unclear on a point, name the gap in one sentence ("I did not note the exact time the student left the room") rather than inventing detail. The gap in the record is more defensible than a fabricated fact.
- Total length: 120 to 180 words for the whole entry. If it runs longer, cut Section 4 or Section 5, not Section 2.

Then, in a SEPARATE block below the entry, and clearly labelled "FOR MY EYES ONLY, DO NOT PASTE INTO THE LOG":
- One sentence naming any part of the write-up a parent reading it out of context would push back on, and why.
- One sentence suggesting the one piece of evidence I should double-check (a witness, a CCTV timestamp, an SMS, an entry in the class seating record) before I file this, in case it becomes contested later.
- One sentence on whether this entry is strong enough to stand alone, or whether it makes more sense to file it as one of a pattern with a link to the two prior entries I named in context.

If any of the following are true, STOP and tell me before writing:
- The notes describe a suspected safety, disclosure or child-protection matter (physical harm, disclosure of abuse, threat of self-harm or harm to others). In that case, tell me the write-up should not be drafted here; it needs to go straight to the child safety officer or wellbeing lead by the school's mandatory reporting process.
- The notes name another student as a witness or a co-participant. In that case, tell me the second name will need to be handled separately, either as its own entry or with the family's consent, before this entry is filed.
- The notes describe an interaction with a staff member (not just the student). In that case, tell me the write-up sits in a different process (HR, incident report, WorkSafe), not the student behaviour log.

What it does well

The forcing constraints do the work. Banning the character verdicts ("defiant", "disrespectful") is what stops the write-up drifting into a judgement of the child. Banning the corporate cliches ("dysregulated", "on a journey") is what stops it drifting into the mush that reads like every other entry in the log. And the "for my eyes only" block at the end is the one that earns its keep: it flags the sentence a parent would push back on before you file, not after they email the principal on Monday morning.

Where it falls over

Two honest caveats. The prompt cannot check facts. If your scribbled notes said the wrong time or misquoted a student, the write-up will faithfully carry the error forward, and it will look more authoritative in polished form than it was in your handwriting. Read the entry against your memory before you file, and correct anything the model tightened past what you actually saw. Second, this is a log entry, not a wellbeing case note. If the incident is a disclosure, a safety concern, or a suspected child-protection matter, the prompt tells you to stop, but you also have to actually stop. Those go to the child safety officer through the school's mandatory reporting process, and no prompt is a substitute for that pathway.

Try it like this

For a Friday-afternoon Period 5 incident with a Year 8: paste your Post-it, timestamp, and the one exact phrase the student said. The five-line entry will be in the log before the last bus leaves, and the "for my eyes only" block will tell you whether to also send a heads-up to the year level coordinator over the weekend or wait until Monday.

For a pattern of low-level disruption across a fortnight (three small entries adding up to something): run the prompt for the third entry, and in the context block name the two prior entries by date. The write-up will link them as a pattern rather than reading like a standalone overreaction to a single minor incident.

If you only have ninety seconds: skip the raw-notes paste, dictate the incident straight into your phone (thirty seconds), paste the transcript in place of the notes, and let the prompt do the sorting. You lose some precision on quoted words, but the entry will still be defensible.

If it turns out you shouldn't have written the incident up at all, that's a good day. Not every corridor moment belongs in the log. The prompt's silence on the small stuff is a feature.