The Good Behavior Game: A 50-Year-Old Idea That Still Works

Most "new" classroom strategies are lucky to survive a school year. The Good Behavior Game has survived more than fifty — and it keeps working. First tested in a rowdy fourth-grade classroom in 1969, it's a simple team game that channels something teachers usually fight: kids' loyalty to their peers. Played well, it makes the class the keeper of its own expectations, so you spend less time correcting and more time teaching.

What is the Good Behavior Game?

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a team-based positive behavior strategy built on what researchers call an interdependent group contingency: the reward is shared, so the team succeeds or falls short together.

The structure is simple:

1. The class is divided into two or more teams.
2. Everyone knows the behavior expectations for a specific activity (for example: voices off during independent work, stay in your seat, hands to yourself).
3. During the game, the teacher tracks how each team does against those expectations.
4. Every team that meets the goal earns the reward. Teams compete against a standard, not against each other.

That last point matters more than anything else. In the original 1969 study by Barrish, Saunders, and Wolf, teams received marks for out-of-seat and talking-out behavior, and teams that stayed under the limit kept privileges like extra recess. Disruptive behavior dropped sharply during both math and reading — and the finding has been replicated many times since.

How to play it, step by step

You can run your first round tomorrow with nothing but a whiteboard:

1. Pick one activity

Choose a single, predictable block — independent work, a transition, carpet time. Ten to fifteen minutes is plenty at first. Don't try to gamify the whole day.

2. Teach the expectations first

The game only works if students know exactly what "good behavior" means right now. Name two or three observable expectations, model them, and have students practice — the same explicit teaching we recommend in our guide to positive reinforcement in the classroom.

3. Make the teams

Two to four teams, roughly balanced. Table groups work fine. Give teams a quick identity — a color, an animal — and a visible place to earn points.

4. Play, and catch teams doing it right

The classic version counts rule violations, but many modern versions flip it: award points to teams when you see the expectations being met. The flipped version fits a positive-first classroom better, and it lets you use the same reinforcement muscle you already use for individual praise — specific, immediate, and warm.

5. Reward every team that meets the goal

Set a clear criterion ("any team with 10 points wins"). Winning teams get a small, immediate reward: five minutes of choice time, a class cheer, line-leader picks. Ties are wonderful. A game where everyone can win is still a game — and it's the version the research supports.

Why a team game works when reminders don't

The magic ingredient is peer influence pointed in the right direction. Most classroom misbehavior is socially rewarded — the laugh, the reaction, the audience. The GBG quietly reverses the economics: now the peer group wants focus, because focus earns the thing everyone's working toward. Students start supporting each other ("come on, we've almost got it") instead of egging each other on.

It also works because it's honest about attention. During the game, your attention flows toward teams meeting expectations — which is exactly the ratio shift that decades of praise research recommend (more on that in the science of praise).

What the research actually says

The GBG isn't just old — it's one of the most-studied classroom interventions in existence.

• The original experiment. Barrish, Saunders, and Wolf (1969) showed dramatic drops in talking-out and out-of-seat behavior in a fourth-grade class when the game was on, across both math and reading periods.
• A "behavioral vaccine." Reviewing roughly twenty independent replications, Dennis Embry (2002) argued the GBG works like a public-health measure — a simple, low-cost procedure that reliably reduces impulsive and disruptive behavior across very different settings.
• A modern meta-analysis. Bowman-Perrott and colleagues (2016) synthesized 21 single-case studies covering about 1,580 students from pre-kindergarten through grade 12 and found consistent positive effects on behavior.
• Effects that last decades. The most striking evidence comes from Baltimore, where whole first-grade classrooms were randomly assigned to play the game. Kellam and colleagues (2008) followed those students to ages 19–21: young men who had played the GBG in first grade had roughly half the rate of drug abuse or dependence problems compared with controls (19% vs. 38%), and among the boys who had been most aggressive in first grade, 75% of game players graduated high school versus 20% of comparable controls.

Read that last one again: a classroom game, played for part of first grade, was still visible in life outcomes fifteen years later. Few things in education research can say that.

Pitfalls to avoid

The GBG earns its results only when it stays positive. Three traps to sidestep:

• Don't let it shame. If the same team "loses" every day, the game is miscalibrated. Lower the bar until every team can win with real effort, then raise it gradually.
• Don't weaponize the saboteur. If one student tanks their team on purpose, don't let teammates pile on. Quietly make that student their own one-person team with their own goal — the game keeps working, and nobody becomes a target.
• Don't skip the teaching. The game reinforces expectations; it doesn't replace teaching them. If behavior is shaky, re-teach first, play second.

Running the game with classroom points

You don't need special materials — but if you already run a points system, the GBG slots right in. In Chou Chou Teach, you can award points to student groups the moment you catch a team meeting expectations, so the score stays visible and the reinforcement stays immediate — and because points only ever go up, the game stays on its positive-first rails by design. Pair it with a small menu of team rewards (the kind we cover in classroom reward systems that actually work) and you have a complete loop: teach the expectation, play the game, reward the win.

Start with one ten-minute round tomorrow. Keep the goal winnable, cheer every team that gets there, and let peer loyalty start working for your classroom instead of against it.

References

• Barrish, H. H., Saunders, M., & Wolf, M. M. (1969). Good behavior game: Effects of individual contingencies for group consequences on disruptive behavior in a classroom. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2(2), 119–124.
• Embry, D. D. (2002). The Good Behavior Game: A best practice candidate as a universal behavioral vaccine. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 5(4), 273–297.
• Bowman-Perrott, L., Burke, M. D., Zaini, S., Zhang, N., & Vannest, K. (2016). Promoting positive behavior using the Good Behavior Game: A meta-analysis of single-case research. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 18(3), 180–190.
• Kellam, S. G., Brown, C. H., Poduska, J. M., Ialongo, N. S., Wang, W., Toyinbo, P., Petras, H., Ford, C., Windham, A., & Wilcox, H. C. (2008). Effects of a universal classroom behavior management program in first and second grades on young adult behavioral, psychiatric, and social outcomes. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 95(Suppl 1), S5–S28.