Most whole-class behaviour systems are inherited rituals. The marble jar. Names on the board. A behaviour chart with a laminated sad face at one end and a smiley face at the other. Teachers pass these down to one another the way recipes get passed down: someone used it once, it seemed to work, and now everyone’s using it with full confidence and zero evidence.
The Good Behaviour Game is not that.
It has been studied continuously since Barrish, Saunders, and Wolf introduced it in 1969 — one of the most replicated interventions in applied behaviour analysis. Randomised trials have been run. Longitudinal follow-up studies have tracked participants into young adulthood. Kellam and colleagues ran a series of Baltimore trials, first and second grade, finding that early exposure to the game was linked to reduced rates of substance-use disorders and antisocial behaviour decades later. That’s not a claim most classroom interventions can make.
The original study was published under the US spelling — the “Good Behavior Game” — but throughout this article we use the UK spelling.
What it actually is
The class divides into two or more balanced teams. During a defined game period, teams accumulate marks against them when members engage in target disruptive behaviours. At the end of the period, any team that stayed at or under the criterion wins a small reward — an activity-based prize, extra free time, a privilege.
The mechanism is an interdependent group contingency: every member’s behaviour affects the whole team’s outcome. That structure changes what peer attention does during the game period. Instead of peers laughing at disruption or ignoring it, they have a direct stake in whether it happens.
Short game periods. Observable rules. A criterion generous enough that teams win regularly, especially at first. That’s the core.
Why it works when poster systems don’t
Here is the inconvenient truth about classroom behaviour management: the most powerful variable in any classroom is not you. It’s the other students.
Peer attention is uncontrolled reinforcement. When a student clowns, calls out, or argues with you in front of the class, the laughter, the wide eyes, and the heads turning around are all delivering reinforcement that your response — however calm, consistent, and practitioner-approved — can barely compete with.
Most whole-class systems completely ignore this. They’re designed as teacher-to-student systems: the teacher tracks behaviour, the teacher assigns consequences. Peer reinforcement keeps running in the background, unchecked, and continues to outcompete whatever system you’ve introduced.
The Good Behaviour Game recruits peer attention instead of fighting it. When a student disrupts, their teammates now have an incentive to look away, redirect quietly, or simply not react — because the reaction has a cost. The game doesn’t eliminate peer influence; it redirects it.
Running it: a practical sequence
Start with three observable rules. Specific and countable. “Shouting out without raising a hand” is observable. “Being disrespectful” is not. If two people watching the same class could disagree about whether it happened, rewrite the rule.
Build balanced teams deliberately. Distribute students who are likely to struggle across all teams, rather than clustering them together. The goal is competitive balance — teams that can all realistically win.
Start short. Ten to fifteen minutes during one predictable routine, ideally a structured activity where the rules are easy to apply. The game is not an all-day system; it’s a bounded period with a clear start and end.
Set a generous criterion early. The first few game periods, teams should win. Dense success early builds buy-in. A criterion that no team can meet in week one will tank motivation before the game has a chance to work.
Reward immediately and keep it small. End the game period, announce the result, and deliver the reward that session. Activity-based rewards — five minutes of free drawing, a two-minute brain break of their choice — work well and avoid the cost and complexity of tangibles. The token board tool can serve as a team-score display during the game period, giving students a visible running tally.
Expand gradually. Once the game is running well in one routine, extend the duration or add a second game period. Don’t try to run it across the whole day; that’s not how it was designed and it’s not how the evidence was generated.
The failure modes worth knowing in advance
Punitive peer pressure on struggling students. If a student frequently causes their team to lose, teammates may start directing criticism at them. This is the most serious failure mode and the one most likely to cause harm. Prevent it with three design decisions: balanced teams so no single student is a visible liability; a criterion generous enough that teams can absorb occasional marks and still win; and a firm rule that nobody names individuals when a mark is given. You record the mark. You don’t announce who earned it.
Criterion too strict too early. Teams that can’t win stop caring. When no team reaches the target in the first week, you haven’t raised the bar — you’ve pulled it out of reach. Drop the criterion back until winning is common, then tighten it gradually.
Running it all day. The game is a defined period, not a classroom regime. Trying to maintain group-contingency pressure across every subject and transition throughout the day will exhaust students, create resentment, and collapse under its own weight by week two. One or two focused game periods per day is the research-based model.
Where it fits in the bigger picture
The Good Behaviour Game is a Tier 1 whole-class strategy done properly. It doesn’t replace individual support for students whose behaviour is maintained by specific functions — those students still need function-based assessment and targeted intervention. What the game does is shift the classroom climate so that the ambient conditions are more conducive to learning for everyone.
For students whose needs aren’t met by a whole-class approach, the next step is individual function-based support. What PBIS Actually Means covers how tiered systems are supposed to work and where they commonly fall short.
More classroom behaviour strategies — organised by function and context — are collected at Understanding Behaviour in the Classroom.