Success Minutes: The Mind-Blowing Metric That Changes Everything

Transcript [pdf]

SHOW NOTES

In this episode, Julie and Kristie introduce Success Minutes, a simple shift in what teams notice and track when a student is struggling. Instead of spending nearly all of our attention documenting what went wrong, Success Minutes asks us to find the small moments when a student is engaged, regulated, connected, or participating—and then study what helped make those moments possible.

Key Takeaways

• • Success does not have to last an hour—or even ten minutes. Thirty seconds of engagement, regulation, connection, or participation counts.
  • When teams only collect data on challenging behavior, they can miss the conditions that are already helping a student succeed.
  • Tracking Success Minutes helps teams identify patterns: particular peers, adults, movement, choice, responsibility, music, visual supports, times of day, or types of activities.
  • The goal is not to ignore difficult behavior. It is to use that information as a signal that more co-regulation and support may be needed, while also studying what is working.
  • Once a team can see successful moments, the next question becomes practical: How can we create more moments like this tomorrow?

Episode Download / Handout

The Success Minutes Quick Tracker

A simple one-page tool for capturing small moments of success and looking for the conditions that help them happen. Use it to record what was happening, how long the success lasted, what support may have helped, and the patterns you notice across the day.

The tracker can help you notice success connected to engagement, regulation, connection, or participation—even when it lasts only 30 seconds. It also includes a quick support check and an end-of-day pattern check so the team can decide what to intentionally create more of next.

👉 Get the handout at: inclusiveschooling.com/download77

The Success Minutes Challenge

Try it for one week: track three Success Minutes each day. Write down how long the success lasted, what the student was doing, and what support might have helped. Then ask: How can we create more of this tomorrow? You can do it alone, but it may be even more useful with a co-teacher, paraprofessional, related service provider, coach, or administrator helping you notice what you might otherwise miss.