The Hopkins researcher who studied how a first-grade game could keep kids out of trouble

Here’s how to play the Good Behavior Game: Split a classroom full of first- or second-grade students into small groups. Make sure the teams have the same number of girls and boys and disruptive and quiet children. Then tell them their team can win rewards for being good.

When Sheppard “Shep” Kellam launched a multiyear clinical study of the classroom management technique with Baltimore schools in 1985, he wasn’t sure exactly what it would yield. But the Johns Hopkins University researcher wanted to know: Could these interventions help prevent students from engaging in dangerous behaviors? From doing drugs or being violent? From going to jail or trying to take their lives?

He studied more than 2,300 students across 19 city schools and followed up with them four times between then and when they were 21. The results were stunning: Students who played the game were less likely to display aggressive behavior later in life than those who didn’t. They didn’t smoke as much and were less prone to risky sexual behavior. Boys seemed to benefit more than girls.

Hopkins researchers revisited Kellam’s work to celebrate its lasting impact on the field last month after he died July 11 of dementia. He was 95.

“He revolutionized the way mental health researchers thought about prevention,” said William Eaton, Kellam’s former colleague.

Kellam was born Jan. 10, 1931, and grew up in a Jewish family in Cape Charles, Virginia, where his father ran a grocery store. He had a brother 10 years his senior, Mervin, who was an early mentor but died of leukemia when Kellam was a teenager, said Sheppard’s son, Jonathan “Jon” Kellam.

Growing up during World War II deeply affected a young Sheppard, his sons said. He told stories about playing with friends on the beach and worrying that Germans were just offshore, ready to strike.

The family moved to Baltimore in Sheppard’s youth. He attended a Jesuit high school, where he swam and was president of the debate club, said his son, Stephen “Steve” Kellam. In his yearbook, he said he wanted to go into medicine.

Shep joined the National Guard in the early 1950s, betting he’d get drafted anyway. He was in the artillery, then trained to be a medic, Steve said. He was also briefly a Merchant Marine before leaving for medical school.

He enrolled at the University of Maryland and studied psychiatry. One of his professors had a daughter, Ruth, about his age. Shep fell in love with her, and they had three children — Jon, Tony and Steve — during their marriage, which ended in divorce after a little more than a decade. After their split, he married Margaret “Peg” Ensminger, also a scholar and mental health researcher.

Sheppard could be a great teacher but a tough parent, Steve said. He preferred to call his elementary school sons “men” rather than “boys.” When they were a little older, they called him “Shep.”

He took them on cross-country road trips, first in a Volkswagen Microbus, then a red Porsche. They went on beach vacations, where Shep loved to sail and fish.

But he most wanted his children to grow up with a strong moral compass. He regularly talked about news and Democratic politics at dinner, his sons said.

“I think he instilled in us that respect for humanity,” Jon said.

The family was eating together one day when then-President Richard Nixon announced he would resign after the Watergate scandal. Jon remembers his father jumping up and down in excitement and relief.

Shep’s politics were largely shaped by his experiences as a researcher at the University of Chicago, where he began working with primarily Black communities in the early 1960s, his sons said.

He helped established a community mental health center in Woodlawn, a low-income, predominantly African American neighborhood where only about half the students completed high school at the time.

He was interested in learning more about childhood behaviors that could indicate risk of delinquency later in life. Aggression was chief among them, so he started studying the impact of the Good Behavior Game.

“People didn’t realize, I think, as much at that time as they do now, that mental disorders take 10 or 20 or 30 years to evolve and become very apparent in adults,” Eaton said. “But they’re sort of sitting inside young children, and if you can help the young children, then that has a beneficial effect on life in general.”

He and coworkers coined the phrase “developmental epidemiology” to detail the developmental paths that can impact adult behaviors, according to a Hopkins biography. He worked with local leaders and advocates to tailor prevention research strategies to the needs of the community.

“You learn how to work with communities not in a top-down way but in sort of a bottom-up way,” Steve Kellam said.

He took the same passion and research to Hopkins in 1982, and he served as chair of the mental health department for over a decade and was the founding director of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Hopkins Center for Prevention and Early Intervention.

Outside of work, Shep enjoyed carpentry, literature, photography and jazz music, his sons said. He often hosted big Thanksgiving dinners with family.

He was also a foodie who preferred his steak very red and would have chosen seafood for every meal if he could have. He met close friend Chris-Ellyn Johanson over a shrimp bowl at a faculty party at the University of Chicago.

She sometimes found him difficult. “He was very sure of his facts and views and whatever, and God help you if you didn’t agree,” Johanson said.

But he could also be reliable and compassionate. He walked Johanson’s daughter down the aisle at her wedding after her own father died.

“Shep was a perfectionist,” Johanson said. “He didn’t do anything sloppy.”

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