Saturday, August 18, 2018

Students’ Mental Health Status, and School Safety, Discipline, and Disproportionality: An Anthology of Previous Blogs


Integrating Successful Research-to-Practice Strategies into the New School Year (Part II of II)

 [CLICK HERE for the Full Version of this Blog]


Dear Colleagues,

Introduction:  Change is Hard

   As I continue to collaborate with educators across the country to help them open their schools for the new year (this week I am training in an Alaskan Early Childhood Center), I am struck by this primary theme:

   Most of my work—as a consultant, psychologist, and fellow educator—is about changing behavior.

   Indeed, depending on who I am working for, I am often tasked with changing or modifying the behavior of administrators, related services and special education professionals, general education teachers and support personnel, and—of course—students at all age levels and with all kinds of needs.

   To do this, I need to:
  • Develop strong and positive relationships and trust with my client-colleagues, the students and their parents, and the community and its various constituencies;
  • Be an effective communicator and professional development guide;
  • Provide ongoing mentoring, technical assistance, collegial consultation, and coaching; and
  • Offer honest feedback that encourages continuous growth, but also is constructive and specific.

   Changing behavior is not easy. 

   Sometimes it does not occur because people just do not understand what they are supposed to do.  Sometimes because they do not know the steps, or they have not mastered the skills.  Sometimes, they just need more time and practice—or they have reached their limit, and additional practice is not going to make a difference.  Sometimes, pressure from competing interests are undermining the motivation to change. . . or there is no motivation at all.

   My work is intriguing and complex.  And success is not guaranteed.

   But success will never occur if the process of change is not complemented with the evidence-based content that drives the change.

   And this is what today’s Blog (continued from Part I) is all about.
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A Blog of Blogs

   As we enter (or approach) the new school year, I thought that it would be useful to review some of the most popular Blog articles that I have written over the past year or more.

   And my blogs do periodically address the processes underlying school and schooling success, I more often discuss the content that represents what administrators, teachers, support staff, and students need to demonstrate or change.

   Indeed, if educators (and others) don’t know how (for example) to organize a school’s staff into shared leadership committees, differentiate instruction, teach a social skills lesson, or implement a cognitive-behavioral intervention. . . then all the discussion, planning, and arrangements in the world are not going to deliver the needed or desired outcomes.

   Thus, I have organized the content of my recent (and past) Blogs into four clusters:
  • School Improvement, Strategic Planning, and Effective School and Schooling Practices
  • The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA/ESSA) and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support
  • School Climate, (Disproportionate) Discipline, Safety, and Classroom Management
  • Students’ Mental Health Status and Wellness

   In Part I (August 4th) of this “Series,” I provided chronological lists of the Blogs directly related to the first two areas.

   [CLICK HERE for Part I]

   In today’s Part II, I will briefly overview the last two areas—and then provide the Dates and Titles of the most important and relevant past Blog messages in reverse chronological order. 

[CLICK HERE for the Full Version of this Blog]
_ _ _ _ _

To read one of the original Blogs cited below:

   Go back to the Blog “Home Page” on this website, or CLICK HERE

   Look at the right-hand side of this Blog page and click on the year when the Blog article was written.

   Find the desired Blog on the resulting web-page and click on it.  Each year’s Blogs listed there are also in reverse chronological order.
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School Climate, (Disproportionate) Discipline, Safety, and Classroom Management

   With the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA/ESSA), the importance of looking at and nurturing the non-academic factors that impact students’ academic proficiency is more important than ever before.  This especially includes ensuring that all schools are safe with consistently positive classroom climates, and that school discipline and classroom management are an inherent part of the “academic program.”

   Beyond ESEA/ESSA, however, school safety and discipline are constantly discussed in national reports and research, in the popular press, and on social media. As such, over the past three years, I have written a number of Blogs addressing, for example:  student engagement, the role and impact of school resource officers, student violence and injuries, and my ongoing concern that many school discipline “programs” have not been independently and comprehensively validated, and that they too often “promise the moon, but do not deliver the cheese.”
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This Year’s School Discipline Lessons Learned
  • ESEA/ESSA (2015) and IDEA (2004) do not cite, mandate, or even recommend the PBIS (upper case, with acronym) framework advocated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), its tax-funded National Technical Assistance Centers, or the state departments of education who have accepted federal funds contingent on implementing these specific frameworks.
  • Instead, these federal laws require—under very specific circumstances—the consideration of “positive behavioral supports and interventions” (lower case) for specific groups of students.
  • Research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education concluded that OSEP’s PBIS framework has significant psychometric and procedural flaws that are preventing their full implementation, and (at times) delaying needed services and supports to students who are demonstrating significant social, emotional, or behavioral challenges.
  • The ultimate goal of a school discipline initiative is the developmentally-appropriate preschool through high school teaching and mastery of students’ social, emotional, and behavioral self-management skills.  These outcomes are manifested through students’ effective interpersonal, social problem-solving, conflict prevention and resolution, and emotional control and coping skills.
  • The scientific foundation of an effective school discipline, classroom management, and student self-management initiative involves:  Positive School and Classroom Climates and Prosocial Teacher-Student Relationships; Behavioral Expectations and Social Skills Instruction; Behavioral Accountability and Student Motivation; Consistency across All of these Components; and Application and Extensions to All School Settings and Peer Groups.
  • This scientific foundation is the same foundation that addresses the social, emotional, and behavioral effects of student poverty, trauma, teasing, bullying, and disproportionality.  This foundation is more defensible than the research-thin character education, mindfulness, restorative justice, and social-emotional learning framework approaches.
   For a chronological summary of the 38 Blogs in this Area:

    [CLICK HERE]
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Students’ Mental Health Status and Wellness

   Over the years, numerous epidemiological reports have estimated that up to 40% of students, during their school-aged careers, experience a mental health challenge that bears formal services or interventions.  More recently, the connection between students’ mental health and the all-too-frequent school shootings (relative to the perpetrators, the victims, and the direct and indirect witnesses) has been tragically drawn. 

   And yet, these mental health and wellness “discussions” in our professional (and popular) press, often miss different levels of multi-tiered prevention, strategic intervention, and crisis management/intensive services specificity.

   Over the past three or more years, I have written a number of Blogs that have described an evidence-based blueprint with the components and pieces needed to implement effective multi-tiered social, emotional, behavioral, and mental health services, supports, programs, and interventions.  As a school psychologist, this blueprint and these approaches are not focused on treating students’ labels. 

   Instead, they are focused on (a) changing the emotional, affective, attributional, and social-behavioral interactions that “represent” (or the diagnostic criteria for these) students’ clinical labels; and (b) ensuring that the chosen approaches are directly linked (and are responding) to the underlying root causes of those interactions.

   This is a skills- and strengths-based approach.  It involves a continuum involving multi-faceted, systems-based assessment and intervention resources to direct, intensive, one-on-one evidence-based clinical therapy.

   Even though they are outside their training and experience, some educators nonetheless grasp for one-size-fits-all mental health “solutions” that may actually exacerbate the existing problems.  Others do not have the psychological experts available to guide the process, so they depend on those who are “closest” to being “the experts”—putting them in an unfair and untenable position.

   For a chronological summary of the 10 Blogs in this Area:

     [CLICK HERE]
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Summary

   I hope that all of you had a great summer break . . . but it is now time to “hit the re-set button.” 

   As always, the new school year offers new opportunities and new beginnings.  Indeed, we all have a chance to build on last year’s successes, to “retire” last year’s disappointments, and to analyze, work on, and close last year’s gaps.  To this end, I hope that today’s Blog—and Part I on August 4th—will help you to attain these goals.

   To assist further:  If you would like to discuss any of the areas addressed in this and the other cited Blog messages, I am always happy to provide a free one-hour consultation conference call with you, your School Improvement, or your Multi-Tiered Services team.  These calls are designed to help you clarify your needs and directions on behalf of your students, staff, colleagues, school(s), and district.

   Please accept my best wishes for a great beginning of the school year! I hope the coming year is everything that you hope and want it to be.

Best,

Howie