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