E145: Behavior in Schools: Some Context
I overheard some teachers talking in a coffee shop a while ago...and I while I sat listening to them...offended...I also thought about how we (meaning you...and me!) can persuade them to think a little deeper. So today on the podcast, it's a bit different-because it's story telling time!
I overheard some teachers talking in a coffee shop a while ago…and I while I sat listening to them…offended…I also thought about how we (meaning you…and me!) can persuade them to think a little deeper.
So today on the podcast, it’s a bit different-because it’s story telling time! Both in how staff learns behavior management (-or not-), and my own story of creating some change with a kiddo with “behaviors.”
We also tackle:
-Why ABA in the schools is such a big deal.
-What is PBIS?
-And how we can actually have changing ideals from behavior being “dealt with” to changing the perspective to equal more and unique support needs?
So is this week’s episode excusing the archaic nature of schools and behavior? Absolutely not!
Will it create an “ah-hah” moment that allows you to craft your questions and support requests in a way that makes staff question if “what they’ve always done” is really the best way?
I sure hope so!
Sign up for the FREE October 13th Parent Training: Is My Child’s IEP/504 Working? https://TheIEPLab.com/FREE
Beth [00:00:00]:
I was in a coffee shop in August, right before school went back, and I overheard two teachers having this in depth conversation about kids with quote unquote behaviors. So today we are exploring what they said and kind of peeling back the behavior piece of schools and why this culture is the way it is and how we can attempt to change the culture of behavior and also advocate for your child. For them to be truly supported in schools. So stick with me, because today we’re talking about peeling back the layers of behavior.
Beth [00:00:34]:
You are listening to the Parent IEP Lab, the podcast that helps you become an informed parent advocate to get your child supported and learning in school. I’m Beth Liesenfeld, occupational therapist passionate about leveling the IEP information playing field for parent advocates. The mission of the Parent IEP Lab podcast, and also the online courses, workshops, and summit of the IEP Lab is to break down barriers to being able to advocate with collaboration most effective approach to advocacy I saw in over 400 meetings. Inside of this podcast, I hope you find insider information from the school side so that you have context and create informed thoughtful questions of your IEP team to have a clearer voice in your child’s plan. So let’s dive into the topic of behavior today and think about what we can change and tweak to get the right formula for success for your child to learn and grow at school. Welcome to the lab. Welcome to the lab.
Beth [00:01:22]:
I have been sharing a ton of free resources provided by all kinds of different people in my area lately. And now I get to share another one that’s coming directly from me. So on October 13th, 2023 at 12pm Eastern, 11am Central, 10am Mountain, 9am Central time is my free parent training, my child’s Entitled, Is My Child’s IEP or 504 Working? In this parent training, we’re talking about how you can tell if your child’s IEP or 504 plan is working and essential keys for advocacy during this time of the year. To register, go to theieplab. com slash free, F R E E, and that link is also in the popcat. And that link is also in the podcast’s description. We’ll see you there. So, behavior is a loaded topic.
Beth [00:02:11]:
And when I was thinking about sharing my behavior stories, I was like, okay, I can share the context behind why it’s so hard to change the way that we think about behavior in the schools. And then I was like, well, I don’t want to sound like I’m defending the schools, right? Because we know that they’re archaic. We know that they need to change. But I think it’s still worth it to address it, which is why I’m still muscling through this topic with you today. Because I do, I do think that context for how things work in the schools a lot of times, even if it’s wrong, is so helpful for parents coming to that table and saying, okay. Like I know the barriers to you changing your ways are this, and it just better informs you in how to combat those and how to truly advocate for your child and get them supported. So today we’re going to talk a little bit about how teachers and therapists and all kinds of people are trained in how to address behavior. And then we’re going to talk just a little bit about how that’s changing.
Beth [00:03:12]:
Just in case you haven’t listened to like Connie Persick’s interview, um, in the summit and also in this podcast. And then I’m gonna tell a story at the end about my experience and, and changing the way that I was doing things and still the resistance that I had in trying to approach that and change it for everybody else that was working with this child. So first of all, let’s talk about general education teachers. Now, general education teachers, uh, go to all kinds of programs right around the country, and they get their undergraduate degree in teaching and then, A lot of them will come into working and within a couple of years they will go ahead and go back and get their masters. So, they do their masters at the same time as they are running a classroom. So, typically within those first couple of years because, um, it has to do with how they’re paid. Um, it’s worth it for them to go get their masters and the programs really are set up for them to be able to do that. I’m sure that they address behaviors when they’re going through their actual programs, but their classes that they go through in their programs are probably much like the ones that I went through when I was in graduate school for OT.
Beth [00:04:20]:
And they’re like all theory and, you know, do you study the different ways of of psychology and how you understand people’s motivations and things like that. And so it’s very behaviorist in the way that you go through it. And so you have that lay down of coursework that kind of sets the stage for, hey, this curriculum hasn’t changed in years. Like we’re talking decades. They’re teaching the same topics in the same program and preparing teachers the same way, right? And then they’re also… So, we as humans typically learn best when we are supported, but we also get a chance to jump in and try to do things ourselves, right? We’re experiential learners, more than anything else, I believe, with a little bit of prep beforehand, right? So That’s what happens during the student teachings, right? You go through the coursework, you maybe have a couple weeks where you shadow a certain classroom or you meet a certain thing or you have an experience, but then you have these semester long student teaching stints. So, you know, you might watch that teacher and how they do things first to say, okay, this is the way that they have their classroom set up. I’m going to try to follow this as best as I can because when you’re a new teacher, you don’t have those systems.
Beth [00:05:34]:
You don’t have those ideas of how you want it to be run unless you’ve been a paraprofessional in the schools before, or you’ve, you know, mentored under somebody else and you’re in a different situation. So really you’re coming in and you’re saying, Oh my gosh, I don’t know what I’m doing. Okay. This teacher has this system for managing behavior. They have a clip chart system at the front, uh, where they take points away or they have a class. Party on Friday so that everybody has to earn points as a class to be able to go to the party on Fridays and all of these now what are considered really bad practices that are still happening. Right? So new teacher coming in, student teaching, you’re seeing these systems and you’re saying, Oh yeah, okay, I can do that. Um, this is how they manage that.
Beth [00:06:17]:
Okay. Okay. I can do that. And so you implement it. And then when people graduate and have their own classroom, that’s the context they know, right? That’s the experience that they have is these class parties on Fridays, taking away points from people, um, the PBIS systems which are school wide programs that, you know, one example from the schools that I worked in was that, you know, kids would earn like a little token and then they would go into the hallway and a certain spot and they would add up their tokens and then when the whole school got so many tokens in that little tube that they put the tokens into, then they would get, you know, a field day or a, pizza day or whatever it is. So there’s this like whole system set up, which is integrated into the culture of schools in, okay, like positive behavior, right? And you’re trying to earn points and you’re trying to do the right thing, um, and get rewarded for that as well.
Beth [00:07:14]:
And then, of course, the issue with this is that if you don’t get the tokens and you don’t do the good behavior, then you get reinforced as being this quote unquote bad person because you can’t ever get these tokens and you’re not contributing and you’re the one that’s taking the class points away and that is the part where this whole system needs to go away because there’s no way to do positive behavior supports without making some people feel bad because they are not meeting those expectations of the positive behavior support system. So hopefully that makes sense.
Beth [00:07:45]:
So this is kind of like how this persists. And it’s a very similar experience for people who are considered behavior specialists inside of your schools. In Colorado, we have a lot of BCBAs, so behavioral therapists, working inside of the schools. And that’s what happened when I was working in the schools is that they, uh, very much were managing that behavior, especially within autism programs as well. But in different states, they don’t have BCBAs in the schools, but they might have social workers that head up the FBAs or the functional behavioral analysis, which is kind of like the evaluation process to see what is happening with this child? Why are they having behaviors and trying to figure out why so that we can try to support them? And so in addition, so in summary, it can be a school psychologist. It can be a social worker. It can be an OT or an SLP, like a speech therapist in some cases, and it can also be a BCBA. But again, we have internships, so we go in and we shadow and we work under a person of our profession, and we take over their caseload in the course of, you know, the nine or twelve weeks or however long that internship is, and we learn the practices from our mentor.
Beth [00:08:57]:
So unless we are connecting with the world outside of our school system, because so many people are like, I can’t even think about work after I’m done, they Don’t even know to follow people on social media. They don’t know what accounts to follow to learn about more appropriate, supportive behavior practices. And so you kind of get stuck in your rut of your routine and what you know. And so this is how behavior persist. And this is why it’s so hard to break this because there’s a whole school wide system. And then there’s also this kind of micro system where this is how we’re trained. And this is how we’re reinforced because everybody else is doing it this way, right? And so we’re on the bandwagon. Um, so that’s a little bit of context for how educators learn about managing behavior.
Beth [00:09:44]:
Okay, so if you haven’t heard about this, this is when we’re going to talk about how managing behaviors and truly supporting kids is changing, hopefully inside the schools. It’s changing very slowly. It’s changing one team at a time. And I, I do think that parents have a huge opportunity to be able to change. But first I want to kind of like explain this a little bit more. So, uh, behaviors in schools and across like teaching and you know, everything like the culture of schools is that we follow Dr. Skinner’s version of behaviors. So when he talks about behaviors, he’s very much talking about The outward behavior, anything that we can observe, and when you go back and look at his writings, there’s some really scary things in his writing, and a lot of quotes that are kind of scary from him as well, in that he doesn’t believe that humans really have an internal, like, emotional process to them, so he’s just looking at the outward behavior and how can we change that behavior, so hence, that’s why we get a lot say this word and get an M& M kind of situation where we’re like, Oh, that doesn’t really feel that right.
Beth [00:10:57]:
In certain situations, I’ve seen it be, um, kind of excusable as far as safety concerns go. So I remember, I had a very short stint. Our therapy center, when I was in my first year of being an OT, took over a contract with an ABA based school. And so it was very different. It was very interesting. Uh, but what happened was they were teaching this one kid who did not listen at all, kind of not, aware of his surroundings at all. They were having a really hard time getting him to stop running out in parking lots, running out over crossing streets without somebody with him, all those kinds of things. So what they did was they would practice all day, every day, and anytime they said, stop, they would say the kid’s name and then stop.
Beth [00:11:41]:
If he stopped, he would get an M& M. Right? So, as, as far as a quick fix goes, yes, he learns that ability to know what stop meant and to be able to stop. Does he really understand what stop means and why? No, but we were just managing that safety concern, right? So it’s pretty much the only situation that I’ve seen where it’s even remotely appropriate to use these kinds of things. When we talk about the FBA, the Functional Behavioral Analysis, that is kind of the evaluation that, yes, you as a parent can request, formally request, and it kind of triggers this evaluation process. You do need to have permission for it. You go through the whole waiting period and then discuss the results and the data that they keep. The problem is if they’re looking at it from an ABA lens, what they’re doing is they’re classifying those behaviors as the intention behind it is that the person is trying to escape, most likely escape work, uh, avoidance of work, attention seeking, or wants access to tangibles or reinforcements, which is called instant gratification. Um, and so we all know that everybody is a little bit more complex, rather than attention seeking, we can absolutely phrase that better, which is what ABA is trying to do, is kind of phrase that in a better light, uh, but really we need to dig a little bit deeper.
Beth [00:13:06]:
Why are they attention seeking? And to kind of flip it on its end, we have the contrasting idea, which is Dr. Ross Green’s CPS method, which is Collaborative Proactive Solutions, and his most favorite quote is So, all of this like reasoning, yes, we need to look at why they aren’t able to do this, but most often from his lens, we’re saying, guess what? They don’t have the skills to be able to do that in this particular situation. So getting on socks and shoes is one example, right? We might know that this child is capable of getting on their socks and shoes, and then some mornings they just have a fit and they, you know, scream and they yell. That’s the behavior, right? And so from an ABA lens, they might look at it and say, well, you know, they’re just avoiding it. Um, Putting on their socks and shoes and then if you dig a little bit deeper I’m thinking of my toddler in this moment, right? Sometimes he cannot put them on himself in the morning because he hasn’t slept well because he’s really hungry But he won’t eat anything, you know because he’s not regulated on the inside of him to be able to perform that function on the outside So do I think that’s avoidance of the activity sure is Because he’s not having the skills and the capabilities to do that. But is the response to that, is my response to that, to force him to do it when he’s not able to do it? It’s just going to blow up in my face, right? I’m sure that you’ve had a similar experience where if you force them to do it, it becomes this whole emotional battle. It becomes worse. And if you force them to do it, then You take a little bit out of that relationship bank, right? You kind of taint that rapport that you have with that child.
Beth [00:14:58]:
If you’re forcing them to do something, whereas if I come in and I support them and I say, Hey, it looks like you’re having a really difficult time. All you have to do is say, mom, can you help me do this today? And. You know, modeling that and not necessarily making him say that before I help him, but modeling that as this is the appropriate response. This is how you ask for help and then go ahead and help him do that. That’s teaching him how to advocate for himself. So that’s more of a CPS, uh, response, but not necessarily the CPS process because it’s a lot more, uh, in depth than that, including getting to the bottom and not assuming why he can’t do it, um, but getting his actual input into that problem. So it’s not the 100 percent best example, um, of CPS and it’s not meant to do that. It’s just meant to illustrate the different approaches to, finding out why behind that behavior.
Beth [00:15:50]:
Um, and so lastly, I just want to share a quick story about my own journey in discovering about behaviors and trying to change The way that we were helping one of our students. So, you know, going through. And my first career was in being an adaptive horseback riding instructor. And the cool thing is, we would have a ton of reports of kids with really high behaviors, kicking, screaming, spitting, all of that kind of thing. And we would almost never see it. Um, at the barn when kids would come in and be around the horses and they had this very, we were credibly structured. If you haven’t seen this happen before, it’s like you do this, then you do this, then you do this. And there’s a reason behind, we do everything in that order because there is a very, very good reason.
Beth [00:16:40]:
And so we really never saw any of this. We also saw a lot of autonomy. You know, we pushed them to be more independent when they felt like they could. And so we really never saw any of these behaviors. So I really loved these kids that we came in. I had such good experiences with kids that quote unquote had really high behaviors. And so coming into being an OT, it was like, Oh, I love these kids. Like, I love discovering who these kids are.
Beth [00:17:03]:
I love hearing stories about these kids and because the, the progress that you can see is so amazing for them becoming confident kids, you know? So when I became an OT. The first job that I had actually specialized in kids with behaviors, and they also specialized in AAC devices. So kids who had really severe difficulty with communication and we would obtain the AAC devices, which are augmentative and alternative communication devices, the talkers, and we would train them. So I learned a lot about that. Um, and these kids, now we were in a clinic setting and we did start to see these behaviors because we were running around the horses. And so when we. came to kind of manage these behaviors, a lot of times we would have a deeper understanding of okay, like let’s try this or hey, can we get them to advocate for this or do they need a break or you know, you can tell us no. Those kinds of things were definitely reinforced in the culture of that clinic that I started at.
Beth [00:18:01]:
So again, building those skills of hey, they need communication, they need to be able to tell us no, you know, building on those building blocks of how we really And I think that’s and explain what’s happening and what we actually need so that we can be regulated. Bring that forward into the schools then, and we had one particular kiddo who was super interesting because I showed up to one of the first IEPs. We had him almost a full year before we had his IEP. And so I knew him. Um, kind of well before we had that IEP and so I was like, Oh, I’d love to work on some functional things with him, you know, just to get him up and moving and do things that he likes to do. And I was like, how is he doing with like, you know, does he do any like chores or things at home? And she was like, Oh yeah, he does dishes. He matches laundry like a boss and puts it away. Like he had all of these skills, but we weren’t seeing any of them in the school setting.
Beth [00:18:53]:
And This is about the same time where I started to hear about the neurodiversity movement. Now, the neurodiversity movement has been happening for a very long time. I was very late to the game and still am very late to the game, but this was in 2020 or so, 2019, 2020, somewhere around there. And I was like, okay, I’ve heard of this quote that’s kids do well when they can, I don’t really know who it came from. So I started trying to follow autistic voices on Instagram. And so You know, once you find one, then you can like connect to the others and kind of snowballed. Well, it was about this time where I learned about, um, hand overhand and hand underhand. So for some context, this child hated writing and he was also a grabber.
Beth [00:19:39]:
He would scratch, he would, um. really dig his nails into you. He would scratch your arms. If you came too close, he would grab your hair. If it was down, he would grab any loose clothes, clothing, your lanyard, anything like that. Um, and so he was on a very strict behavioral plan and this team was doing a lot to develop rapport with him as well, but it wasn’t really changing what we were able to do with him. So, you know, we were trying to work on handwriting, and so I was doing hand over hand. So his hand on the pencil, my hand on top of his, and we were making letters together.
Beth [00:20:10]:
Well, frequently I would get scratched, I would get grabbed, um, you know, he would get dysregulated and upset with me. So, you know, in looking at this neurodiversity movement, I was like, Oh, wait a minute. I’m not supposed to do hand over hand. There’s they’re telling me to do hand under hand. So this is my hand on the pencil, his hand on top of mine, and he can remove it whenever he wants to. And amazing things started to happen. Not only was he more able to tolerate me being in his space, because it’s really hard to give somebody space if we’re trying to work on handwriting, but He started to grasp the pencil independently, without anybody’s hand on anybody’s, and start to draw, start to do circles, you know, scribble, that kind of thing, and we’ve never seen this before. So, naturally, you know, I come in one time a week to work with him, and so I started discovering this in my weekly sessions.
Beth [00:21:02]:
So I turn to the paraprofessional who is with him most of the time and I start to kind of carry over. Okay, this is working really well, so I want you to try to switch your method of doing this with him. Can you do it this way? And so I’d come back the next week and I’d be like, Hey, are you doing hand under hand? And she’d be like, Uh, I tried it, but then it didn’t work. So then they just revert back to what they were doing before, even though it wasn’t working. But that’s what they were taught to do in the beginning. So doing something new and different just didn’t seem like it was working. So they didn’t do it, right? So it would took weeks and weeks and weeks of me saying, oh, yeah, like look at this what he did in therapy today. Hey, how are you seeing him scribble more by himself? Well, yeah, I am.
Beth [00:21:44]:
Okay, try hand under hand, hand under hand. So, You know something that should have taken one week for me to be like, Hey, try this. It’s been really amazing in our sessions. It took six weeks to try to get the rest of the staff to be on board with this new approach because it was different. And you can see that because they are taught by the teacher, the teacher is taught by former teachers, like it’s this whole system that needs to be turned on its head, right? So hopefully this episode gives you context for behavior and how behavior works in schools. Not to excuse it, that is not my intention, but I do think that when we understand the context in this way, especially through that story that I told, it’s like, oh my gosh, okay, so this might take time, but it’s worth it in the end. And I do think that parents are absolutely able to advocate in this way when we communicate things like this, like if that mom had told us a long time ago, before we had the IEP meeting in the spring, when we got him in the fall, that he was doing all of these things at home, that would have created context in me to be able to say, Oh my gosh, well, he can do these things. How can I build on his strengths instead of just going blindly and not really knowing about him, um, and just trialing and error things every single week until I found something that worked.
Beth [00:22:58]:
So hopefully that was helpful and I hope that I approached it in a way that was, um, open but also explaining, uh, what I think that we need to work on when it comes to schools and what your role is in that as well. So before we wrap up the episode, I just want to make sure that you remember to register for the free training that’s happening on October 13th. Do not miss it. You do have to register for it. To be able to get the link, uh, so it’s over zoom. So you’ll see the landing page and then you’ll sign up through zoom on the next uh, page when you hit the button to register. So I’m so excited to dive into this and I am expecting it to be a little bit of a workshop where we say, okay, is your IEP working? Is your 504 working? And we’re going through key pieces to look for, observations to look for, to see if it is truly working or not. So I can’t wait to work with you on that as well.
Beth [00:23:46]:
So thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you same time, same place next week. Thanks so much.