Day 3 Re-ED debrief

The focuses of today’s training included experiential education and social skills instruction.

Often when I think about experiential education, I think Outward Bound and “hands on” learning and it’s true that these things can be experiential opportunities. However, what defines experiential education, especially in a setting led by the principals of Re-ED, are the briefing, planned sequencing, experiencing, reflection, and debriefing components brought together in a complete activity. In my secondary setting, I would sequence activity, with my specific students in mind, over a period of time to allow students the opportunity to interact as a group, build trust, practice and grow communication skills, and solve problems. Small classroom experiences/activities can help students grow their social competence by giving them frequent opportunity to practice. Certainly, there are a lot of examples of experiential education that go beyond the walls of a classroom, but I think there are plenty of inquiry lessons that could have an experiential component within the walls of the school.

Instructional Resources for Experiential Education:

Project Adventure

Association for Experiential Education

Wilderdom

Washington State University-4H Adventure Education

Our discussion around social skills instruction highlighted the Re-ED principal that self-control can be learned. Additionally, when educators see a student struggle with an academic problem, the assumption is made that the student needs to be re-taught the skill. If the student still doesn’t master the skill other interventions are often explored until the student finds success. When educators see a student struggle with a social skill, an assumption is made that the student is purposefully acting that way or that they could do something different if they chose to, educators fail to see that the social skill has yet to be mastered and therefore do not teach and re-teach the skill.

In effective social skill instruction, educators identify or name the skill they are attempting to teach, teach when and when not to use the skill, operationalize (task analysis or break into steps) the skill, model the skill, practice the skill, review, test, collect data on the effectiveness of the instruction and implementation, and then try to generalize the newly learned skill into other areas.    

We teach social skills everyday, whether we are deliberately planning for it or not, therefore if we integrate social skills teaching into our lesson planning and instruction deliberately we will positively impact future behaviors in our classrooms.

Social Skills Instruction Resources:

The National Center for Positive Behavior Interventions and Support

The National Dissemination Center for Children withDisabilities

Beginning a New Year and a Different Focus

I am beginning a new school year working with students classified with emotional and behavioral disorders in a high school setting. Right now I don’t know what my day will look like. It could be a self-contained setting where I co-teach with another EBD teacher or it could look like a mixture of co-teaching with general education teachers, co-teaching with another EBD teacher, and a self-contained period where I am the only “teacher” in the room with support staff. I am waiting to hear from my new principal and/or assistant principal what my schedule might entail.

This week I am attending a weeklong training given by WAREA, Washington Re-Education Association, entitled “Effectively Serving Children with Emotional/Behavioral Disabilities. Yesterday we focused on what is Re-ED, the nine stages of Re-EDucation, and structure and predictability. Today we focused on effective instruction and conflict to coping skills.

My take-aways from day one include the importance of having a philosophy (district, building, and/or classroom) that guide an EBD program. A lot of the presenters working for WAREA also work at Renton Academy, which is a therapeutic public EBD school in Renton, WA. I have visited this self-contained school and their district and school have adopted the Re-ED principles as the districts philosophy and approach to dealing with students classified with EBD.

The twelve principles of Re-EDucation include; trust between child and adult is essential and foundational, life is to be lived now, competence makes a difference (children and adolescents should be helped to be good at something), time is an ally (work on the side of growth), self-control can be taught and students can learn to manage behaviors, cognitive competence of children and adolescents can be enhanced through skill development, feelings should be nurtured, the group is very important and should be a part of instruction, ceremony and ritual give order, stability and confidence, the body is the armature of the self, communities are important and benefits of community must be learned and experienced, and children should know some joy in each day.

The nine stages of Re-EDucation refer to the stages that a child goes through as they learn to manage their own behavior and make connection with adults, other students, and their school community. Here change looks likes child development stages, where students progress and regress as they move through stages like limit testing, active resistance, and beginning stages of trust. We spent the afternoon talking about preparing for our students, creating structure and predictability from the start, boarders or boundaries, that will help students move through the nine stages feeling more safe and secure.

Today, we spent the morning practicing and reviewing research based literacy and math interventions, emphasizing that our EBD kids have years of experience dealing with behavioral interventions, but less experience with teachers addressing academic deficiencies. Not a lot of surprises here, behavior is linked to past academic and/or school failure. Finally, we closed the day looking at the conflict cycle. Are we reinforcing the “irrational thinking” that leads kids to feelings and problematic behavior? Or are we interrupting the cycle and helping kids to interrupt their own thinking, maybe even help them change their thinking.

I felt like talking about the conflict cycle was a perfect opening for discussing cognitive behavioral interventions and cognitive academic interventions. If our kids’ deficits center on metacognitive deficiencies then work around thinking and evaluating information is a great next step. 

    

Resources

In these last two posts I have been using some of the strategies outlined by Ellyn Lucas Arwood Ed.D, Carole Kaulitz M.Ed., and Mabel Brown M.A. in their books Visual Thinking Strategies for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders - The Language of Pictures (2009) and Learning with a Visual Brain in an Auditory World (2007). I have had the good fortune of being observed by Carole Kaulitz and she provided me with feedback and ideas about my teaching.  She will observe me again this winter.

Visual Thinking Strategies for Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders
Learning With A Visual Brain In An Auditory World