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Elendil004 posted:Let's talk about lockdown drills. Likely, they're here to stay. Much like the massive fires of the early 1900's drove fire safety, active shooters have driven the need for lockdown drills. Since it's nearly impossible to walk back safety even if the number of active shooter / hostile events dropped sharply, we're always going to have lockdown drills. So what can we do to make them less traumatic. After all, fire drills are rarely traumatic, and historically school fires have killed sometimes hundreds of students, so they're dangerous and we take them seriously but they don't have students texting their parents about giving their playstation to their friends. This is an incredibly good post about the kind of evidence-based implementation that should be guiding school responses to the risk of a mass shooting. There are guidelines published on every subject imaginable, and lockdown drills/mass shooter events are no different. While there are members of district/admin staff (principals, school board sometimes, others, etc.) who just do not get it and have no interest in learning beyond their preconceived notion of what is/is not effective, many are super open to discussion and change if it's presented competently. But that's damning with faint praise- many educators are resistant to changing their instructional and classroom management practices even when presented with piles of evidence that, for example, some students with attention-seeking behavior are reinforced by negative attention, meaning a loud, public dressing-down for swearing in class will cause them to swear more in the future. Via research, we've essentially known for the last three decades what teaching practices are most effective on a classroom level for things like math, P.E., health, literacy, etc. My field, behaviorism and special education, is similarly mapped out. I say this because it's important to realize that quality education is evidence-based, i.e., fifty valid, controlled studies have analyzed the implementation of number blocks for progressing 1st-grade students toward 1-1 parity between objects and symbolic representations of numbers, and found that kids need something concrete to touch and move before they can known that the character "1" means "1 thing."
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Apr 15, 2023 22:06
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Elendil004 posted:This came up in another thread and I'm curious if anyone has seen any or knows of any studies or research on brain injuries/concussions/tbi/etc. I recall hearing that the Texas clocktower guy had a tumor or something and I've seen news about the latest shooter having youth sports injuries. Something we've asked in this very thread is what tips someone over the edge and maybe having a hosed up brain from sports or anything else might be one of the things. If they have a tbi or medical issue that affects their behavior enough that it's a clear issue, I think the goal is that it's quickly recognized by school staff so that they can be screened for special ed funding and eligibility. Special education is sometimes a self-contained classroom for kids with severe or multiple disabilities, but it's more frequently access to services like behavior intervention, counseling, specially designed instruction, etc., that kids go to at specific times throughout the week and after return to their "homeroom" space. Like most students are not being taught in one room full of other kids with disabilities for 7 hours each day at school unless they have such high support needs that this place would be the best environment for them to work toward their functional and academic skill goals. Generally, they might just get some support in difficult classes like math or literacy in their homeroom. They could also spend their math time in a different setting (a small group instruction room or something) working with kids at a similar ability level with more attention from teachers trained to teach kids in that population. The concept in special education is called "least restrictive environment," which basically means students must always be "placed" as much as possible in their normal classroom. We start there and only adjust placement if the kid is totally unable to access services in that environment, in which case we figure out which specific instruction they can't access there and move them somewhere for as little time as possible during the week and ONLY for those specific services
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Apr 16, 2023 12:47
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Threat assessment programs need to be paired with high quality, data driven tiered support for students with behavior struggles or for whom school is so aversive that planned aggression on that scale becomes one of many options they can use to escape it. Threat assessments are typically performed with alongside counseling and tiered support, but they often reveal "no, the student is not currently a threat but more observation required." A competent counselor or school psychologist who administers one will also be communicating with their classroom teachers, special education staff, BI professionals, etc., to determine whether the child's support needs are not being met. However, positive behavior supports, mental health services, special education services, etc., are a collaborative effort that also involves data that are relevant to school wide efforts for tiered support, anti bullying programs, behavior interventions, etc. A threat assessment in and of itself is useful or not depending on whether it initiates the involvement of other specialists in support the child. Also, many schools don't have competent staff in even half of these positions, don't utilize effective data based decision making, don't have the resources for non special ed supports to be freely accessible, and have existing staff who are resistant to implementing evidence based practices. Edit: I'm only talking about issues within the existing infrastructure that are unrelated to large scale problems in the funding, development, and legislation surrounding k12 education. Those are also important. NeatHeteroDude fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 05:54
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These ARE children we're talking about. It is the responsibility of educators to create an environment where no child's behavior escalates to this level of planned aggression. Sometimes, students have no received those supports and have been "kicked down the road" to other schools that don't have adequate time or data to determine the most effective intervention and supports.
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Apr 19, 2023 05:56
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PT6A posted:What if you don't need a psychiatrist to determine if the "child's support needs are being met?" Do they really need "positive behavioural supports" and "mental health intervention?" This is some euphemistic bullshit out of a Carlin routine. What if you just treat the children like normal rear end human beings, who deserve kindness? Maybe if we stopped pathologizing the fact that school loving sucks for a lot of kids, and just dealt with the situation at hand, we'd be a gently caress sight safer than we are now. A psychiatrist isn't involved in any of these evaluations unless the parents somehow get some kind of assessment performed with one (which I've never seen happen for these things). All the terms you're describing are super-specific and mean more than your gut is telling you. Here are some more, uh, more layment phrases that, while not exactly the same thing, give you a really general idea of what they might mean conversationally. "Support needs being met." -- What's going on for the kid, and how do we help? Are they unhoused? Do they have a disability? What problem behavior are they using to communicate their needs, and how do we intervene to give them better communicative tools? "Positive behavioral supports." - A very specific term related to very specific evidence-based programs that maximize the student's ability to be rewarded for doing good things instead of just being punished for doing bad things. It involves assessment, taking data, analyzing data, finding ways to make the kid's experience at school better, etc. "Mental health intervention." - An "intervention" means that the student is receiving something different from their peers in response to a support need that's not being met. A mental health intervention is us literally saying "have them receive mental health services (counseling etc.) in response to some existing struggle they have to improve their academic and behavior skills. So all these things are things that make a kid's experience at school better. "Kindness," for you looks different than "kindness" for me because I have a more developed set of skills via education and experience working with kids. I would say there are probably things that you think would help kids be happier that I would never implement because they might only result in short-term benefits while making things much worse in the future. For example: an 8th grader struggling with verbal aggression toward adults is taking a math test. Suddenly, they start screaming and swearing at the teacher. In your opinion, what would be the "kind" response this teacher should give? I'll tell you mine once you explain yours. I also don't really appreciate the implication that I've spent the last decade of clinical and school work making kids more likely to shoot their classmates. Both Cease and I have worked incredibly long, hard hours trying to make the world a better place for kids. I leave work at school and go to a clinic where I spend time supporting high school students with disabilities and physical aggression so severe that no school could safely accommodate them. Another example: A 6'2", 190lb 16-year-old with a documented disability and PTSD walks into the classroom and sits at his desk. You turn away to write something on the board, and when you look again, they're out of their seat and about to strike a much smaller student with their 5lb textbook. You don't know if they will for sure, but you have to make a split-second decision based on the student's documented history of physical aggression. What is the "kind" response to this circumstance? In the clinic, I see events like this often enough that I basically know (within limits because clients are different) what I would do even if I wasn't sure whether they'd hurt the other kid.
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Apr 19, 2023 07:08
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Cease to Hope posted:i'm not a teacher or in education at all fwiw Oh dang, thank you for not Stealing Educator Valor. To keep it vague, I'm certified to instruct in general and special education settings and have the most experience and education in providing ABA services to students with severe problem behavior. i've done work as a special education teacher for behavior intervention, resource, and severe/multiple disability settings. i'm also working through the remaining part of my education/supervision toward becoming a board-certified behavior analyst.
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Apr 19, 2023 07:40
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Liquid Communism posted:Many schools, by design, barely have enough staff to fill the schedule. Much less hit reasonable class sizes, or provide other necessary services to do the job well. Austerity politics and privatization solve all problems, right? Oh yeah, my use of the word competent is way too "its the staffs fault for being BAD" and not enough "these programs are training intensive and many schools don't have enough money or sense to provide enough of an incentive for staff to waste their few spare hours learning about multi tiered systems of support and data based decision making." I'm a little biased from some unhappy experiences trying to collaborate with other staff to help kids instead of make poo poo worse, and some people just loving refuse to ever learn anything new or modify their instruction to include things that actually work in practice. However, the incentives for stuff like professional development are half "you're at school before 630 and leave after 530 and then you have prep" and half "well don't you want go learn about Lexia Learning and Dreambox?" Lexia and dreambox are my two least favorite new things in education because both programs have been conclusively shown to do jack poo poo, even in studies those companies pay for that clearly aren't valid or indicative of increased positive outcomes in reading and math. NeatHeteroDude fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 15:09
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Hello! If you want to check out a thread that focuses on general and special education discussions, with lots of teachers and professionals contributing, please come over to our k12 Education Thread!!! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4029992&pagenumber=1&perpage=40 Now it IS in cspam, but I'm personally moderating it to be a safe space for other teachers and people to talk about stuff without being trolled or insulted or thrown to the wolves. The goal is to have a thread for educating people about education, competing instructional programs, and (most recently) how we define equity in education! If someone's moved past pushing back and is just being a dick to you, please report or send me a pm, and I'll make sure the space stays calm. People can disagree, but this is not a place to argue about politics. Please come down and hang out! If I probe anyone from dnd incorrectly let GJB or someone, and they can probe me equitably. Thanks!
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Apr 23, 2023 04:01
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