WCSD PBIS: Community is Strength
Volume Seven: Fall 2019 - (for all Whittier City SD staff)
California PBIS Coalition Again Showers Whittier City Schools With Gold & Silver!!!
For the fourth year in a row, Whittier City Schools have been recognized by the California PBIS Coalition for excellence in implementing core PBIS features at both the Tier 1 and Tier 2 levels. SIX of our schools achieved GOLD level status for their Tier 2 program, twice as many as last year!
- Gold Award Winners: Andrews, Edwards, Longfellow, Mill, Phelan, & West Whittier
- Silver Award Winners: Dexter, Hoover, Jackson, Orange Grove, Sorensen
The awards reflect 70-100% fidelity of national implementation standards, and proof of impact as evidenced by at least 80% of students following matrix expectations. At the Gold level, schools must also provide evidence of 1) upward trends in academic data over the previous three years, 2) evidence of low suspension rates, and 3) evidence of targeted social-emotional interventions with progress monitoring.
Schools must reapply each year, reflecting the PBIS core practice of teaching behavior as relentlessly as we teach academics, and with frequent checks on fidelity. Schools will be acknowledged at the annual CPC Conference in Sacramento in October, and listed on the coalition's website.
CONGRATULATIONS to all of our schools for their enduring commitment to schools that are welcoming, safe, positive, and focused on the whole child!
Also in this edition of the newsletter...
- There is Hope - Doing what is within our power to prevent tragedy
- Community building ideas
- 12 ways teachers can build resilience in themselves
- Thinking differently about children's' challenging behavior
- The Student Wellness Program Timeline
- Resources for teaching Second Step social emotional learning curriculum
There is hope - Doing what is within our power to prevent tragedy
There is no "getting used to" mass shootings in our communities. Each one wounds our sense of safety and feeds the kernels of helplessness within our hearts.
And yet, we might not be so helpless after all. An in-depth two-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice found four commonalities among the perpetrators of nearly all the mass shootings studied, and there is good news about the ability of schools to impact some of them:
1. The vast majority of mass shooters experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The trauma was often a precursor to mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety, thought disorders or suicidality.
2. Practically every mass shooter had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. Changes in job status, relationship rejection or loss often played a role. Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence. The vast majority of mass shooters leak their plans ahead of time.
3. Societal fear and fascination with mass shootings partly drives the motivation to commit them. Hence, mass shootings tend to come in clusters. They are socially contagious.
4. The shooters all had the means to carry out their plans.
PROACTIVE PREVENTION STRATEGIES
The authors of the study suggest that instead of simply rehearsing for the inevitable, we need to use that data to drive effective prevention strategies. While some strategies are beyond the control of schools, we already know how to do some of them. In fact, we already are.
Proactive violence prevention starts with conversations about mental health and establishing systems for identifying individuals in crisis, reporting concerns and reaching out — not with punitive measures but with resources and long-term intervention. Everyone should be trained to recognize the signs of a crisis.
Responding to the traumas in early life by providing access to social services and high-quality, affordable mental health treatment in the community. School counselors and social workers, employee wellness programs, projects that teach resilience and social emotional learning help promote the social and emotional success of all Americans.
Promoting and supporting healthy relationships between and among students and staff nurtures a culture of taking care of each other and trusting each other enough to ask for help - and offer it - when needed.
WE KNOW HOW TO DO THIS - LET'S KEEP GETTING BETTER AT IT
We can do our part by leaning into our systems to provide safe, caring, and predictable schools, integrating social emotional learning into all that we teach and do in schools, and continuing to build our targeted intervention programs. Students learn most deeply when the important adults around them model appropriate behavior.
Look for resources below, in previous and future newsletters, and tour our Whittier City PBIS & MTSS Google Site.
Use the link below to read the item in the Los Angeles Times
"Op-Ed: We have studied every mass shooting since 1966. Here’s what we’ve learned about the shooters," By Jillian Peterson and James Densley; Los Angeles Times, Aug. 4, 2019
10 Powerful Community Building Ideas: For Students & Staff
By Emelina Minero for Edutopia, February 5, 2019 (Abridged)
....Some of the activities below take less than 5 minutes. They’re divided up among the grades, but many can apply across all of the years from kindergarten to 12th grade.
Elementary School
Shout-Outs: First-grade teacher Valerie Gallagher of Rhode Island rings a chime when she wants to get the class’s attention to ask who has a shout-out. “It’s not just me as the teacher saying, ‘You’re doing well’—it’s a way for them to interact with each other and celebrate positivity.”
Friendly Fridays: Elizabeth Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher in Massachusetts, ... has her students write a friendly, anonymous note to a classmate, practice using positive self-talk, or use storytelling to give a peer a pep talk.
Sharing Acts of Kindness: Fifth-grade teacher Marissa King, of Oklahoma, shares 2 activities .... In the first, the teacher gives students secret kindness instructions, such as writing an anonymous note to a peer who is struggling in one of their classes. The second activity revolves around noticing others’ acts of kindness and posting it on a “kindness wall.”
Middle School
Paper Tweets: To build community in her seventh-grade classroom, Jill Fletcher of Kapolei Middle School in Hawaii created a bulletin board modeled on Twitter. Students use a template to create a profile, and they enlist at least three followers—a friend, an acquaintance, and someone they don’t interact with much.
When the class does this activity—which takes about 45 minutes to set up the first time—Fletcher has them respond to prompts about their current mood or new things happening in their lives, and then their followers respond.
Class Norms: Have students develop a set of norms for themselves—adjectives that describe them as a community of learners. Having students come up with their own norms creates “a pathway toward belonging for every single student in that class.”
Group Salutes: A quick, low-prep way to cultivate community, a Group Salute is a teacher-prompted interaction at the beginning or end of an activity. The shared gesture can be physical—like a high five—or social—a teacher could ask students to express gratitude to their group members.
There’s some interesting data supporting this idea: Researchers found that NBA teams whose players touch the most early in the season—high fives, fist bumps, etc.—had the best records later for the season.
High School
Morning Meetings: Bonding exercises led by teachers or students include physical or social and emotional activities, or discussions of sensitive topics like bullying.
Appreciation, Apology, Aha: As a quick, daily closing activity, students gather in a circle and share an appreciation of one of their peers, an apology, or a light bulb moment. The teacher models the activity by sharing and then asks for volunteers to speak....
Rose and Thorn: At the start of class, the teacher and students take turns sharing one rose (something positive) and one thorn (something negative) each.
Snowball Toss: Build empathy and community with a fun kinesthetic activity! Students anonymously write down ideas about what they have learned on a piece of paper, crumple it up, gather in a circle, and throw their paper balls in a mock snowball fight. When that’s done, they pick up a snowball and read it aloud.
“The idea is that we’re moving around. We’re able to have fun, laugh, scream, be loud, and then have that discussion about stress,” says Marcus Moore at Urban Prep School in Chicago. Watch the video demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuu8_Ga63J8&feature=youtu.be
Read the full article, complete with video examples, here: https://www.edutopia.org/article/10-powerful-community-building-ideas
Boys Town has lots of free resources to build social emotional learning skills, relationships, and trauma-informed alternatives to suspension:
Cult of Pedagogy shares a 4-part system for getting to know your students.
Here are the highlights, but click on the link above for access to downloadable tools:
1. Ice Breakers - she shares 3 favorites
2. Take an inventory of student interests
3. Store your data - a system for organizing the information for future reference.
4. Do regular check ups - throughout the year, ask students how things are going for them. Don't wait for the end of the year when it's too late to change anything.
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/relationship-building/
"Teacher’s Powerful Exercise of ‘Leaving Emotional Baggage at the Door’ Has Totally Changed Her Classroom," by McKinley Corbley for The Good News Network, August 29, 2019.
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/teachers-exercise-in-baggage-has-changed-her-classroom/
12 Monthly Themes to Build Teacher Resilience
An Interview With Elaina Aguilar, author of The Art of Coaching and Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators
by Jennifer Gonzalez for her blog "Cult of Pedagogy," May 6, 2018 (Abridged)
It would be an understatement to say teaching is challenging. You can learn all the techniques, plan outstanding lessons, and set up a water-tight classroom management system, but to do this work and stick with it long enough to get good at it, you need a level of emotional resilience most other jobs will never require.
In her book, Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Teachers, instructional coach Elena Aguilar walks us through 12 habits that teachers can develop to strengthen their emotional resilience, organized around a year-long calendar.
1. Know Yourself - Suggested month: June
Taking the time to reflect on and get clear about your values, your preferences, your skills and aptitudes can help you develop a strong sense of purpose. This makes you more likely to respond to difficult situations in ways that are consistent with that purpose.
2. Understand Emotions- Suggested month: July
Emotions “can be tremendous resources and sources of energy,” Aguilar says. They key is figuring out “how to have healthier relationships with them, how to understand them, name them, accept them, and then work with them.”
3. Tell Empowering Stories - Suggested month: August
The interpretation of any incident takes the form of a story we tell ourselves. “So for example, a student rolls her eyes at you. That’s the [event].... “How you make sense of and interpret that event is precisely the point where either your resilience can be drained or filled, because you could interpret her eye rolling as This student doesn’t respect me, or you can interpret that event as, This is very typical behavior from 12-year-olds, and I’m going to move on to the next part of the lesson....”
4. Build Community - Suggested month: September
If we develop habits that nurture relationships with our colleagues, students, parents, and administrators, we strengthen our resilience. By putting relationship-building habits in place early, that community can be a source of strength all year long.
5. Be Here Now - Suggested month: October
Developing habits of mindfulness, where we focus on what is happening right now without judgment, can help us to circumvent a “triggered” reaction to daily challenges and instead respond calmly and thoughtfully. Daily meditation or even brief moments of focusing on our breath can help us hit that “pause button” and bring ourselves to that place of calm.
6. Take Care of Yourself - Suggested month: November
“It’s really hard to build community or to cultivate compassion or be a learner—some of the other habits—when you’re just sick, when you’re worn out.” So this month, Aguilar recommends focusing on the habits of physical self-care.
7. Focus on the Bright Spots - Suggested month: December
Practice giving more attention to what is working, rather than what’s not. “Our brains have a negativity bias,” she explains, “so everything that is challenging, that is potentially a threat, appears really vividly and clearly to us, because of the way our brains are wired....”
In the classroom, for example, we can prompt ourselves to regularly notice students who are paying attention and on-task, rather than giving all our attention to the few students who aren’t.
8. Cultivate Compassion - Suggested month: January
“Cultivating compassion, broadening our perspective on how we see a situation, helps us to ... take ourselves out of the drama of the moment,” Aguilar says. It can help you not take that behavior personally, which leads to smarter, less reactive decision-making.
9. Be a Learner - Suggested month: February
“Resilient people experience a challenge and turn around and say, Wow. That was really hard. That pushed me to my limits. What can I learn from that? Just that question alone immediately propels you into a place of being able to build your resilience.”
10. Play and Create - Suggested month: March
“Playing and creating can unlock inner resources for dealing with stress, for solving problems…” This month, teachers are encouraged to build regular periods of play and creation into their daily lives.
11. Ride the Waves of Change - Suggested month: April
The end of the school year inevitably brings all kinds of changes. Aguilar recommends teachers spend this month looking at “how we can harness our energies to manage those changes...." This practice includes slowing down, facing and dealing with fear, and mindfully evaluating situations to determine which responses will have the most impact.
12. Celebrate and Appreciate - Suggested month: May
This month, teachers are encouraged to develop daily habits of gratitude and celebration and to carry those habits throughout the year. “Even in the hardest moments,” Aguilar says, “if we can shift into a stance of appreciation, we can build our resilience.”
Resources:
- The Onward website at onwardthebook.com offers downloadable meditations, printables, a self-assessment and related blog posts and videos.
"Our very lives are fashioned by choice. First we make choices. Then our choices make us."
- Anne Frank
"How I Came to Rethink Children’s Challenging Behaviors"
Doing Away with the Blame Game
Mona Delahooke for Psychotherapy Networker, August 24, 2019 (abridged)
A nine-year-old boy with severe behavioral challenges suddenly throws a full plate of food onto the school cafeteria floor. The consequence? His special-education teacher puts him in a “quiet room,” instructing an aide not to reward the child’s “bad behavior” with attention.
A first-grader gets repeated reprimands for misbehavior and praise for sitting quietly. Still, he continues to bite and kick peers in his after-school program. Perplexed about what to do, his teachers discuss whether they need to expel him.
In my first decade as a child psychologist dealing with challenging school behaviors, I returned to my studies, hoping to find answers to a central question: What’s at the root of children’s aggressive, defiant, and oppositional acts? And how can we better help the children who exhibit these behaviors? What I learned transformed how I understood and approached behavior.
Previously, I’d been taught that children and teens primarily “use” behavior either to get something or to get out of something. In other words, children’s behaviors are always driven by incentives. But after several years of studying neurodevelopment, I came to realize that this notion was wrong. Studying the work of neuroscientist Stephen Porges, I learned about the brain-body highway known as the autonomic nervous system (ANS). When we understand the ANS, we understand that the behaviors we observe are only the tip of the iceberg; their myriad causes are hidden from view.
Porges’s Polyvagal Theory shows that the drive to avoid threat and secure safety is what guides human behavior. As such, what we often label as “bad” behaviors are actually fight-or-flight behaviors, adaptations of the ANS, developed to protect human beings from perceived harm.
When I integrated this concept into my understanding of children’s behavioral challenges, everything about the way I worked changed. Instead of focusing on contingency charts and talk therapy, I made compassion and relational safety my guiding principles. I shifted from viewing behaviors as incentivized or motivated to understanding that they’re driven by the adaptive ANS and the drive for self-protection.
Instead of seeing pathology or a DSM label, I observed human adaptation and a phylogenetic drive to feel safe. And I changed my advice to parents and educators. Instead of encouraging them to use rewards and consequences, I urged them to employ techniques designed and personalized for each child’s neurological perception ("neuroception") of safety.
The result? The children’s behavioral challenges declined significantly. And parents and teachers felt less stressed, burdened, and blamed. And I told parents that rather than trying to simply eliminate behaviors, they should reflect on what the behaviors might tell us about a child’s need for safety and security.
I moved from labeling, cajoling, or reinforcing behaviors to studying children’s individual differences, their perception of the world, and their relationships. I encouraged using relational joy and cues of safety with trusted adults who no longer labeled or blamed the children for their behaviors, but engaged with them as the first step in helping them.
This approach worked because human beings don’t need to fight, flee, or disconnect when they feel safe, valued, and loved.
As for the nine-year-old who threw his plate in the cafeteria? When I applied the lens of Polyvagal theory, I learned that he experienced severe over-reactivity to the sounds of the cafeteria. Those noises triggered his neuroception of threat, causing stress behaviors outside the control of his thinking brain. Recognizing that, we devised a new plan. Instead of ignoring him, his aide increased relational warmth and the school gave him noise-cancelling headphones to help cope with the cafeteria. In turn, the boy’s challenging behaviors decreased dramatically.
And the first-grader who had such difficulty controlling his emotions and behaviors? It turned out his mother had recently given birth prematurely to a sister, and the boy was reacting to being away from his mother for such a length of time. He couldn’t yet control his emotions and behaviors, and the stress of having a new sister only made things more challenging. Fortunately, his parents arranged to pick him up earlier in the day to give him more time at home adjusting to the changes within the family.
And what have I learned? Being neurobiologically informed gives us the chance to rethink how we view, understand, and manage behavioral challenges in children and devise solutions that are grounded in brain science and that lead to compassion.
***
More:
Watch Dr. Daniel Siegal's video demonstrating the "Hand Model of the Brain" (2:37 minutes).
"The greatest remedy for anger is delay."
- Seneca
Sampler of Trauma-Informed Practices
2 x 10 strategy to build relationships with students
Greetings at the door
20% increase in student engagement
9% decrease in disruptive behavior
Sensory strategies
Movement breaks & break cards (Go Noodle, anyone?)
Fidgets, Flexible seating & calm down corners
Square breathing, Think Time
WCSD Student Wellness Program: Year Two
With a solid Tier 1 foundation based on PBIS core practices of explicit teaching and reinforcement of expected student behaviors, positive relationships, and trauma-sensitive logical consequences, Whittier City is building Tier 2 supports for those students who need more.
The positive impact of the initial launch last school year was reflected in a significant decrease in suicide-threat assessments last year when compared to prior years (view the graph in the "Wellness Matters!" edition of this newsletter). Prevention and early intervention works.
Wellness Program Key Components:
Fall trimester
- Early identification of needs by conducting walk-throughs of Kinder & 1st grade classrooms
- Universal screen for social-behavior-attendance-academic risk
- Second Step social emotional learning curriculum in every TK-2nd grade classroom and at least one classroom per grade level for all other grades. School social workers and interns provide co-teaching and consultant support.
- Tier 2 teams review referrals and universal screening information to match students to interventions and monitor progress throughout the year
- Check-In-Check-Out as the main Tier 2 intervention and vehicle for data collection
- Targeted Small group counseling to teach social skills and coping strategies
- RTI reading intervention programs across the grades; Information letters and progress monitoring reports keep parents informed.
The graphic below illustrates the timeline:
Second Step® Curriculum For Social Emotional Learning
Second Step Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) gives students the tools to excel in and out of the classroom. Even the most challenging students make progress in emotion management, situational awareness, and academic achievement (11% increase in test scores, on average). Second Step’s age-appropriate games, activities, and media engage students and set children on a path to lifelong success.
Teacher-led lessons are the MOST effective!
A 2011 study found that students learn social emotional skills more deeply and apply the skills in more settings when lessons are led by the classroom teacher instead of an outside trainer (Durlak, et.al. 2011).
Once you activate your kit and create a user account, even more resources are available for your specific grade level including video previews of lessons and supplemental teaching video vignettes and activities. Activation codes are located in the first pages of each kit.
- Ready-to-go scripted lessons on the five core SEL competencies of self awareness (identifying emotions), self-management (focus, impulse control, how to calm down), social awareness (empathy), relationship skills, and conflict resolution and decision making.
- Home links so parents can support the skills at home and in the community. The homelinks can be shared with parents via Sangha so no photocopying is required. Materials are available in English and Spanish.
- Lessons are designed to be used "out of the box" with minimal, if any, prep. Once a classroom kit is activated on the Second Step website, video content can be streamed.
District Support:
- Our elementary School Social Workers and counselors are available to get classrooms started with Second Step lessons
- For ease of access, we have created a single user account with a compilation of most grade level documents and video content. Email pbis@whittiercity.net for the login credentials.
- Kits were purchased for every TK through 2nd grade classroom last fall (2018), and one kit per grade level through 8th grade was purchased the year before.
WCSD PBIS Newsletter Archive
Each newsletter has
- videos
- summaries of relevant articles and blog posts
- links to resources for further reading
- classroom activities
- self-care tips for educators
- updates on district PBIS and Wellness initiatives
Fall 2018: Trauma Informed Schools
Launch of Wellness Program
Second Step Resources
Trauma Informed Practices resourcesSpring 2019: Wellness Matters!
Data reflecting the impact of the Wellness Program
Summer 2019: Resilience!
Fall 2016: Relationships!
Collective teacher efficacy
Strategies for building relationships with and among students
Winter 2017: Positive School Climate
Spring 2017: Classrooms!
Winter 2018: Winter Boost!
Silver Awards all around!
Classroom Management resources to refresh routines
WCSD PBIS: Positive School Climate for Student Success
Email: pbis@whittiercity.net
Phone: .