Mini Video Training Series Ep 8: Tips for Staff Training

Hi, I'm Sasha from The Autism Helper, and in this episode of the mini video training series, I'm going to talk about some tips for training your staff. So there's a lot involved in being an effective manager and training your staff well, and I could easily make this a non-mini video training series and talk for many hours about this, but I'm going to kind of go over the basics in today's episode. And I have a lot of other content that gets more detailed into a lot of the topics I'm going to cover, but I'm going to kind of go over the basic must-know do and some things that need to be on your radar when it comes to staff training. This is something that doesn't come naturally to a lot of teachers. It definitely did not come naturally to me. As a first-year teacher and as a 10th-year teacher, this is something that I struggled with. None of us went into teaching likely to be a manager, but all of a sudden in your special ed classroom you will have two roles. You are a teacher and you are a manager of your staff, and I think sometimes we choose to forget that second role and it does such a disservice to our students because we can't be an effective teacher and as great of a teacher as we want to be without a strong staff behind us. So we need to take that role, that role of being a manager, being a leader, as seriously and spending as much time on that role as we do of our job as being a teacher. So whenever I bring up staff training, the question and the comment that I get nonstop is, "I don't have the time. I can't find the time to train my staff. We don't have common planning time. My paraprofessionals or teaching assistants are paid only for the hours the students are being there." I totally get it. It is frustrating. It is hard not having the time, but it's not an excuse. And I'm kind of pulling tough love card here because I hear this so much, and I think that sometimes we feel like it's a get out of jail free card. "Oh, I don't have common planning time. I can't train my staff. Whoops, it's not my fault, not my problem." But guess what? Most teachers don't have common planning time. Very few school districts that I've worked in have, have it set up where teachers and staff have common planning time on a regular basis. And those teachers stay in their positions a long time because it is so valuable to have that. So if you're in those schools where you don't have common planning time or it's hard to find time with your staff, you have to make the time. It's not an excuse of not having the time together. To not train your staff. So just like none of us would walk into our principal's office and be like, "Hey, guess what? Johnny's a 3rd grader and he's not reading at the 3rd grade level, so I guess I'm not teaching him reading today." No, our job is to differentiate. Our job is to individualize. Our job is to meet the students where they are. So you have to meet your situation, your schedule with where it is, and you just have to find the time. Not having the time there is just not an excuse. So some options: one is talk to your administrators. Sometimes there are some creative ways to pull an extra paraprofessional to take some of your kids to gym or a lunch break or something like that so you could have some time during the day. Or maybe there is extra money in the budget to have staff stay after for half an hour once a month, once a quarter. It doesn't hurt to ask. Yes, you might be told no. A lot of you might be told no. That's okay. But it's worth it to put it on your principal's radar that, hey, staff training is important to me and I'm making sure that we have time to do that. So definitely reach out to your administrators, your case managers, see how they can help you problem solve. If you're told no, don't be discouraged. You can still find common time. So within the school day when the kids are with you, you can find time eat all together or with individual small groups of your staff. It's ideal to have all staff together if you have 2 or 3 paraprofessionals to sit down all together, but obviously that doesn't always work. So depending on the needs of your students, some options here would be having a specific afternoon, maybe once a month, maybe the last Thursday of the month, the first Thursday of the month, the last half an hour of the day. Students get tech time, free choice time, they get some kind of preferred activity where they're likely going to be entertained, engaged, and safe. Obviously for all classrooms that's not going to work. There's some kids where giving free choice time, you need a lot of supervision. But in some classrooms, or if you have a set of iPads or a few computers, you can give kids iPad time, computer time, break time, puzzle time, whatever, and have kids play. And you sit down with your staff members on the other side of the room and have your meeting while the kids are in your room. I think a lot of teachers are hesitant to do this because it feels wrong. It feels weird. You're like, "But the kids are here. We should be teaching them." But guess what? By you sitting with your staff and just taking those 20 or 30 minutes and talking about behavior programs, talking about academic data, inclusion, prompting, you are teaching your kids. And you're actually teaching in such an efficient way because you're teaching 3 adults how to do something the same way you would. So the rest of the month, the rest of that quarter, the instruction that your kids are going to be getting is going to be so much more high quality. So you feel like you're taking away time from your students by giving them the iPad for half an hour, but you're actually giving them weeks worth of better instruction by your staff. So don't feel weird about this. Your job is to be a teacher, but to also be the manager and the leader of your team. You have to find that time. Get creative. It's not an excuse that I don't have common planning time. No one else does. Find the time during the school day, outside of the school day, whatever you have to do. If it's not a safe situation for your kids to all be in choice time, like I said, put one paraprofessional to monitor a few kids and have them bounce in and out of the meetings, or have some type of rotating schedule where I'm going to spend 15 minutes talking to these two staff members and then 15 minutes talking to you and re— you know, reviewing everything we talked about with this other staff member who's watching the kids. First up is making sure to find that time. I've been kind of giving examples of once a month, once a quarter, because the time needs to be consistent. Meaning it needs to be happening throughout the school year. You can't have one staff meeting in September or August and be like, "Sweet! I'm done. I trained my staff." It's going to be ongoing. To be effective and to be efficient at doing this, it has to happen on a regular basis. You'll be able to catch problems before they arise. You'll be able to all be on the same page. You'll be a stronger team when it comes to dealing with crisis situations and extreme behaviors, and your staff will actually take academic data if you're meeting on a regular basis. So now that you've been creative and you've figured out some time to meet with your staff, whether it's after the school day or during the school day, what do you do at these meetings? So what I recommend at the start of the year, and if you're catching this in the middle of the year, it's not too late to still do it, but one of my favorite things to do with your staff is to make a team mission statement. I did a Facebook Live all about this and got really into detail about why this is so important and what are some simple ways to set this up. But basically you want to sit with your staff and come together and be like, hey, what are we as a group? Want for our students, want for our work environment, and want for our school. Write that down together. This process is really key in avoiding confrontations later, making sure everyone's on the same page, and getting staff buy-in. When you run into a problem later, you can refer back to that team mission statement that they helped you write and be like, "Hey, it was important to all of us that kids are independent, and some of the things you've been doing aren't in line with this." So that first of all is going to be key. I also think it really starts the year on a tone of togetherness and team, teamwork, that we're all in this together and all of our opinions matter. So that's going to be one of the first things that you do is create that team mission statement. And then throughout the year, review that. Don't just talk about it once, post it in your room, continue to review it, maybe revise it throughout the year and add things or take things off as that comes up. But you want to be in these meetings constantly clarifying and explaining your expectations. I'm really not a confrontational person and I hate having to directly talk to someone about something that's bothering me. So for me, the most effective staff management technique was always clearing my expectations right from the start because it's just going to help prevent problems. Problems typically stem from miscommunication when you haven't explained yourself. Take those time during these meetings to explain what your expectations are and the why. Sometimes our behavior plans really don't make sense. Ignoring a tantruming child might seem weird to some people, but if you go through the process of explaining that, hey, this is an attention-seeking behavior and ignoring the behavior is really removing that attention and we're not ignoring the child, we're ignoring the response, that helps get people to have buy-in and want to follow kind of your expectations and your rules there. So spend a lot of time clarifying expectations. Other things you can talk about in your meetings, like I said, behavior plans, changes to behavior plans, sharing your data and your progress related to a behavior plan as well. A lot of behavior plans can be tricky and time-consuming and effortful to follow, so you want to show your staff that like, hey, don't worry, I know this is really, really hard and this is seems like it's not working, but it is. And look at these, you know, these gains that we're making. Sometimes they're small gains, they're baby steps, but that's okay. So you want to show that to your staff as well. Then you want to be talking about data. You want to be talking about taking academic data, ways to do things differently. You want to be sharing data you're taking, reviewing the data that they've been taking together, and getting all on the same page related to that. Then any other just basic logistics. Changes to the schedule, field trips, special parties. Make sure to note all of those things as well. That was something I actually always forgot to do, was to mention changes to my schedule to my staff. I would spend a lot of time clarifying it with students and having social stories and on their calendar, and that's kind of how my staff figured out. They're like, "Oh, we're going on a field trip because I see it on the October calendar," which was really rude on my end because I didn't specifically tell them. So make sure you're kind of getting all those nitty things. If you're going to be out, if they're planning on being out, getting all of those things out of the way as well. So I've mentioned taking academic data. Your staff definitely needs to be running IEP programs, working on academics and functional skills and communicative skills along with you. You can't do it alone. There's too many things to work on. Your staff needs to be a part of that. So your staff training isn't only going on in these meetings that you're doing. You're also going to be scheduling regular time to observe and sit with and work with your staff members as they work on programs, teach children, and take data on that instruction. I know what you're thinking, I don't have the time. So in a center-based classroom, there'll likely be some type of independent center, maybe some paraprofessional-run centers, and then your teacher-run center. So schedule time or have a specific day of the month Again, I like things that are like regularly scheduled, like the first Monday of the month. We need prompts too, and a lot of us go into the school year with the best intentions, and then life gets the best of us and we just get too busy. So schedule it out that, you know, the first Monday of every month I'm going to observe staff taking data, sit with them, review programs. Yes, that means that the group that is scheduled to be with you will not have you that day. Life will go on, I promise. So if you are scheduled to work with Johnny and Allison at reading at 10:15, give them iPads, give them puzzles, give them file folders, and at 10:15 go sit with Miss Thomas, observe her taking data, check in on her data, talk to her about the programs or how the things she's doing are going, and make sure you're on the same page there. Again, those 15 minutes that you're spending with her are more valuable because it's providing better instruction for many weeks to come. You're not taking away instruction from someone, you're giving more instruction to the rest of the class. So spend regular time observing staff, taking data, providing feedback, both positive and negative. And by negative, I don't even mean bad, just things that you guys both want to tweak. Maybe they'll come to you and be like, "Hey, this is really unreasonable to try to get through all of this work in 20 minutes, you know, how can we cut it back or rotate?" And you wouldn't have known that if you hadn't spent that time observing. So schedule into your teacher planner, into your phone, into your calendar, regular times that you'll be sitting with each staff member for all of their groups that they see and talking through and observing them taking data. This will really, again, help prevent those problems and also make sure that instruction is really high quality. Within everything I've talked about, one of the overarching and kind of all-inclusive themes with everything you need to do with your staff needs to be find the good. Find the good and praise that good. Provide tons and tons and tons of positive feedback for your staff. Thank them. Tell them that they are awesome. Tell them specifically what great things that they did that are helpful to you. Teaching can be a really thankless job. I'm sure us as teachers can remember the last time that we received a really genuine, great piece of positive feedback. It doesn't always happen that often, and that's hard. It's hard to work somewhere where you don't feel always like you're appreciated or like your hard work is noticed. And in your classroom, in those four walls, you are in control of how praised and how valuable and how worthy your staff feels. So make them feel valuable. Tell them all the time. If it feels like you're telling them too much, you're still not telling them enough. Because you know what? It feels good to be told great job and thank you and you're helpful and you did this right. It feels really, really good to be told that. And so make sure that you are giving a really generous dose of that. And it's not fake. I'm not saying be fake about this. Find real things. When your staff laminates file folders, tell them repeatedly, how helpful that was and how excited you are to use these new file folders with your class. When you have a really hard day and there's a really extreme problem behavior on that hard day when everyone feels crappy and like they did something wrong, especially on that day, find those specific things that staff members did. Like, hey Tom, you know what, when you evacuated the rest of the class without me asking you, that was so helpful and took such a weight off my chest. And thank you so much for being there in that moment and keeping our kids safe. "Sherry, you were right there with me and you followed my lead and I appreciated your help so much and you helped me get through this." Say that every day, all the time. And if you forget about it, or if you're someone that— I would sometimes forget. If you're someone that it doesn't always come naturally to you, schedule it out. Again, we need prompts for ourselves. So put it in your phone, put an alert, put a reminder every lunchtime, tell your staff how awesome they are. And tell them all the time. People want to work in environments where they feel valuable, so make sure your staff knows how valuable they are. And just— that's the way positive reinforcement works. The more that you do that, likely the more that you will see those amazing things happening more often. So make sure you really make that part of your staff management perspective. So this was a roundup of some of my overall staff training tips. Obviously, we can get really detailed into what a lot of these things look like, but I hope that these overarching tips will help guide how you look at training your staff, being a team leader, and getting that teamwork approach amongst you and your assistants. It's so critical to have this because our jobs are hard and our kids need a lot, and we want to make sure that we can give them as many opportunities for independence and learning academics and communication as we can. And we can only do that with a strong team. So make sure to incorporate these strategies into your whole year. Staff training is a year-long endeavor. It's not one and done. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of our mini video training series. Please check out the other videos on YouTube, and please feel free to suggest any future topics for the upcoming episodes.