Tips for training your team to follow behavior plans.

Hi guys, happy Wednesday. I am a little early. I said I was going to start at 8, but I was all ready to go at 7:45. I was just too excited. So tonight we're going to chat about one of my favorite topics and like a subtopic under one of my favorite topics. So you guys know I love talking about staff training. I have a bunch of podcast episodes on staff training. If you are in the membership, you know, we talk about staff training every month, all month. Staff training is huge because you need your team, you need your paraprofessionals, you need the clinicians you work with, you need everyone to be on the same page, and you guys need to be working collaboratively. But tonight we're going to talk about, get a little more specific, and we're going to talk about staff training when it comes to your behavior plans. And this area is, I can't, I don't want to say it's more important than academics, but really it is because our behavior plans are targeting behaviors that could be dangerous, like aggression and self-injury and things like that. And we need our behavior plans to work. Our students' safety is on the line. Our students', the rest of our class, our safety, our team safety. So we need these behavior plans followed. Of course, we want our academic instruction and our IEP goals and our data collection, all that great stuff, followed as well. But when it comes to behavior, there's a lot on the line. They're someone's safety. And I've said this a million times, you probably heard me say this before. If you've ever gone to one of my behavior workshops, you hear me say this a lot of times. The kids in your classroom are someone's baby. And even if you teach high school and your kids are 15 years old and twice the size of you, that's still someone's whole world. And they're putting— mom and dad are putting their baby on a school bus or dropping them off at the door and hoping that they're going to be safe all day. And that's, you know, a really big undertaking and a big responsibility that we have to our kids and to the parents of our kids who trust us. So when it comes to behavior plans, staff training is such an important piece because we need our staff on board for our behavior plans to run the way they are supposed to run. And we know in the world of positive behavior change little small things can mess up the whole plan. Like, the devil's in the details. If something's not a reinforcer, the plan's not gonna work. If you're giving a little bit of attention to an attention-seeking behavior, the plan's not gonna work. There's all these little nuances. And also, when it comes to behavior change, not everything seems really obvious. There are strategies that we utilize that might seem weird at first. If you're, if new to the special ed world, new to the ABA world, or even just been in the field for a long time, what worked with one child might not work with another child, especially when it comes to behavior change and our behavior plans. So we need our team on board because these things aren't intuitive. So I've kind of got 4 little areas that I want to talk about, um, when it comes to strategies for getting your teams to follow behavior plans. But I first had to get on my soapbox about why this is so important. But feel free to drop any questions, um, related to this in as I go. I think I see my questions. I'm doing this on my computer, which I don't always do. Someone say hi or drop a question so I see where the comments go, because I can't tell right now. Well, we'll find them. Maybe they'll pop up. Cool. All right, so first thing is we want to find the time, and this is the first thing whenever I talk about staff training. That I hear from teachers a lot is, I don't have the time to do staff training. Thanks, Janine. Okay, I see where the comments are now. So I, you know, I don't have the time for staff training. I don't have common planning time with my paraprofessionals. I don't know when I'm going to do this. And I feel you. I got you. I get it. A lot of people don't have common planning time. Oops. I would venture to say most people don't have common planning time with their paraprofessionals. You have to make the time. And if you want to learn more about this, I have a podcast episode on staff training. If you're in the membership, we talk about this the first 2 months a ton on how to find time. You have to find really the nooks and crannies, 10 minutes here, 5 minutes here. And when it comes to behavior plans, this isn't like, let's see if I can figure it out. Like, you have to make the time. Maybe this means that a lot of your kids are doing independent work or kind of some type of rec/leisure activity, and you and one paraprofessional step in the hallway to talk and start your training. You might have to do this one at a time. You might not be able to sit down with your whole team, and then, you know, it might have to be individual because you kind of want to be out of earshot of your students. Like, there is confidential things you're talking about. This is students' behavior. You don't want other kids listening in. So you might need to train your team one at a time. Like, hey, I've got 3 paraprofessionals, you 2 watch the kids, I'm gonna step out with one. If you only have one paraprofessional, you know, figure out a way to come in 5 minutes early, say, hey, can I call you on your way home from work and chat with you about this? Like, get creative. And the time issue can't be the stopping point because you need to sit down and explain a behavior plan and talk through it because, like we said, some of these things are counterproductive. Sarah has a good point here. I think it's hard when, when it's profanity because a lot of adults think this is something students can control and give it attention instead of working on redirection. Absolutely. So a lot of the behaviors that we might see, our staff or people we work with might have just misconceptions, and we might not— they might not understand why we're asking them to do a procedure, like why we're asking them to do planned ignoring. So that's why finding the time to train your staff is essential. So once you find the time, number 2 is behavior skills training. If you're in my membership, we talk about this a lot. This was the video last month. Behavior skills training is the holy grail on how we're teaching our team to do anything. And there's 2 super important parts when it comes to our behavior plan. So behavior skills training is 4 steps, and it's nice because this is like how you can teach anyone to do anything. So, and you go through these 4 steps until it works. Like, it's not like you do one, each step one day at a time. You do this till it works. And as I say these 4 steps, you're gonna realize, oh man, I don't do all 4 of them, because that's how I was. So first, we want to explain. So you want to explain in a way that the people that you're teaching someone, you know, teaching something, understand. You explain, then you model, you rehearse, and then give feedback. So 4 steps. You need all 4 steps. So most important pieces here for me when it comes to behavior plans are 1 and 4. Explain. Because something like Sarah said, like, okay, a student is swearing at you, and I'm an adult, and I'm not going to let a student swear at me, so I'm going to yell back at him, and I'm going to tell him that's disrespectful. And it's like the whole scene in Breakfast Club, you know what scene I'm talking about. I show that at every behavior training I do, because it's such an attention-seeking behavior, and he keeps getting detentions. You know, it's hard to bite your tongue, and to, if a student's swearing at you, and you're like, oh my god, what do I do? But if you sit down and do the first step of behavior skills training and explain, like, this is an attention-seeking behavior. By giving it attention, we're making it worse. You want to go through and take the time to give the why. Like, we can't expect people to follow us blindly if we're not explaining why we're doing something. Like, okay, the reason we're gonna ignore his, you know, I don't really care about his nose picking right now is because we've got bigger battles to deal with. Like, we want to deal with the aggression and the running. He can pick his nose all he wants. I don't care. So we want to go through and explain that. We want to allow at this time questions. Please ask me questions. Let's talk through it. I want to hear your concerns and what you don't understand right now while we're not in crisis. Because give me an amen if you've been in a crisis situation and it's potentially dangerous and then people are asking you questions about your intervention and you're like, we are trying to keep people safe right now. Like, this is not the time. And then you act like a jerk because I mean, we've been there, right? So you want to kind of go through those questions and concerns at a non-crisis time. So that is really the time to do that. I'm gonna read through these questions before I get to my next point. Oh, Lisa has a great question. It's for specialists, so art, music teachers who you only see once a week. Yeah, it's that. I mean, even though it's only once a week, you know, it's, it's a lot, you know, it's an important part of their day. And if they have a rough time in music and then they're coming back to your class, maybe— so I've usually found that a lot of specials teachers are open and eager to ideas because this isn't their area of expertise. So maybe if you can kind of get some type of regular schedule of, hey, like, can we, you know, can I pop in the last Friday of every month and bring you a coffee and can we talk about a few things that'll work with these students? Kids. And it has to kind of, you have to put the onus on yourself to do that, because like you said, Lisa, they have huge caseloads. They see the whole school or half the school. For them to come and help you, that could be really hard. If your paraprofessionals are going with to specials, that's a great time to kind of empower your paras to like be the lead. Like, hey, like, you let me know if like the gym teacher does something that's like, you know, really not going well with this child, let me know so I can be the liaison. Or you can tell the gym teacher like, hey, actually we let Johnny use his break card right now, so So that's why we're doing this. So you want to really empower your paras, and that's why we need our paras to follow our behavior plans. So when you go into other settings and you're not there, they're running the behavior plan just like you would. Janine said, I have a para who gets really defeated when a behavior plan doesn't work right away and stops implementing interventions. Any ideas? So that's a great question. And I think, you know, within that kind of first step of behavior skills training of explain, we want to go through and talk about you know, what, what success might look like, because as we know, our interventions aren't going to be magic wands, like, this isn't going to be day one and things are better. So, I would really loop them in on the data collection and be like, hey, like, we've only been doing this for 2 days, but, you know, look, let's see, and like, okay, now we've been doing this for 6 days, look, let's look at the data, like, last week, you know, on day 1 of this intervention, we had 42 behaviors. Now, after 6 days, We're at 12 behaviors. Because sometimes our perceptions aren't correct. You know, we're our own worst enemy. And if you look at the data, that can be really empowering. So I really, you know, loop that, that pair in and let them know that like, hey, we might not get it right, right away. The intervention that we select and how we're implementing the intervention might not be right. So that's why we're going to take data. And in 2 weeks, in 1 month, whatever timeframe we've decided, then we're going to decide, is this working or not? And then we're going to move on. So you want to kind of loop them into that whole process. Like, we're not just gonna do this forever, whether it's working or not, but we have to be consistent to give it a shot. So that's in that explain. So remember, behavior skills training is explain, model, rehearse, feedback. In that first step, we will kind of loop them in on our process. Like, hey, this is an intervention based on kind of the ABC data I have, functions of behavior, etc. I might not be right, right? This isn't like, this isn't, you know, a magic spell. We're gonna see what happens. We're gonna take data and we're gonna decide from there. And as a team, you know, let's review this data together in 2 weeks and decide how this is working. So the step 1 is explain. And you might, like I said, you wanna do that in privacy. You don't wanna do that obviously in front of the student or other kids. That might mean stepping into the hallway. That might mean doing this during student hours. So that might mean while the kids are in the classroom, you step away and you work with your para on this. And, and that's okay. Like, you know, not— I think we get stuck in this idea that every single minute when your student's in the classroom needs to be instructional FaceTime minutes with the students. When you're working with your paraprofessionals and you're sitting one-on-one and explaining and talking through a behavior plan, those are instructional minutes because those are minutes that you are giving to your student and really multiplying yourself. You're multiplying yourself and you're gonna have your staff members now running behavior plans with kind of the same fidelity that you would be. So that first step is explain, and you want to explain this in really user-friendly language. I love the behavior plan flowcharts for this. That's really kind of where that idea started. When I had ABA interns in the classroom, we used to make those for the paras. People started asking me like, what are those cool things? I'm like, well, they're amazing. So that's really where we started making those, because it was nice to have in a staff training, like, hey, let's talk through this in an easy way. So number 2, then we want to model. It's great if you can model this with the student, like if behaviors are happening, you know, let them know, like in your first step, explain like, hey, next time Johnny's aggressive, whatever you're doing, I want you to kind of like pause there and just watch what I do. And let them know that that's okay. Like, You know, you might be working with 2 other kids. Give them the iPad for a second, and I want you to watch how I respond to aggression, or I want you to watch how I give tokens or how I prompt for communication. So let them know that they can, like, pause what they're doing and watch you. And then the next step is rehearse. And again, you want to do this ideally in real time with the student. So, you know, when they're with the student, let them know, like, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna watch when you do it to make sure we're all doing it the same way. Because we have to be consistent and we have to be on the same page here. And then the last one is feedback. And this is going to really tie into like my number 3 point. So 1 is find the time, 2 is behavior skills training, and 3 is we want to give feedback. And giving feedback, I know, it's so hard. It's so hard. And we want to, of course, give lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of positive feedback. And if you think you're giving too much positive feedback, give more. Because you know what? People like to be told that they're doing a good job. People like to be thanked. People like to be appreciated. People love to be acknowledged. So be the person that does that. So that's the big one, you know, give all the good stuff, but also pick up the little things like the little inconsistencies. You want your feedback to be really consistent here because I— what I see happen a lot, I know I'm guilty of it, is You know, we just kind of start sliding on things and sliding on things and I don't want to bring that up, it feels uncomfortable, it feels awkward and soon that adds up and all of a sudden you flash, you know, fast forward 2 weeks and you've had a horrible meltdown, everything went poorly, you realize the behavior plan is completely out the window and nothing anyone is doing is remotely like the behavior plan. It's because all those little inconsistencies added up. And it's harder to call someone out on like, hey, you did this 100% completely wrong versus like, oh, hey, let's just tweak that a little. So you really need to make this the culture of your team, the culture of how you lead. You don't have to do it in a rude way. You don't have to do it in a disrespectful way. You can— I even like asking a person like, hey, like their preference on how they receive feedback. Like in the first step of behavior skills training, when we talk about explain, like, hey, When, you know, when I notice that you're doing something that isn't, you know, on the behavior plan, how would you like me to let you know? Do you want me to let you know right away when it happens? Do you want me to let you know at the end of the day? Do you want me to write it on a Post-it and then we can chat about it later? Like, give them a few options because there are some people that are like, oh no, tell me right away. And there's other people that if you tell them right away, they like might murder you later. So you want to know that, like, where, where are we at with how you receive feedback? Oterra said she loves the behavior plan flowcharts. Yeah, they're a lifesaver for staff. And I mean, even for like me, I'm conceptualizing a behavior plan, but for helping staff get on the same page, huge, huge, huge. So yeah, my number 3 kind of idea here— these aren't really like, I guess, tips— is really being consistent with your feedback and catch the little things. And then my number 4 is going to seem like I'm you know, having an oxymoron here, but like, this is opposite of number 3, but I want you to then also be empathetic. Like, yes, catch the little things, but also balance that. I think that's a better way to say it, to balance it with being empathetic. We're human, we're not robots. You're not going to implement the behavior plan 100% perfectly, 100% of the time. There's gonna be times that you're frustrated, that you have to go to the bathroom, that you're tired, that you're distracted, and that's the same with your staff. We all come to school with baggage sometimes. We all come to school after, you know, maybe if you have a young child that was up half the night, maybe if you have, you know, a high schooler that's been acting out and you're stressed about it. We come to school with distractions and know that, like, not everything's going to be perfect all the time. Maybe we forget to take data, maybe forget to do this. So give grace, you know, like, hey, we forgot to take data all day today. And it's like, you know, someone's like, oh gosh, sorry. Be like, oh yeah, no problem. Let's try again tomorrow. So you really want to balance being consistent with your feedback, still saying those things in a respectful way, but also being empathetic to the fact that our, our team members are human and we're not going to do everything 100% perfectly all the time because there's a lot of what-if situations. Like, what if this happens? Or what if I'm with another student also? Like, how do I implement that? So those are kind of my 4 big tips to kind of overall approach this topic of training your team to follow behavior plans is one, finding the time. So finding those nooks and crannies, pulling staff outside in the hallway, going through the process of explaining a behavior plan and really getting into the why. But making this a priority because, like I said in the start, your students' safety is on the line, and that is the most important thing in your classroom is keeping someone's baby safe all day. And that means we need our behavior plans to work. So this isn't like, if I have time for staff training, if I, if I get the courage, if I get over, you know, whatever, we'll see maybe next year. No, like, it's now. Like, it has to be now, especially for our kids that have extreme behaviors, because they really need our help. And their families really need our help. And we want to be there for them and we want to be keeping them safe. So number 1 is finding the time and then number 2 is behavior skills training. So following that protocol, write this down on a Post-it, you know, put it somewhere to remind yourself: explain, model, rehearse, feedback. Keep going through that process until your team is running the behavior plan just like you are. And in that explain, remember, allow questions, allow feedback, allow like Hey, this makes no sense at all. Like, this seems ridiculous. Let your staff members say that so you can kind of squash all those objections before we get to even running with this plan. And then number 3 is giving that consistent feedback. So catching those little things that— so it doesn't snowball into a bigger problem. And then 4th, balancing that with being an empathetic leader, knowing that we're all human. We all have distractions and things that we bring to work, and not everything's going to be perfect all the time. So giving your team members some grace, letting them take breaks, make sure you tell them that, like, hey, this is hard. If you just need a five, tell me. Like, I would much rather someone tell me like, hey, I need 5 minutes because I'm super frustrated. Let me go for a walk in the hallway or go to the bathroom and come back, then act on those frustrations. Because when we're overwhelmed and frustrated and burnt out, and we act on them, and we're reacting instead of responding. And we want us ourselves and our teams to be, to be responding to behaviors, not reacting. Reacting is on emotion and it's impulsive. We want that response, that planned, thought-out response that has a purpose and is in line with our behavior plan. So I hope that this was helpful. If you want more behavior tips, I want you to go— I put the link in the in the caption here, head over to theautismhelper.com/10wins, one zero, and I have a new free download, 10 Quick Wins for Behavior Change. I really, really love it. I've summarized a lot of my favorite proactive, positive, ABA-based behavior strategies in super user-friendly language, and I think these would be awesome to give your paraprofessionals. I know a bunch of teachers that have put these in their staff lounge and given them to clinicians they work with or specials teacher. Lisa's mentioned the specials teacher. I think these would be awesome to give to a specials teacher, but definitely great to give to your paras. So head over to theautismhelper.com/10wins and grab these because I think that these are really going to help kind of maybe give you some ideas on how to explain different behavior plans that you're running and different strategies. I will be back on live, I think, next Monday, and we were talking about work life balance, which is a fun topic that I am absolutely not an expert on, but we'll chat about some kind of strategies for work-life balance on Monday night. So hope everyone has a great rest of your week.