Dr. Greene shared why we need new lenses, new timing, and new practices.
1. Change Our Lenses
We need to discard our old lens of looking at children and change the language we use
when talking about kids' challenging behaviors. When we believe a kid could do well if he wanted to, or when we think students are acting the way they do because it's working for them, getting them something, helping them escape or avoid something – we are not going to help the student with his lagging skills and unsolved problems.
A free tool families and educators can use the Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems.
2. You Want To Be Early, Not Late
In our live show, Dr. Greene helped us understand that timing is everything. If
you're early, you're in true crisis prevention mode. If you're late, you are in crisis management mode.
Most often, educators and families are reacting to the child's behavior signals. In the Collaborative & Proactive Solutions'' model, 99.9% of what you're doing is
planned proactive.
3. STOP modifying behaviors.
Dr. Green also explained the new practices we need to
embrace and implement with fidelity. Behavior is a signal, and if we are trying to modify a person's behavior, we'll never figure out what the expectations are that the person has difficulty meeting, nor will we know what those unsolved problems are. As a result, we never get around to solving them.
Instead, we do behavior checklists we do behavior observations, and we do functional behavior assessments, all so that we can come up with a behavior plan all focused on the behavior signal. Not helpful.
4. Lucky and Unlucky Ways Kids Communicate
Tune into the 30-minute mark of the video
to hear Dr. Greene describe the differences and how students with unlucky ways of communicating get treated.
Want to learn more? Catch the replay, click here.
If you'd rather listen to the podcast of this episode, you gotta it!
5. What About Learning Barriers??? (my side note)
One of the things I'm trying to reconcile is wherein the Collaborative & Proactive Solutions process do we identify the learning barriers.
These learning barriers can be environmental, implicit or explicit bias, not having an appropriate communication system, lagging skills of teacher, "one-size-fits-all" curriculum and mismatched instructional strategies, etc.
So, wherein the Collaborative & Proactive Solutions process, do the adults examine what learning barriers they have control over and change that first, before jumping to identifying the child's lagging skills are?
I'm concerned some teachers and families will still see challenging behavior as the problem lies within the child, and the child needs to be "fixed". That's the paradigm we've been trying to change.
