Massachusetts Grant for Reducing & Eliminating Time-Out Rooms Webinar

0:02 So on January 22, DESE released an important grant as a resource for public and private approved schools to obtain funding to reduce or eliminate timeout rooms in Massachusetts schools. Applications are due February 20th. As an overview, the grant can be used for high quality professional development, implementation of restorative practices, behavioral support teams, parent and community engagement, data collection and evaluation, and physical changes and resources in schools today.

0:35 We have highly knowledgeable and accomplished professionals who will share their approaches to working with schools on these topics. I want to note that these alternative approaches have been successful for children with all types of disabilities and in all types of schools, including public and private. Private approved schools.

0:55 Announce our next speaker. Dr. Stuart Ablon, who is the director of Think Kids in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, is also an associate professor and the Thomas G. Stenberg Endowed Chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He's the author of three books, including the School Discipline Fix, Changing Behavior through Collaborative problem solving approach. Dr. Avalon has helped hundreds of schools throughout the world implement the evidence based collaborative problem solving approach as an equitable alternative to traditional school discipline.

1:31 Dr. Avalon, we're really pleased to have you here.

1:35 Thank you very much, Tim. Appreciate it. And thank you at the outset here to the dlc, to the Ed Law Project, and to Mass Advocates for bringing us all together. Pleased to be here. So we do work all over the world, but actually I think important to kick this off by saying that we are local. We are based right here, as you heard, in Boston at Mass General Hospital. And our team, we have a team of about 30 staff members and many of them have roots right here in Boston and in Massachusetts.

2:08 Our trainers have deep experience working with districts across the state alongside our project managers who are local and work in the local systems. In fact, many of us, myself included, are products of Massachusetts public school system and also, like myself, have kids in the public school systems in Massachusetts as well. So we're quite invested here locally. And this is just an example of some of the schools that we have deeper partnerships with and have worked with over time.

2:39 So we have a lot of experience working in Massachusetts. We teach an approach called collaborative problem solving, and you may be familiar with it or perhaps you've heard about collaborative problem solving because it was named recently as one of two really approved alternative remedies by DESE in the new legislation governing suspension and expulsion. So you saw collaborative problem solving and restorative practices mentioned as alternatives. And we think collaborative problem solving is a great solution to the problem that we're here talking about today.

3:16 But I do want to point out something which is that we don't like to implement collaborative problem solving explicitly to try to eliminate things like time out rooms or suspension, detention, et cetera. But instead our focus is trying to help educators better understand and more effectively respond to concerning behavior. And what we've been able to show is that when you do that, you dramatically reduce and even eliminate the use of things like timeout rooms. But it happens as a byproduct of understanding that challenging behavior is about skill, not will, and that these students, they're not lacking the will to behave better.

3:56 What they lack are the skills to behave better. And we need to empower our educators to have other tools to use, because traditional approaches to progressive discipline not only don't work, but they often make matters worse and often, in fact, trigger the very behavior that they are trying to prevent. But I have learned over a couple of few decades now doing this, that you can't tell people to stop using something without giving them something else actionable to do instead that they feel confident in and engage in using.

4:32 So, you know, I think right now there's just a massive contagion of dysregulation everywhere in our schools coming out of the pandemic. It's one of the most pressing issues. And collaborative problem solving is a solution that anybody in a school can implement. Classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, administrators. And it provides actionable things for people to do and a clear structure to follow. So it helps people move from theory to action. Our research has shown it strengthens relationships, improves school climate, helps kids and adults, as you heard in the last presentation, is so crucial.

5:07 Build emotion regulation skills, social thinking skills, all kinds of neurocognitive skills, and yes, indeed reduces or eliminates the use of time algorithms. What does collaborative problem solving provide? Well, it provides an empirically validated assessment tool so educators can quickly identify the skills that students are struggling with that lead to their challenging behaviors and predict the triggers to them. A simple framework for behavior intervention planning, and then a three step problem solving process that decreases these behaviors while building relationships and skills.

5:43 We see pretty dramatic results in terms of reduction in office referrals, in things like restraints, seclusions, timeouts in the middle. Here you see a graph that shows a 200% change in students sent out a classroom for discipline during the pandemic. We see emotional safety increase sizably as well. I think many people on this webinar have great reason to be really concerned about the degree of stress that our educators are feeling these days.

6:13 We see reductions in teacher stress in addition to reduction in student behavior. We also see significant jumps in student attendance, which is something we all need to be concerned about as well. Collaborative problem solving is also a trauma informed approach. I'm fortunate to do a lot of work with a good friend and colleague, Dr. Bruce Perry, who's a noted trauma researcher, and he's very fond of this approach because in essence what it does is it operationalizes basic principles of being trauma informed and trauma sensitive, which most schools are trained in the principles.

6:46 But how do you take those principles and make them actionable, especially in the face of concerning behavior? That's one of the strengths of this approach. The other thing that we're really excited about is that collaborative problem solving is showing promise when it comes to not only interrupting explicit biases about behavior like that, it's willful, but also implicit biases about behavior that lead to the disproportionality in school discipline that we see, particularly when it comes to students of color, students with disabilities, and students with trauma histories.

7:20 We do have a curriculum, it's called the School Discipline Fix, and we have a number of supports that educators can use to help them to be able to practice and implement the approach successfully with fidelity. And my last slide here, as I mentioned at the outset, we work with lots of districts across Massachusetts and beyond. We can provide professional development so all staff can learn this. We provide group coaching so that people can improve their practice after training.

7:49 Because one thing we know spray and pray training does not work. Coaching is essential. We also provide consultation to leaders in terms of how to implement these strategies. And we have a certification program where you can certify people within your district so they can be experts, they can be your culture carriers, and they can be doing the training internally for sustainability reasons. So thanks so much for having me. I'm honored to be a part of this group and would love to have some discussions with folks who might be interested following the webinar.

8:24 Thank you Tim.

8:25 Thank you very much doctor. Really appreciate it.