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CASEL defines Social Emotional Learning (SEL) as "the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.
SEL advances educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships to establish learning environments and experiences that feature trusting and collaborative relationships, rigorous and meaningful curriculum and instruction, and ongoing evaluation. SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities."
Support for Students Starts with Classroom Design!
Support for Students Starts with Classroom Design!
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
This quote by Alexander Den Heijer can instantly change your perspective. It highlights exactly where to concentrate your efforts when a student is having difficulty being successful in your classroom.
Classroom Environment:
Classroom Environment:
Classroom Layout:
Clearly mark areas for different activities, such as reading corner, group work tables, supply area, and/or calming area.
Allow ALL students to have full access to a safe and accommodating classroom
Ensure appropriate spacing between tables, desks, and student workspaces
Organized Materials:
Store materials at student height, clearly label materials, and organize them in designated places.
Set out all necessary materials for activities on tables and have them ready for immediate use by students.
Visual Supports:
Display both expressive and receptive visual supports and utilized across various contexts in the classroom.
Examples include timers, boundaries, choice boards, emotional regulation scales, lists/task cards, visual instructions (e.g., task analysis), and visual aids for concepts.
Positive Classroom Culture:
Positive Classroom Culture:
Positive classroom rules:
Display 3 to 5 classroom rules or expectations that are clearly defined, positively stated, and understandable, reflecting broad constructs or classes of behavior.
Provide explicit teaching and practicing of rules
Positively reinforce the expected rules or behaviors
Consequence procedures in place:
Create consequence procedures for rule infractions and consistently implement them to avoid power struggles.
When a student breaks a classroom rule, calmly remind them of the rule and deliver the consequence.
Take the opportunity to discuss and teach the student alternative, more appropriate behaviors for the future.
Immediate and specific praise:
Consistently use immediate and specific praise, with frequent and behavior-specific acknowledgments of positive behavior and adherence to classroom rules and routines. "Great job putting away your materials, James. You followed the classroom routine perfectly!"
The ratio of praise to corrective feedback is high, with praise being given more frequently than corrective feedback.
Classroom Schedule:
Classroom Schedule:
Daily classroom schedule:
Ensure your schedule is visibly present in the classroom so both staff and students can regularly refer to it.
Consistently direct attention to the schedule, using it as a reference point throughout the day to keep activities on track.
Have a routine in place for handling changes in the schedule, ensuring students are informed and prepared for any adjustments.
Signals for attention or response:
Consistently use signals or cues to engage students' attention before delivering instruction to focus and prepare them for learning.
Examples:
Ring a bell to signal the transition to learning time.
Use a call-and-response technique to gather students' attention
Structured Day:
Design tasks and activities that are structured throughout the student’s day with a schedule designed to support positive behavior.
Design lessons that promote high levels of engagement and frequent opportunities to respond
Provide reminders regarding upcoming activities
Classroom Instruction:
Classroom Instruction:
Tasks are Appropriate:
Design lessons are appropriately timed for students' attention spans, with difficulty levels that are challenging but manageable.
Provide opportunities for students to respond that are frequent, allowing for engagement, feedback, and active participation.
Core is Boss! SDI is in addition to the core curriculum.
Access to accommodations:
ALL students have access to accommodations.
Some commonly used accommodations include visual aids to build background knowledge and support comprehension, more frequent checks for understanding, demonstrating understanding in multiple ways, and reducing the number of items to complete.
When appropriate, provide a student with modified assignments that match their learning pace, ability level, and communication style.
Systematic Instruction:
Identify and communicate to students a clear teaching point and provide a connection to previous learning.
Break down complex skills into smaller, more manageable chunks
Use explicit instruction and scaffolding by modeling to deepen understanding, providing guided practice and group work, and gradually releasing responsibility to students in independent work
Progressively increase the difficulty of skills to build upon student knowledge.
Social/Emotional/Behavioral High-Leverage Practices
Social/Emotional/Behavioral High-Leverage Practices
Establish a consistent, organized, and respectful learning environment:
Establish a consistent, organized, and respectful learning environment:
To build and foster positive relationships, teachers should establish age-appropriate and culturally responsive expectations, routines, and procedures within their classrooms that are positively stated and explicitly taught and practiced across the school year. When students demonstrate mastery and follow established rules and routines, teachers should provide age-appropriate specific performance feedback in meaningful and caring ways. By establishing, following, and reinforcing expectations of all students within the classroom, teachers will reduce the potential for challenging behavior and increase student engagement. When establishing learning environments, teachers should build mutually respectful relationships with students and engage them in setting the classroom climate (e.g., rules and routines); be respectful; and value ethnic, cultural, contextual, and linguistic diversity to foster student engagement across learning environments.
Provide positive and constructive feedback to guide students’ learning and behavior.
Provide positive and constructive feedback to guide students’ learning and behavior.
The purpose of feedback is to guide student learning and behavior and increase student motivation, engagement, and independence, leading to improved student learning and behavior. Effective feedback must be strategically delivered and goal-directed; feedback is most effective when the learner has a goal, and the feedback informs the learner regarding areas needing improvement and ways to improve performance. Feedback may be verbal, nonverbal, or written and should be timely, contingent, genuine, meaningful, age-appropriate, and at rates commensurate with the task and phase of learning (i.e., acquisition, fluency, maintenance). Teachers should provide ongoing feedback until learners reach their established learning goals
Teach social behaviors:
Teach social behaviors:
Teachers should explicitly teach appropriate interpersonal skills, including communication, and self-management, aligning lessons with classroom and schoolwide expectations for student behavior. Prior to teaching, teachers should determine the nature of the social skill challenge. If students do not know how to perform a targeted social skill, direct social skill instruction should be provided until mastery is achieved. If students display performance problems, the appropriate social skill should initially be taught, then emphasis should shift to prompting the student to use the skill and ensuring the “appropriate” behavior accesses the same or a similar outcome (i.e., is reinforcing to the student) as the problem behavior.
Intervention Design
Intervention Design
The Resource Guide for Evidence-Based Practices in Special Education document was created by Sara Cothren Cook, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and Lauren W. Collins, San Diego State University. This document contains evidence-based practices identified in special education research as well as links to additional resources (e.g., peer-reviewed journal articles and reliable online websites) to support the planning and implementation of specialized instruction for students with disabilities.
Due to formatting complications, the table in the picture to the right was unable to be linked directly to the website. All the practices and resources below come from the Resource Guide for Evidence-Based Practices in Special Education document.
**See pages 17-18 of the original document for more info.
Target Outcome
Target Outcome
Strategy/Practice
Strategy/Practice
Find out more...
Find out more...
This strategy/practice is designed to:
Decreasing problem behavior
Increase academic outcomes
Check-In, Check-Out (CICO)
In standard CICO, each student is assigned an adult mentor who “checks in” with the student twice daily—at the start and end of the school day.
This strategy/practice is designed to:
Improve Behavior
Self-Management
self-monitoring,
goal setting,
self-evaluation,
self-instruction, and
strategy instruction
(Cooper et al., 2007; Keller, Brady, & Taylor, 2005; Mace, Belfiore, & Hutchinson, 2001; Nelson & Hayes, 1981; Reid & Lienemann, 2006; Schunk, 2001).
This strategy/practice is designed to:
Improving problematic classroom behavior
Group Contingency Interventions
A group contingency intervention is a management system in which the delivery of a predetermined preference item or activity is provided contingent on the behavior of one or more students in a group (Heering & Wilder, 2006).
Collecting Behavioral Data
Collecting Behavioral Data
This course is intended to help educators learn about behavior progress monitoring. By completing this course, you will be able to:
This course is intended to help educators learn about behavior progress monitoring. By completing this course, you will be able to:
Summarize the process for identifying target behaviors.
Describe two behavior progress monitoring approaches that can be used across behaviors.
Align a progress monitoring tool with a target behavior.
Summarize the key features of a behavior progress monitoring data collection plan.
To access this content you will need to log in or register for an account in the PROGRESS Center and NCII Learning Module Library. In addition to the self-paced module, the course includes a collection of resources highlighted in the module and a course completion certificate. You will only be able to access the course completion certificate once you have completed the module.
This Excel tool is designed to help educators collect academic progress monitoring data across multiple measures as a part of the data-based individualization (DBI) process. This tool allows educators to store data for multiple students (across multiple measures), graph student progress, and set individualized goals for a student on specific measures.
Kearns, D. M., (August, 2016)
This Excel tool is designed to help educators collect academic progress monitoring data across multiple measures as a part of the data-based individualization (DBI) process. This tool allows educators to store data for multiple students (across multiple measures), graph student progress, and set individualized goals for a student on specific measures.
Kearns, D. M., (August, 2016)
Websites and Resources
Websites and Resources
Target Behavior and Replacement Behavior
Target Behavior and Replacement Behavior
Target Behavior: This is the behavior of concern that is selected for intervention and is sometimes referred to as the problem behavior. The target behavior is expected to increase or decrease as a result of implementing the functional assessment-based intervention.
Replacement Behavior: This is a behavior that is socially valid and will result in the student’s needs being met – in other words what behavior can the student do instead of the target behavior that typically serves the same function (otherwise known as functionally equivalent). In brief, we want to empower the student to acquire new, socially valid behaviors that will help them to get their needs met in a more constructive way and to help them enjoy life more fully
Consideration of Behavior in the IEP
Consideration of Behavior in the IEP
Explain the behavior through structured observations
Explain the behavior through structured observations
Before a behavior can be assessed and analyzed it is important to operationally define the behavior.
An operational definition of behavior describes what the behavior or behaviors of interest look like in a way that is observable, measurable, and repeatable.
When an operational definition of behavior is drafted, such as for the target or replacement behavior. One rule of thumb to help evaluate its completeness is the dead man’s test.
The dead man’s test is a rule of thumb for deciding if something is a behavior. The question poses, “Can a dead man do it?” If a dead man can do it, it is not a behavior; and if a dead man cannot do it, then it is a behavior – for example.
Can a dead man lay still? Yes. Can a dead man not walk around the room? Yes. Can a dead man not pay attention? Yes. Here are some examples…. Examples of behavior include sleeping, getting out of the seat, talking, and looking away from the speaker. We know these are behaviors because a dead man could not do any of these behaviors.
Examples of non-behavior include being quiet, not eating candy, and not responding. These examples are not behaviors because a dead man could do them and they are not readily observable.
Analyze the potential reason(s) for the behavior and examine the relationship between the impeding behavior and the environment.
Analyze the potential reason(s) for the behavior and examine the relationship between the impeding behavior and the environment.
The 4 Functions of Behavior:
Escape: Engaging in a behavior to end or avoid something they do not like
Attention: Engaging in a behavior to receive attention
Tangible: Engaging in a behavior to get access to an item or activity
Sensory: Engaging in a behavior because it physically feels good or relieves something that feels bad
It often takes several repeated examples of behavior for a pattern to emerge. Patterns may never emerge through observation alone, and more targeted assessments must be used to inform our understanding of why a behavior occurs.
Describe what triggered the behavior and how we reacted
Describe what triggered the behavior and how we reacted
Antecedents are the contexts or events that occur immediately BEFORE the challenging behavior. They include specific times of day, settings, people, and activities.
Example: If a child tantrums each night when it's time to transition to bed, the verbal prompt "it's time for bed"might be an antecedent or turn on your child's challenging behavior.
Consequences are the events or contexts that occur immediately AFTER the challenging behavior
Example: Attention from an adult in response to a child's behavior, the removal of activities or demands, or access to objects or activities provided as a result of the behavior might be consequences or turn off challenging behavior.
Individual Instructional Support (IIS)
Individual Instructional Support (IIS)
"IIS Should only be provided when a student is in need of full-time uniquely designed behavior interventions to access academic and nonacademic activities during the school day. The provision of IIS must be outlined in the student's Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP), indicated on her/her IEP and provided by a qualified staff member under the direct supervision of a qualified Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) professional.
To accurately determine the need for IIS, a Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) must be conducted. It is only when the results of the FBA indicate the need for an intensive behavioral program, in the form of a BIP and delivered by a dedicated individaul, should IIS be considered by an IEP team.
IIS services are documented in the "Supplementary Aids and Services, Program Modifications and Supports for School Personnel" of the IEP. Frequency and duration must be indicated. Further description of the service may be documented in the "Clarifications of Services" section of the IEP. "
HIDOE Determining the Need for Individual Instructional Support Memo
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