on the specific behavioral skills that students must develop to be successful students and citizens.
chapter
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Psychological factors—often called motivational or non-cognitive factors—can matter even more than cognitive factors for students’ academic performance.
— CAROL S. DWECK, GREGORY M. WALTON, AND GEOFFREY L. COHEN
Identifying, Defining, and Making Sense of Behavioral Skills
If it’s predictable, it’s preventable. This core phrase is at the heart of RTI. It allows us to identify, anticipate, and prepare for our students’ needs, and to proactively respond to these before frustration and disengagement set in. We as educators predict and take measures to prevent student difficulties in academic skills—but how can this predict-and-prevent attitude apply to our model of behavioral RTI?
We can predict that a lack of adequate core instruction in the behavioral skills as the introduction describes will compromise student success—both behavioral and academic. We can predict that not all students will possess the mindsets, social skills, perseverance, learning strategies, and academic behaviors that will lead to success in school and life when they arrive in our classrooms. Thus, we can conclude that if we do not identify, prioritize, and teach these critical skills, there will be some students whose success is negatively impacted. We can prevent this negative impact if we establish behavioral skills as a priority along with key academic concepts.
In this chapter, districts, schools, and teams of educators will discover tools to assess the culture of their districts or schools and the readiness of their staff to proactively and positively nurture behavioral skills with and for all students—a necessary precursor to implementing behavioral RTI. They will then consider the first two steps in the behavioral RTI model:
1. Identify the most critical behavioral skills.
2. Define and make sense of these skills.
Educators will learn to identify those behavioral skills that will most contribute to student success in school, college, career, and life, and define and make sense of what those behavioral skills look and sound like. They will then learn how to prepare both general and content-area-specific behavioral priorities for their classrooms in a manner that emphasizes consistency and prepares them for the next step of teaching behaviors.
So, to begin our journey, let’s briefly address school culture.
Creating a Collaborative Culture of Commitment
The first step in designing a system of supports that nurtures the mindsets, social skills, perseverance, learning strategies, and academic behaviors within students—behaviors that are so critical to their success—is for educators to accept responsibility for this critical but challenging task. Parents and communities can positively shape student behaviors, and schools should complement these supports. Schools, however, have the unique opportunity to nurture behavioral skills that educators can apply and practice when engaging in the intellectual tasks in which schools specialize.
The nurturing of behavioral skills is consistent with innovative learning environments in which student voice, choice, and agency are priorities. Ryan Jackson, executive principal of the Mount Pleasant Arts Innovation Zone and practitioner of behavioral RTI, notes that:
Schools adapting to the Netflix generation mindset, where purpose, passions, and empowerment reign supreme over compliance, standardization, and simple engagement, can be highly successful. These schools are building a sustainable model of behavioral skill success, starting from the ground up with trust and respect as a foundation, and goal setting and commitment as the catalysts. (R. Jackson, personal communication, June 19, 2017)
Creating this sort of staff culture and learning environment starts with a belief in and high expectations for all students’ success and a commitment to not letting anything (such as poor attendance, apathy, or deficits in reading skills) get in the way. The central importance of belief and expectations should sound familiar to proponents of PLC at Work (DuFour et al., 2016). They are foundational Big Ideas. A culture of high expectations, of doing whatever it takes, and of recognizing that the only way to ensure that every student learns at high levels is through a commitment to collaborative and collective action has always been at the heart of PLC at Work.
So, how is this nurturing learning environment created? I believe that there exist several foundational principles that educators should address, discuss, and ultimately accept regarding student behavior.
■ Behavior is as critical as academics; behavioral skills include the categories of precognitive self-regulation, mindsets, social skills, learning strategies (such as metacognition, cognitive self-regulation, and executive functioning), perseverance, and academic behaviors (such as participation, work completion, attendance, and engagement).
■ Students behave and misbehave for a reason, purpose, or function, and educators have a great deal of influence regarding the ways in which students behave.
■ Educators must define, model, teach, and nurture the behaviors that they want to see.
■ Educators will be most successful nurturing behavioral skills when they align the definitions, steps, and process of behavioral RTI to those of academic RTI.
■ Staff members must assume collective responsibility for nurturing student behaviors.
■ Great relationships between educators and educators, educators and students, and students and students lead to better student behavior and greater levels of engagement and learning.
■ Great classroom environments with high expectations and clear procedures and routines lead to better student behavior.
■ Engaging, rich, and sound pedagogies, strategies, and tasks lead to better student behavior.
■ If educators want student behaviors to change, they must be willing to change.
Begin your collective work on building a system of behavioral supports by collaboratively reflecting upon and discussing these foundational ideas, and reference them throughout the process. Do they ring true? Do “yeah, but…” and “what if…” comments and questions arise? Transparent and courageous dialogue on core principles such as these can help serve as a vision or “North Star” that guides and shapes these critical efforts.
To measure the current realities of your school and the readiness of your staff in creating a nurturing learning environment, consider using the survey in figure 1.1 (page 18) as a preassessment to inform how you will begin your journey. This survey is designed to gauge the current climate and staff attitudes regarding behavior and can be repeated at any time before, during, and after the implementation of the six steps of behavioral RTI.
A colleague was recently appointed principal of a school in which the climate and attitudes, as measured by the survey in figure 1.1, were inhibiting success. Staff were hardworking and capable, but beliefs in all students learning at high levels and a collective commitment to meeting student needs required some attention. This principal courageously and respectfully shared the results with staff and facilitated an open dialogue in
