-: Okay, we're ready.
All right. Here we go.
You can go. -: And then
go to the next slide.
-: Okay.
-: Hi, my name is Barb Gross.
I am from ESU 5
in Beatrice, Nebraska.
I'm the behavior PBIS and autism consultant there.
This is my 24th year in education,
surprisingly all in the field of behavior.
Started off in a residential facility,
I've done resource, self-contained Level Three,
and alternative education,
and now I am in the consultant role
and work with 10 different school districts.
I also teach mahn-ton CPI.
-: Hi, my name is Sally Vanderplas-Lee,
and I work for the ESU 3 - Brook Valley South
in Omaha, Nebraska.
I work in a Level Three program right now,
and I do K-2 special education in a self-contained setting.
Before that, I was a resource teacher for 12 years
in Millard Public Schools,
and then before that I was a family teacher at Boys Town.
So, I've also worked in the area of behavior
for over 20-some years.
And today we're gonna do a presentation
called "Got Social Skills",
how you can get social skills in gen ed,
working in gen-ed populations, and resource populations.
So, to get started,
why do we even need social skills instruction?
Just a few key points.
All environments are social,
and if a student would just learn these incidentally,
they probably wouldn't need social skills,
we wouldn't have to explicitly teach them,
but not all kids pick up on these,
so, some kids need more explicit instruction.
Also, social skills, it provides strategies
to prevent and replace problem behaviors.
Social skills instruction teaches students appropriate
interpersonal communication skills, self-discipline,
and problem-solving skills in a little smaller setting,
so, you can really focus on the skills that they're missing.
And we already know that poor social skills
and behavioral skills correlate highly.
So, we want to address those as much as we can
so we can improve on those.
Lots of times, we talk about needing social skills,
but we can't ever fit it in, in the day.
And so,
many, many years ago,
when I was teaching in the public schools,
I had kind of a need to start a social skills group,
and I was like, "I don't even know how to do this,"
but I had so many kids come in
with social skills on their IEPs,
and I really was struggling with how I was gonna meet
all of these IEP goals across the board.
I didn't have enough time in the day,
and I thought, "What if I put them all in a group?"
And so, my idea kinda came
more based out of need than by this great idea.
So, what I did is I put kids, kind of identified their need,
and put them all together in this group
and started a little social skills group
that I'll talk a little bit later about.
But if you're wanting to start a social skills group,
the first thing is just identify the needs of the kids,
who could you maybe group together
that you could kinda get more bang for your buck?
Then identify maybe a time of day, or a session,
that you could get these kids together in a location.
I was able to pair up with my speech path
and we identified a time of the day at the end of the day
from like three to 3:30, that we were able to pull kids
and they weren't missing too much instructional time.
It was really good to pair with somebody.
So, we had two heads working at it
and we could also kind of target
some language goals at the same time,
so we were killing two birds with one stone.
So, that really worked well for us.
The other thing that's was really crucial
when we started the social skills group,
since it was a pull-out,
is that we had to have administrative support,
for one, because we were pulling kids out.
They weren't missing,
like I said, a lot of instructional time.
They also needed to meet IEP hours,
but that we got our principal on board.
And at the time, she was super supportive of this,
that we were meeting needs of students,
and then the gen-ed teachers
were able to be more on board with it,
knowing that these kids were gonna learn skills
that they needed to get as well.
We were able to identify the target students pretty easily
because these were already kids that had verified needs,
but then we also pulled in some peer models
and got parent permission on that
so that we had peers also modeling the correct things,
and then just identified the missing skills.
Most of that had already been done
because it was already on their IEP,
what they were missing, but those are
just kind of very basic building blocks of how we did it.
Getting admin on board was really, really crucial for us,
and being able to find a time and a space.
So, some of those are some hurdles at the beginning.
So, once we got all that established, now what do you do?
Well, initially, you have to kinda go back
and look at your needs again and say, "Where do we start?
What do we have to do?"
Curriculum was kinda tricky
'cause there isn't really a-one-size-fits-all curriculum.
So, I pulled from lots of different resources
and I made a list of those later on in the PowerPoint.
I like to use a lot of social detective stuff
and a lot of Michelle Garcia Winner things.
So, we just kinda looked at just the basic psych,
how are we feeling, and just all the different emotions.
And I just set up just a basic schedule
for kids and activities,
and we kinda did the same thing every day,
where we picked like a skill of the week.
So, we set a specific time of the day that kids came,
so, it didn't fluctuate.
They always came from three to 3:30,
some kids maybe came two days a week,
and other kids with more intense need
maybe came three days a week.
So, it did require planning
and it did require planning with those gen-ed teachers.
And then we just kinda went through with the needs
and found curriculum,
or actually, it wasn't really a curriculum,
it was more resources that we pulled together
and made kind of our own we'll-call-curriculum
that identified, like, if they were really struggling
with emotional regulation,
we found strategies and we found resources,
research-based resources, that we can pull from,
and I'll share those here in a little bit.
The instructional format that I use for social skills
is just, I picked a skill.
So, maybe we just picked, we talked about
accepting no for an answer.
So, we identified the skill,
we talked about why it was important,
we modeled, we provided examples,
and then we did guided practice,
independent practice, and then we monitored.
So, this skill might be one that we would teach
and we would reteach, and we would revisit
'cause it took a lot of this very explicit teaching,
but then we would do lots of practice there,
but it was getting it back to the classroom
and generalizing that was so, so hard.
So, we would try to do
lots of different situations for the child
so that became kind of a more natural situation,
but we all know that generalizing,
it is the toughest part for our kiddos.
And we had other things going on in the classroom,
we just didn't do just that skill,
we had lots of different things
that would happen in the classroom,
but we did a lot of just very structured practice.
And then we would take that into different locations
of the classroom, depending on their age.
But that was just the general kinda skeleton of practice
and lots of modeling and lots of different scenarios
of how you would use that skill.
Some of the skills, this is just a very generic list.
We named our group STEPS.
It stood for Skills to Encourage Positive Socialization.
Some of the skills that we addressed at the primary level
were just understanding emotions, your face and your body,
what does that look like, expressing your feelings,
recognizing emotions of others, how to have a conversation,
picking up on social cues, perspective-taking,
interpreting nonverbal cues,
understanding size of problem and size of reaction.
That's just a very short list, we covered lots of things,
but those were some general things that we did.
And we expanded on those
and dove really deep into those skills.
This just a basic schedule
of our little 30-minute group for STEPS.
They checked in, and I have pictures here in a minute,
they checked in using the zones of regulation.
So, we taught all that,
which those were mini lessons all by itself,
just teaching the zones.
And then they each had a job, we had calendar,
we had a visual schedule so that they could help generalize
what a schedule was in their own classroom,
then coming to my classroom, we did our skill of the week,
we role-played, we even had little songs with actions
because they needed to move, we practiced handing out snacks
and having that one-to-one correspondence,
and then we had like a little reward time at the end.
Everything that we did in our class had a purpose, though,
it wasn't just, we're just gonna do it for fun,
it was either to provide movement,
it was either to provide joined attention,
it was to provide turn-taking, standing up, and speaking.
'Cause I paired with a speech path,
we had articulation kinda goals worked in there,
we had language goals kinda worked into...
everything we did had a meaning and a purpose.
So, when kids were standing up doing their jobs,
it was body-facing the speaker.
We had certain things they said
to help with some of their language goals,
some of their articulate goals.
So, everything kinda had even a hidden purpose
that we were monitoring and practicing.
This is just a picture of how they checked in
using the zones of regulation.
There was a little mirror,
we had the four colors of the zones of regulation,
they'd check in and then a student's job was to say,
"Susie, I see you're in the green zone today.
How are you feeling?"
And then they would respond back
and it was all practicing making eye contact,
and facing the speaker, and taking turns.
And they would go down the list of kids,
and every week the job would change
so we would get turns with that.
There's just some more visuals that we used.
And then we would teach strategies at the different zones,
how we could use.
So, there were multiple lessons built in,
there were endless opportunities.
Just a picture of our visual schedule there on the left.
Using a visual schedule helped lots of my kids,
not just my kids on the spectrum.
It helped them predict what was coming next,
but it also helped transfer
that we have schedules in our classroom that we use,
that we can predict what's coming next,
so, just help some of those generalizations.
We also did just a mini calendar
that helped us get even more jobs for kids to do.
We had a weather helper.
So, we tried to kinda create jobs for kids
so that we could check on different skills.
And we even had, in the corner there's a little job
called the day off, so, not everybody got a job every week
'cause we had so many kids,
and that was a learning experience all by itself
because everybody wants a job
and those kids would kinda be sad or get upset,
and so, we would have to problem-solve,
"Well, what do we do when we get frustrated?
How do we problem-solve that?
What do we do when it's our day off and we wanted a job?"
So, how we handle things when we're sad, or mad,
when we know it's our day off,
what are some things we can tell ourselves
when we know that it's our day off and we wanna have a job?
So, all of those worked into lessons
and really good practices for our kids
that we could generalize, "Well, when we don't get picked,
it's kinda the same thing."
So, they all turned into really good teaching opportunities.
Just another visual we learned
with real faces of real children.
And we talk about if we were studying happy for the week,
we'd go find the kids that all looked happy.
And how did we know they were happy,
what clues did their faces give us?
So, when we talked about happy,
we would talk about it for the entire week
and really talk about eyes, and eyebrows, and smiles,
and faces, and the people in our classrooms.
So, we really would dive into that.
We also had a body that I found, and traced, and blew up,
and then we really broke down
to what does our body and face look like and feel like
when we're happy, when we're sad, when we're mad,
and you can kinda see, are our eyes big, are they crying?
And we would break that down and circle the different parts
of our body with different emotions.
Our kids mainly knew the ones I worked with,
happy, sad, mad.
They didn't really know about the other ones.
So, we talked about what does it feel like
to start feeling scared, or worried,
or anxious, or frustrated?
So, we really dove into emotions at those younger ages
and just kept building on those a lot
to build some more self-awareness with that
so we could start working on self-regulation skills.
We also did Size of my Feelings.
We would break into that and things that made us sad
and things that made us happy.
So, like I said, there were so many ways
you could go with this
and the size of our reactions to things.
And if we were having big reactions, medium reactions,
little reactions, and did that match?
So, we did a lot with this triangle,
and just noticing how other people were feeling
and what our reactions were, to that.
One of the biggest things that was a problem
in getting this going,
and maybe what you're even thinking right now,
especially your mid-year, is there is no time
to get a social skills group.
I don't have time, I've got too many on my caseload,
which can be a huge factor.
So, sometimes you don't have 30 minutes,
you don't have anybody to pair with.
Some things that we had to do
when we got caught off in the middle of the year
is just planning a morning meeting.
There was a time I just went into a gen-ed setting
and it took about 15 to 20 minutes,
and we started just co-teaching social skills,
first thing in the morning, two to three times a week,
even I didn't even do it daily.
And it would still continue,
if I couldn't make it, for some reason,
one of the days the gen-ed teacher would still run it,
and she still does it to this day.
Once we got that up and running,
she found such value in it that she still does it
and it built a really strong community of her with her kids,
and she loved it.
So, that was really good
because during the two or three times I went in,
we would do social skills
and we'd talk about community building.
So, that was nice
'cause I still got to count those minutes for the IEP,
and lots of kids were getting social skills,
not just that one targeted student.
The other thing we started when we were really short on time
is we would have one or two target kids
and we'd just have a quick lunch bunch.
I will say it worked much better
for third, fourth, and fifth-graders than the young ones,
the young ones really just need to concentrate on eating,
we couldn't get anything really done.
So, we would do that just a few days a week over lunch.
This worked really well when we just needed
to target more things on friendship.
Teaching the skills was a little bit trickier
when we had to eat at the same time,
but building friendships, and things like that,
worked really well for just our little lunch bunch group.
Those are just two quick ideas.
I have lots of resources,
but these are my top go-to's for social skills.
Like I said, I never found
a really one-size-fits-all social skills curriculum,
but some of the ones that I like to pull from
and kind of create my own are here on this list,
and you can pretty much find them anywhere.
Here's another page.
Some of these,
like the Whole Body Listening Larry at Home and School
are more kid-friendly, those are the ones you'd read to the,
the other ones are more that a teacher would use
and you would pull lessons out
or create lessons of your own.
And then Barb also has her top go-to
for social skills resources.
And Barb, if you wanna explain any of yours.
-: Yeah, so, we recently received
a grant for PBIS, a pretty extensive grant.
And so, out of that grant,
we were able to purchase Second Step
for all of our districts that weren't already using it.
Most of our districts had Second Step but weren't using it,
so, we kind of encouraged them to use it.
What I've noticed is there are times
where we get into an MDT meeting or an IEP meeting,
and we are identifying some pretty specific target behaviors
that when I go through the scope
and sequence of Second Step,
I don't see that particular target behavior
that we're looking for.
So, for example, I think Sally,
one of yours was perspective-taking.
So, that might not be something that Second Step identifies
as one of their pieces of scope and sequence.
So, while Second Step covers
a lot of areas of social skills,
it doesn't cover some very detailed ones
that you tend to see with some of our students
that really need some pretty targeted areas.
So, I think, Social Thinking,
oh, what are some other ones, Superflex,
they tend to get into some of those more specific ones.
And so, what I like to do,
and actually it's kind of interesting,
yesterday we had an MDT where at the end of the MDT,
we were just flummoxed
because there was a little kindergarten girl
and we just could not decide
if the verification should be autism or developmental delay.
And it was a three-hour meeting just for an MDT
because we could not come to consensus.
And we just kept saying,
"It's really about the interventions,"
and the interventions clearly needed
to be on friendship skills, social skills,
how she interacted with her peers.
And we could all agree on that for sure,
but we could not agree on what that looked like.
And so, we talked about
how are these interventions going to take place?
And Sally talked a lot about pull out
and being able to do those interventions
in a separate group, and we were trying to figure out,
how could we get this little girl to everyone in the class
just repeatedly shouts her name all the time,
because she's always in trouble,
she's always doing something wrong.
And she doesn't have any friends because everything she does
is something that gets her in trouble with their peers.
So, we were all kinda sad about that.
So, how do we get the whole class to have these lessons
taught with really the intention to be targeting this child,
but everybody is learning
but we're really honing in on this child?
So, they are doing Second Step in the class,
but maybe adding a few targeted lessons
that come from Social Thinking, that come from Superflex,
that come from zones of regulation
in the mix of that Second Step.
There's no rule that says you only have to do Second Step,
there's no rule that says
you have to do Second Step once a week.
There's plenty of time in a kindergarten classroom
where you can pull a little bit out of recess
or a little bit out of free play
to teach some of those skills to a few of your students
'cause everybody benefits from it.
And teaching other kids to have empathy for this child
who's a little bit neurodivergent and doesn't understand
how to interact with the rest of her peers, for some reason,
is also a good skill for them to learn.
So, by the end of it,
I thought we had a pretty good plan,
even though we couldn't figure out how to pull her out
and teach those skills separately.
So, Second Steps,
it's not gonna always have the piece of the curriculum
that you're gonna need for those targeted behaviors.
But I do really like it,
I do think it has some good general skills.
Oh, and I forgot to say,
Sally, you talked about the body picture,
there's a curriculum, I cannot remember who writes it,
oh, I think it's Kelly Mahler, mah-h-lah,
it's Interoception.
Our OTs have been doing it, but it does talk about
understanding your body's responses.
And so, you were way ahead of your time
when you were doing that.
So, it's had a big resurgence in-
-: Yes, we do a lot of Interoception here as well.
All right, I'm gonna move on to the next slide.
So, kinda the second half of this
is just talking about different reinforcement systems
and incentives that you can use in the gen-ed setting
and also in a resource setting.
So, earlier, from Kaye's presentation, she talked about
just some guiding principles of reinforcement.
We'll just, really quickly, glance over those.
Reinforcement is something that happens after the behavior,
resulting in the behavior maintaining
or increasing in the future.
It does not continue or increase
if there's not some type of reinforcement present.
So, any attention can be reinforcing.
Negative attention is better than being ignored.
Attention is one of the most common reinforcers.
There is no such thing as a universal tangible
'cause everyone likes and dislikes different things.
One other thing, give as little attention as possible
to inappropriate behavior, but don't ignore the student
looking for the positive reinforcer.
Anything else you wanna add there, Barb?
-: Nope, I think you hit it all.
-: All right.
-: Okay, so, this slide is just talking about
the different types of reinforcement.
You're gonna use different types
depending on how significant the behavior is,
but the most powerful one in the long run
is a variable interval,
and we'll talk about it a little bit later.
That's the kind that when you go to a casino
is like the slot machines.
When you go into a casino,
those slot machines keep you continually pressing that
because you're getting a little bit, a little bit,
just enough to keep you pressing that button
or pulling that slot arm on the side to keep going.
It's just keeps maintaining that desire to think
that you're going to get that reinforcer eventually
because it keeps changing to get your response.
But there are times where we need to use a fixed ratio
because we have such significant behaviors.
So, you are using those other types,
but you're eventually going to fade
to something that's more variable, a variable interval.
You're muted, Sally.
-: Okay.
-: There you go.
Oh, and this slide is just, sometimes you hear teachers say,
"That's bribery," and we wanted to distinguish
the difference between what is reinforcement,
what are rewards, and what is bribery.
So, let's get bribery out of there, for sure.
Bribery is giving something to the person
before they actually even engage in the behavior.
I don't know too many people whoever do that.
Now, reinforcement and rewards, you definitely can see
those two intermixed quite frequently.
If you give a student something
and you don't see the behavior increase,
the behavior you want to see increase,
then it was just a reward.
But if you see the desired behavior increase,
then it was reinforcement.
So, that's how you know the difference
between whether it was a reward or a reinforcement.
Reinforcement can also be,
you can reinforce inappropriate behavior.
So, for example, if a student engages in a behavior
and a suspension is a good example of that.
If you send a student home for a particular behavior
and then the next day they do the same behavior
and you send them home again,
and the next day they do the same behavior
and you send them home again,
why, by goodness, you are actually reinforcing them.
So, reinforcement can actually not work
in your favor somehow, sometimes.
So, suspension could actually be
very reinforcing to many students.
There are lots of things we do
that we consider good behavior management
that actually does not benefit the student.
It makes us feel good in the short term,
but it's not helping us, or the student.
Okay, so, when we do behavior plans,
this is what we're looking for,
what is the skill we want the student to learn,
how are we going to provide reinforcement
to encourage practice,
and then of course, this is the one that gets missed
a lot of the time, we want to fade the reinforcement
that we're providing
with the unnatural reinforcement, tangible.
Now, granted, some people consider praise
or verbal reinforcement unnatural.
I wouldn't say that falls into that category.
Maybe you're not praising as frequently,
but you should still consider the verbal reinforcement.
That's still more natural reinforcement.
Tangible stickers, prizes, whatever,
that's what you're looking to ultimately fade out
because you want the student to have
that more internal reinforcement, that feeling of success,
that feeling of wanting to do well,
just for the sake of doing well
to be the natural reinforcer.
So, this is what often is not what happens
and that people forget is the point we want to get to,
that we do want to fade that out over time.
So, we want to see the student do this skill over time
and feel good about doing this skill
just for the sake of doing the skill, and correctly.
-: So, if you're starting a new intervention plan
or a targeted intervention, specifically in the beginning,
it's really important
to provide the reinforcement frequently.
You really wanna get that early buy-in from the student,
you want 'em to get the good stuff early
so that they kinda get bought in.
You also get what the student likes.
Like we talked about earlier, there's no one universal thing
that every kid's gonna like,
so, make sure you do some kind of like a survey,
or an inventory, with them.
Find out what they like, because if you think,
"Oh, I'll give them M&Ms, or Skittles,"
and they don't like that,
then they're not gonna work for it.
So, make sure you find out what they like.
And we talked about the thing,
almost make it like a no-fail
so that they get that reinforcement,
and they're like, "Oh yeah, I wanna keep doing this.
I love this."
So, don't lose 'em because sometimes we put,
they have to do five things before they get the thing,
or 10 things, or 20 things before they get the carrot,
the good thing, and especially with the young ones
or those really tricky kids, it's too long of a wait,
and they give up before they even get a chance to get it.
And so, you lose them
before you even get the program up and running.
You're like, "Well, that didn't work."
It has to be so quick that they taste that so quick,
it's like, "Okay, I'm in for this."
And you kinda feel like, "Oh my gosh,
they didn't really have to do anything."
Get them on on board, you gotta get them in the boat
before you can start rowing.
So, provide frequent
and get 'em in, and then like Barb said,
you can start stretching that out further.
But if you never get 'em a taste of it,
they never know what they're missing
and then they'll just gonna do without.
And do celebrate the little and the big wins.
So, you can start out by doing that frequent, frequent,
and then start spreading it out,
so, slowly fade those frequency of the reinforcers
with more natural things
so you can start building that intrinsic motivation.
It does take a while, and I would say the younger they are,
the harder that is.
So, it's okay, but you get early buy-in
and sometimes that's a hard concept,
even for us adults to understand.
It's like, if they gotta work for it,
they gotta put in a little bit.
So, praise those approximations.
It might feel a little difficult at first,
but if you can get them to buy in,
it's gonna be in your favor.
-: And a couple of things there, too.
Earlier, we talked about that fixed ratio
where Sally just said, get buy-in quickly,
with the fixed ratio,
that's how you get that buy-in quickly,
where they can clearly see,
"I do these three things, or two things."
We've had kiddos where, my goodness, I've said,
"You just have to sit in this area for one minute."
I mean, we've had kiddos that were not compliant
or were not able to sit in an area for one minute.
If they sat there for one minute,
they received the reinforcer.
We had to start somewhere.
And if I could get one minute or 30 seconds,
I was able to get that, then there was effusive praise.
And every single time a tangible reinforcer was provided,
it was always provided with a verbal reinforcer as well.
Because every time you pull back a tangible reinforcer,
you don't wanna pull back the verbal reinforcement,
those are the things that stay consistent
'cause those are free,
and those are something that never need to be taken away,
and those are the things that feel really good to a student.
So, always pair any type of tangible reinforcer
with a verbal reinforcer.
-: Just an idea for just one of those
you can do it all-classroom kinda thing
and an all-for-one, one-for-all kind of incentive.
This is a kindness board
that I have happening in my classroom right now.
We talk about ways to be kind.
So, every time a student is caught being kind,
they fill in a kindness star
and then we get a big reward when we get to 100
and then we do a mini reward when we get to 20.
So, it's just focusing on the positive kinda thing.
It could be with anything.
If you're working on, I know downstairs a classroom,
anytime someone outside of their classroom compliments them,
so, when they get a compliment from the teacher,
from anybody outside of the building, from just anybody,
they have this compliment jar,
and then once they reach so many,
they get a kinda like party, but they can't ask for them,
so, there's little stipulations on that.
The other thing we have is this, we have this Fish Goal.
So, this is based around our Safe Room,
but you could turn it into anything you wanted.
So, every day that a child doesn't use
the Safe Room in our room,
so, it's for every child that doesn't,
they get to put a fish in the jar
and then once you reach like the first level,
there's medium prize, the medium level,
and then the very top level is our biggest prize.
So, it's kind of like a flip on the pompom jar.
So, the whole class gets one pompom if they do...
I've seen in classrooms
where like you put a pompom in a jar
if the whole class is like being quiet.
Well, usually, there's one or two students
that kind of mess it up and then nobody gets the pompom,
well, this is kind of a flip on that.
Everybody that is doing
what they're supposed to put this fish in,
but at the end, everybody in the class gets to participate,
even the kid that hasn't contributed as many fish.
So, it's really rewarding everybody.
But over time, some of the kids
that maybe haven't got to put in as many fish,
they start feeling it and they work a little bit harder
to stay out of that Safe Room, or do what they need to
to be able to put a fish in.
They get really proud when they're able to put a fish in
and we've reached the top party, or whatever.
So, that's just a kind of a flip on that.
And they also decide what the small,
medium and large rewards are.
So, the top one last time was to get a treat from Sonic,
so, I bought everybody an ice cream or something from Sonic,
that was the big...
And I don't have very many kids in my class,
so, that's probably not something you could do
if you had 20 kids, I only have five,
so, that's doable for me.
Maybe it's a pajama party or something.
But for me, that's doable
and they don't get that very often,
but anyway, that's kind of one-full-incentive-class thing.
-: We'll also- -: And that brings up,
oh, sorry. -: No, go ahead.
-: That also brings up conversations.
In Sally's room,
she has so many different incentive systems going on,
which is so amazing to me, considering the role I serve in
versus the role she serves in.
She's keeping up so many different incentive systems,
which is so neat, but it's also, she said,
everybody contributes,
maybe some contribute more than others,
but it's also brings up the skill-versus-will opportunity
to say to this student who maybe didn't contribute as much,
"Okay, I noticed that you didn't contribute as much
to the fish reinforcement plan.
What kinds of goals could you set next month?
And what do you think is standing in your way
because of that?
Why do you think you didn't add as much to that this month,
as opposed to last month?
How can I help you reach that goal?
What are some strategies we can do to make that better?"
So, it's not always just a sheer will thing,
what is standing in their way that is a skill deficit
that we can work on improving?
Maybe there's a social-skill deficit
that we could focus on that month
that helps them improve their ability to reach that goal.
-: Yes, so, we kinda keep track of Safe Room
in two different ways.
So, there's one
if you don't visit the Safe Room for the day,
but there's also one based on minutes in the Safe Room
for the door being closed.
Since we are a Level Three,
we do keep track of seclusion minutes.
So, this is kind of a non-thermometer,
we don't wanna color their thermometer in,
but for September,
we had a goal for the whole class of 60 minutes or less.
If you reach 60 minutes or less,
you didn't get to come to the monthly party.
The monthly party is a big deal,
so, if you had a child at 64 minutes,
they did not get to attend.
They, instead of coming to the one-hour party,
you have to go in the other room and do work.
So, that's a pretty big deal,
and we work on this all the time,
what's keeping you from that,
because once you miss kind of the party
and you see your friends going, "We work really hard.
How can we get you to the party?
What's keeping you from that?
What do we need to do 'cause it's a pretty big deal?"
So, we focus individually, but then we also,
we do kinda two different things
so that they're not missing out on everything,
but we go back to what's the skill that they're missing
so we can work on that.
So, we do lots of different things tied to that,
but we also have individual charts that they get
to celebrate that they were able to use.
So, it's just to be able to say,
"Did you use a coping skill today?"
Obviously, if you weren't in the Safe Room,
you used a coping skill today.
So, individually, they also get to do a reward chart,
which has a delayed incentive.
So, they get $10 when their part's filled in.
So, there's a delayed incentive there,
so, not everything is immediate.
And we have to teach a little bit
to that immediacy piece as well.
Another thing that I have is called Terrific Tickets.
A colleague introduced this to me.
Terrific Tickets are used for individuals
and then they can buy stuff later with them on Mondays.
So, if they stay in the group, if they're calm,
if they're doing their job,
it's a lot really useful during small-group instruction,
it's really impactful when one kid's earning
because they're able to stay in their chair
and paying attention and the other one's under the table,
and this one's just got five tickets,
the other one doesn't have any,
they can look very quickly at their envelope and saying,
"When you're not sitting up at the table doing your job,
you're not earning tickets."
I didn't give them to you, you earn them,
this is how you earn them.
They're right here, we go over them, we talk about them.
In the setting I am in, we have a really hard time
with taking responsibility
for our actions, and accountability,
and this is a very concrete way
to help kids take accountability.
"Are you staying with the group?"
"Hmm."
"Not right now, but you can change that,
and I bet you start earning some tickets."
So, I'm making things very, very concrete and visual.
Those tickets eventually turn into things
for them that they can earn.
So, making it visual, concrete,
and, "Here are the things you have to do
to be able to get more tickets.
You can earn more tickets with this."
Those are pretty powerful
because it's not just more money, and they're immediate.
One of the things they can get
are they can buy mystery coins.
So, they can pay 10 tickets and get a mystery coin.
The mystery coin then can turn
into whatever letter they pull.
They get 20 more tickets,
and they can get $10 for this class store.
They can get, you can see it there, if they put a blank,
they can get your choice of any of those things.
So, we wrote Hero one 'cause it's in an Avengers bucket
that I found on sale, so, it's just Hero, they just pick.
And they just think it's fun because it's a mystery,
they don't know what they're gonna get.
So, that's just something fun
they can do with their tickets on Mondays
when we have our Marvelous Monday, we call it here.
We also have a Lollipop Draw, we do it on Marvelous Monday
but you could work it into any classroom.
They work or earn for a lollipop,
and then they get to lollipop, regardless,
but on the bottom, some of them have a little black mark
and then they get an additional prize.
My kids get 10 tickets or $10 for the ones that are blacked.
And that's just a little plastic bucket
with one of those styrofoam balls shoved in it,
and then I just got those Dum Dums suckers
stuck them in there, and just replace them.
But that's a real,
it's novel, they think it's funny to look at,
they pay 10 tickets to do kind of this random drawing,
but they love novelty and they love to do funny,
quirky things like that.
And if it's something that they're willing to buy and say,
"Hey, you need 10 tickets for that.
How are you gonna earn 'em?"
it's just another reward system for them.
This is one of Barb's ideas.
And we also do Bingo Boards, too,
I just didn't put a picture on it.
-: The only reason I put Bingo Boards up there
is because they can be used for a multitude of reasons.
The same with The Principal's 200 Club,
that's just an example of a number board
that can also be used for a multitude of reasons.
What I would say is get a big,
if you have like a poster board,
or a poster maker at your school,
you can make one of these Bingo Boards or number boards,
one time, get it laminated,
and you can use it for years to come
for numerous types of behavior intervention plans.
Typically, I use these for group contingencies,
sometimes I even use them for school-wide plans
like the one on the right,
I've seen that used for a school-wide PBIS programs,
but I'll give you one example of how they've used it.
So, the Bingo Board on the left might be posted on the door.
And let's say the class has been having problems lining up.
It's a first-grade class
and they just are terrible about lining up
and the teacher's just frustrated with them,
and they just talk, and they push,
and they just cannot get it together.
So, she decides to implement a plan
where she's going to time them with a timer of lining up.
And she times them and it takes 'em four minutes to line up.
So, she says, "Okay, you guys,
we're gonna start doing a bingo game."
And of course, Sally said
you want to get the incentive reached quickly.
So, there's a couple different elements involved here,
the element of competition with themselves.
So, she provides some opportunities.
So, maybe she puts those Velcro dots on the floor
and people have certain spots,
or certain colors where they're supposed to stand,
so, creating some structure with the lining up.
So, we make a plan and then,
"Oh, I think you guys can beat your time.
If you beat your time, you get to pick one number."
Can you modify that?
You could say, "If you beat your time by so much,
I'm gonna let you pick two numbers today."
And you make sure that the numbers in there
are only numbers that are on that Bingo Board.
So, you don't put all the potential numbers,
you just put the numbers
that are on the Bingo Board for that day.
And this is a good example of how fading can work.
So, over time, when they get really good at it,
you start to put more numbers in there
where they don't get bingos as easily.
And remember, you're pairing this
with the competitive factor, they're beating their time,
they're starting to realize,
"Wow, it's really nice when we line up quickly,
we don't get yelled at.
We get a lot of verbal praise from the teacher.
It's not annoying. Our other teacher isn't upset with us.
We get more done,"
there's a lot of intrinsic value in lining up quickly.
So, it takes the external extrinsic reinforcement
of the bingo to get them
to see all the value of lining up quickly.
So, there's just so many different things
that that bingo board could be used for,
but that's just one example.
Same with The Principal's 200 Club,
you can use that as a mystery motivator,
there could be little stars underneath there.
And if the student picks a number where there's a star
that you won a prize, there could be prizes underneath it,
could be something where they get
all the way across the row,
then that whole row earns a prize.
So, it could be school-wide,
class-wide, all sorts of things,
so, mystery motivator, whatever you decide.
The variable one here, this all just depends
if your school's okay with using dice and cards.
The dice, a student comes up,
they did really well on an assignment,
"Oh, you get to roll the dice.
If you get a certain number, you earn coins,
or funny money, or a chance to win a prize,"
that could be related
to lots of different things in your classroom,
it's just an example of a variable reinforcement
that just promotes them doing the right behavior.
Same with the cards, it could be they get a card,
the teacher draws a card,
and maybe you're doing like the house versus the students
and the house wins versus a student wins,
and it's like a poker game.
They might not be okay with that in a school, I don't know,
but just an example of a variable type of reinforcer.
The BE+ app is something that personally I've been saying,
"Somebody needs us to create this app,"
and I should have done it, but I don't have the skill,
and it finally got created like two weeks ago.
And it came out through Kent McIntosh
at the University of Oregon
who's responsible for the whole PBIS initiative
many, many, many years ago, but this app finally came out.
So, it's basically just a reinforcement app, super simple,
don't know why it took so long, it's free,
you can get it on Android and iPhone,
and all it is is an app
that allows you to either get a audible
or a vibrating sound
to elicit you prompting a student to do something.
So, it can be for behavior,
but it can also be for pre-correcting.
So, if you wanna pre-correct a student
that you know has difficulty with behavior
during a certain timeframe,
you can pre-correct them about behavior
that you know they struggle with during a transition.
But I saw a teacher do this a couple of weeks ago
with her own timer,
and so, I'm like, "Hey, there's this app now."
She had it where it was an audible timer,
it went off, I think, at a fixed interval.
This app has it at variable intervals.
So, the best part about that is it vibrates,
so, like the whole class doesn't have to hear it,
and because of it's variable,
the student doesn't know when it's coming.
And that's the best kind,
is when they don't know when it's coming,
then they can't plan to be doing the expected behavior.
This particular student was a first-grader.
I've seen him for a couple of years,
he's really struggled with on-task behavior,
every single time he was on task.
But I could tell it was a fixed interval,
so, she could set it where it's variable interval
and it would be a little bit harder
for him to ensure that he was on task
because he wouldn't know when it was coming.
So, great app, works really well,
it has it for pre-corrections, reminders,
can't remember the other, but there's four different things.
So, I'm excited that that app finally came out.
Everybody carries their phone, so, it's always available.
-: We have four minutes.
-: Pardon me?
-: We have four minutes.
-: Okay. Chart Moves, you've probably seen this before.
You just put dots along the outside of whatever you pick.
There's a dinosaur, a lot of kids like dinosaurs
in early years, you just connect the dots
when they engage in a certain behavior.
You can make this as fixed or as variable as you want.
So, that's the beauty of it.
I like to write on the chart, what it's for.
You can use this for all grade levels
and make it as immature or mature as you like.
And I've seen it done for homework completion,
I've seen it where there are intervals
where the child earns a reward after five connections,
after 10 connections, and then there's a bigger reward
when they get all the way through,
or they earn it part way through and then it's faded out
by having to complete the whole thing.
So, that's a good example of a tangible type of reinforcer.
Mystery Motivators, same kinda thing,
you put something in an envelope, the Secret Writer Markers,
kids have figured those out, though, you can color over 'em
and then there's something hidden underneath
and they win a prize.
Mystery Game, or a Memory Game,
if they make a match, they win a prize.
So, like,
if they engage in a certain behavior, then I say,
"Oh, you can have a chance to make a match,"
and then if they get the match, they earn the prize.
Charting progress visually is just something we did
in a particular class where it's helpful,
kinda gives the students some incentive
to see that they're making progress.
We kinda did this with a kindness project
where I'm using kind language.
I don't know why I used pushups for it,
but we were measuring the language
that they use with each other in a PE class
because they were really using hurtful language.
And so, we were focusing on it and they were able to see
that the language they were using with each other
had greatly improved.
And by seeing the progress visually on the chart,
they were really proud of themselves.
So, they started focusing on it a little more intentionally
than they would, had I not shown them that visual progress.
And then we talked about this earlier,
the kind of reinforcement that's the most resistant
to extinction is that variable reinforcement.
So, that's the kind we want to use,
when they don't know that it's coming,
they're more likely to engage in it.
And then group reinforcement,
sorry, I'm running out of time here.
So, there is a Group Contingencies Tip Sheet.
So, this is for the whole class.
-: Do you need me to click on that, Barb?
-: Sure. I don't know if it'll pop up.
That doesn't look right.
-: Okay. I'll click out.
-: I don't know what happened to it.
It's been a while, so.
And that will work that CW-Fit game.
And we don't have to go into the CW-Fit game,
but they can go into it.
CW-Fit game is actually an example of a group contingency
that was heavily, heavily researched
that just shows how you can use a group contingency
that's very structured,
that works for the whole class.
So, yeah.
-: You don't want me to play it?
-: No, you don't have to.
They can play it on their own, if they want to.
And then fading, yeah, fading is something
that tends to get forgotten with reinforcement,
that you're not intended to reinforce forever,
and this is what people forget,
but you do have to fade out reinforcement.
Don't fade out verbal reinforcement,
verbal reinforcement is always desirable.
You should always praise and state expectations,
and give children encouragement,
but you don't always have to give them things,
so, you do wanna fade those things out.
And these are examples of things that we can fade,
how often we reinforce, the criteria, the strength of it,
self-monitoring, prompts,
and going from external to internal.
We definitely want them to be more internally reinforced
and externally reinforced.
Oh, and I've already talked a lot about these.
-: That is the end of "Got Social Skills".
If you would have any questions,
especially anything that you saw in this presentation,
any pictures that we didn't explain well enough
or any tools or strategies
that you would like more information about,
feel free to email either one of us,
our emails are right there, and you can contact us
and we'd be more than happy to get back to you.
Thanks so much for watching.
Bye. -: Thank you.