Over the summer (yes, the summer “vacation” that teachers get) my co-teacher and I took a well-known in-school special education program and developed it into a whole new thing. She and I have been working together for the past 5 years, and we were both hired to work in a new school for this year, in an already established program. What we came up with takes a little bit from where we used to work, and mixes it with some new concepts.
We collaborated online in order to make sense of, and establish a behavior management program for our high school students (who are mostly emotionally disabled, but also may be on the Autism spectrum). By hiring two teachers, the school doubled the amount of students in our program, so we needed to fully establish our system. We come from a school program that has been well-established (and respected) since 1981, so it was important for us to make sure we have a tight system. We first decided what our core values would be:
- Demonstrate and foster compassion, respect, responsibility, and integrity.
- Work cooperatively and collaboratively with peers and adults within the school and greater community to support academic, personal, and social development.
- Make decisions that will positively influence social, emotional, and physical health and well-being.
- Understand choices have consequences
- Understand and exhibit citizenship in order to be a contributing member of a democracy and of a global community.
Then we found state standards and transferable skills that would help us be able to measure our core values:
Based on the following from the VT Framework of Standards:
Respect 3.3 Students demonstrate respect for themselves and others.
Healthy Choices 3.5 Students make informed, healthy choices that positively affect the health, safety, and well-being of themselves and others. This is evident when students: ddd. Assess personal health in terms of stress, and develop an approach or plan for managing stress; eee. Demonstrate refusal and negotiation skills to enhance health, and to avoid potentially harmful situations;
Teamwork 3.10 Students perform effectively on teams that set and achieve goals, conduct investigations, solve problems, and create solutions (e.g., by using consensus-building and cooperation to work toward group decisions).
Interactions 3.11 Students interact respectfully with others, including those with whom they have differences.
Conflict Resolution 3.12 Students use systematic and collaborative problem-solving processes, including mediation, to negotiate and resolve conflicts.
Dependability and Productivity 3.14 Students demonstrate dependability, productivity, and initiative. This is evident when students: a. Attend school on a regular basis; b. Complete assignments on schedule; and c. Participate in classroom and group discussions.
Taking Risks 2.8 Students demonstrate a willingness to take risks in order to learn.
Persevering 2.9 Students persevere in the face of challenges and obstacles.
Vermont AOE Transferable Skills/Graduation Proficiencies and Performance Indicators
Clear and Effective Communication
Self-Direction
Creative and Practical Problem-Solving
Responsible and Involved Citizenship
Informed and Integrative Thinking
Next we wrote our statement of purpose, which took many drafts to complete:
The SOL Program is committed to creating a classroom environment that is built on the principles of being safe, respectful, and productive. By creating an environment that values each student as an individual and as a collective member of the classroom community, we are helping students achieve mastery in the skills and knowledge that are essential to becoming empowered citizens of a diverse and ever-changing world.
Then we created our rubrics based on our three core areas (safety, respect, productivity), which was not an overnight process (you know what I mean if you’ve ever developed rubrics from scratch). Our rubrics referenced transferable skills and state standards as well as social competencies developed by teams at the high school which our program serves. We
What took even longer was developing scales which we and our students will use to rate our three core areas. We plan on using our behavioral data to be 10 or 20% of a student’s grade in the core areas we teach (that hasn’t been fully decided yet). While we want the students to earn their grades through academics, we strongly feel that behavior plays a role as well–as it does in life. Think about the people who get job promotions: they are the ones leading others or putting in extra time and effort; they are the ones with good social skills–so using behavioral data as part of a student’s grade is realistic.
We also plan on doing standards based grading–which also took a chunk of time to develop. We have a 4 point grading scale; students will rate themselves, but we will also rate how well they meet the standards for each skill within the projects we do in class. Our rating scale transfers to letter grades (since our school still uses that system for transcripts). We still have work to do to further develop our rating scales (and I’m sure there will be much tweaking), but we have a great start and we will be ready to work with students in two weeks when school begins.
Teacher Talk 