[00:01] SPEAKER_02:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by my good friends, Chris and Courtney Dykos, who are consultants with the Continua Group. The Continua Group works with schools to help them to develop Trauma-Informed Multi-Tiered Systems of Support. And we'll talk about how we all got to where we are today and how we came to be on this call.
[00:39] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:42] SPEAKER_01:
Chris and Courtney, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you, Justin.
[00:44] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you. Pleasure to be with you.
[00:46] SPEAKER_01:
I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what brought you into this work. And I'll just kind of set things up by saying that we all went to school together. This is kind of a unique treat on Principal Center Radio. We all went to the Danforth Program for Educational Leadership. We won't say how many years ago that was, but it's a matter of public record that we all kind of went to principal school together. We met at principal camp.
[01:08] SPEAKER_00:
We met at principal camp.
[01:09] SPEAKER_01:
And it actually was at a camp, I think we started out at a camp.
[01:12] SPEAKER_00:
It was. That's what Chris and I tell people when we met at principal camp. That always gives people a good laugh.
[01:18] SPEAKER_02:
For your listeners, the initial meeting was at Pack Forest, a bunch of cabins. And that's why we joke about it being principal camp.
[01:26] SPEAKER_00:
We were stuck there for eight days. And it was hot. And the rest is history.
[01:31] SPEAKER_01:
The rest is history. You guys got married and continued your careers and started a consulting company. But yeah, tell us some of the professional side. What's kind of led you to this work with multi-tiered systems of support for students?
[01:45] SPEAKER_02:
Well, I started off as, in the field of education, I started off as a special education teacher focusing on students with emotional behavioral disorders. I was brought to a program that would have been the worst made for TV urban school setting movie. There were literally gang fights in the school. This is a school where there were students who did not succeed at the comprehensive schools were brought to our school, or if they were coming out of incarceration, they were coming into our school. Most of these students were diagnosed, or not diagnosed, but identified as students with emotional behavior disorders. And in this program, there was no social emotional learning.
[02:22]
There was no psychological interventions. There were no interventions whatsoever for these students to lead towards positive life outcomes. It was more or less a housing for them. And right away, a few of us realized we needed to bring in interventions. A bunch of us new teachers coming in. Heather Wixom is one of them who works with Seattle Public Schools right now.
[02:42]
David Lewis, we worked with also in conjunction with conversations with him. We brought in sound mental health. We partnered up with the students, parole officers, and they brought in anger replacement training. So right away by doing this, we noticed that there was a significant reduction in violence in the school on a regular basis. I would say there's at least 20 restraints a week. This is prior to us meeting Justin.
[03:08]
And then through these interventions, we brought it down to about one restraint a week. And then eventually even less than that. And eventually it became almost like about, I don't know, maybe four restraints a quarter. And right away, we realized that leadership needs to be aware of this. And I was encouraged to go to the Danforth program to start my principal certification. And from there, I went off to become the interim assistant principal at Meany Middle School.
[03:33]
And at Meany Middle School, I really got to work a lot with David Lewis, who is now the behavioral health director at Seattle Public Schools. At that time, he and I partnered up right away because I was in charge of discipline. We wanted to make certain that discipline was addressed through a psychological perspective rather than a punitive perspective. So if a kid threw a book across the room, we'd ask the question, why? Rather than, I can't believe this kid this, we'd ask, why did this kid do this? And so David Lewis got a lot of parent counseling going on.
[04:02]
He brought in other behavioral interventions to help support our school. And from there, we reduced the disproportionality suspensions from 3.6 to 1 to about 1.6 to 1. From there, I realized, okay, it's psychology. I need to get into psychology and understand this more if I really want to be effective and change lives.
[04:21]
And so I went back to grad school to get my school psychology EDS and finishing up my PhD right now. And from that, I worked closely with Clayton Cook. And Clayton Cook is now at the University of Minnesota. And we started digging into multi-tier support systems. And from there, we started digging even further and understanding the ACEs research. And with the ACEs research, we understood that we need to start aligning psychological interventions based off what we understand as trauma today.
[04:54] SPEAKER_01:
Right, right. And we'll talk about adverse childhood experience scores and things like that in just a moment. Perfect. And then, Courtney, do you want to talk about how you got into doing this work with Chris and in your own career?
[05:07] SPEAKER_00:
Sure. So I started my career as an educator in Chicago Public Schools in an elementary setting. I worked as an interventionist as well as a classroom teacher. And then when I came to Seattle and started to work for Seattle Public Schools, I was working then as a reading first coach, which was a quasi administrative role where I was overseeing a large federal grant. And working to get the kindergarten through third grade students up to standard as readers to maintain the grant, which we did. And from there, then I went to Danforth, met all of you, got my principal cert, and started working as an administrator in Highline Public Schools, which is just south of Seattle.
[05:46]
It's a relatively... large sort of semi-urban district. It serves five municipalities and a very high refugee population as well as ELL population. I worked as a district level administrator supporting all the schools K-12 at first with their categorical funds and planning for their interventions and their school improvement plans and got a really broad perspective of the needs of the system at a K-12 level.
[06:11]
And then I worked as a high school administrator for three years as an assistant principal. Again, really focusing especially on ELL students. There were probably students from 80 different countries at that school, many of whom had come from war-torn and refugee situations. So lots of trauma in that population. And then I most recently served as an elementary principal with a school of 85% free or reduced lunch and some pretty significant trauma needs. We served students that were at a local drug and alcohol rehabilitation center for families.
[06:46]
So often they were students who had been removed from parents because of addiction issues and had been maybe in foster or with a relative if they were lucky. And then reunited with their parents to live in this rehabilitation center once the parents were demonstrating, you know, commitment to their sobriety. And that was just one example of some of the layers of trauma that we were seeing and increased aggression, especially in our primary age students. And so, yeah. As I was working to lead the school and trying to really serve students' needs, we were also at that time shifting as a school district to eliminate out-of-school suspensions as much as possible. And so thankfully I'm married to someone who has growing expertise in this area, so he was supporting me a lot in thinking about how do I help my staff and my students shift to more of a growth mindset in general.
[07:44]
And then in particular, What do we know about the ACEs study and trauma and what it does to children? And how do we use that information to inform our instruction and to really dedicate time to teaching both social and emotional learning, teaching emotional regulation, using mindfulness practices to help kids lower anxiety and be more attuned to their learning? So I learned a lot in leading that work with my school and at the same time also implementing things like PBIS structures, trying to really work with both tier two and tier three students using things like functional behavior assessments. I was growing my knowledge both of how does an MTSS structure work in terms of data-informed interventions, but also in particular, how do we serve populations with high levels of trauma and what do the instructional needs look like from a leadership perspective?
[08:38]
And like I said, Chris was informing a lot of that work. And going back to what I said about recognizing, especially in the primary age students, and the more I've talked to people in other districts and even across the nation, I think there's almost an epidemic happening with five, six, seven year olds right now in the schools for a variety of reasons where it's just, it's not uncommon to hear about kindergartners who throw chairs or who stab or who do things that really seem very, of course, very unsafe, very aggressive, but also kind of increased aggression from such a young age group.
[09:11] SPEAKER_02:
And that would be based off qualitative, you know, just based off observation. We haven't come across a study yet, but consulting with other districts and across in other regions, understanding that there is an increase of student with ACEs, you know, because they experienced the Great Recession. So a lot of these kids at young ages didn't get the deep folic acid, deep leafy greens, the folic acid they need for neurological development in the utero. A lot of these kids experienced sustained stressors such as parental discord,
[09:42] SPEAKER_00:
Drug and alcohol abuse.
[09:43] SPEAKER_02:
Drug and alcohol, financial stress.
[09:46] SPEAKER_00:
Housing insecurity.
[09:47] SPEAKER_02:
Housing insecurity, food insecurity. A lot of that did happen during the Great Recession. It's not being talked about. And so we're seeing the results at the elementary schools right now. There's a bubble, there's a cohort of kids who have these shared experiences.
[10:01] SPEAKER_01:
Well, and it sounds like throughout the course of your careers, you've had kind of an unusually broad window on some of those issues because of the specific places you've worked, because of the specific circumstances faced by the populations in your schools. You've seen probably far more of that than the average educator. And I know in most schools, you know, if we're talking about a suburban school or a small town school, I currently live in a small town. It's tempting to see the students who are in those circumstances as just very unfortunate individuals and to not see the patterns and to not see the forces and the factors that are at work. So I know Principal Center Radio listeners will know that we don't usually go into that much biographical detail, but I think it's really important. to understand your background in coming to this work and seeing these patterns over the course of your careers in terms of what's contributing to students' current behavior.
[10:53]
Because as you said, if a student throws a chair, there's a lot more going on than simply the fact that the student is upset and threw a chair. And I wonder if that's a good segue into the idea of ACE scores. And our listeners will recognize that term from my previous interview with Paul Tuff. But frame for us, just briefly for anyone who hasn't come across that concept before, what is an ACE score?
[11:14] SPEAKER_02:
So an A score is based off your life experiences, such as if you experienced child abuse, if you experienced somebody in your family with alcoholism, if you experienced, again, as things that we mentioned, food insecurity, housing insecurity.
[11:29] SPEAKER_00:
Domestic violence.
[11:31] SPEAKER_02:
Right. Divorce or things like that. I think I said parental discord being parents fighting. So when you have multiple of these, there's an assessment where they provide an A score. I don't really teach that. Um, because I don't want educators to think that, well, because this kid didn't achieve the ACE score, that kid only got four out of five or, you know, the cutoff, you know, out of 10.
[11:56]
The fact is that that kid has experienced that, that has had that experience and that kid in development developed neurological pathways to suggest that behavior X is correct. This maladaptive behavior in their home setting. That kid journalizes and brings into the school setting. And so the point of the score, I mean, it's great to know the score and it's under, you know, and it helps people inform them themselves, you know, how much they're actually struggling with. But the fact is maladaptive behaviors and maladaptive behaviors, it doesn't need a score to go along with it.
[12:31] SPEAKER_00:
And just to give a little more background, and your listeners, obviously, if you haven't heard of the ACEs study, I highly recommend Googling it and looking at it. It started in the medical field, and there was research by Folletti and Anda, who were doctors, who were recognizing that issues like obesity and other negative health outcomes were more and more statistically likely, the higher that that individual's ACEs score was. And so like Chris was saying, the score is just a number, but there is research in the medical field and now growing research in the education field that the higher the number is, which literally means you're checking a box. So did your parents get divorced? That's a score of one. Was there alcoholism in your family or drug abuse?
[13:23]
That's a score of two. And as you add those up, the likelihood of that person, even their life outcome in terms of how long they live, but also the likelihood that they smoke or have addiction themselves, issues with heart attacks, issues with diabetes, those all become more and more statistically likely. We're learning through meta-analysis based on that score. So that's sort of where the importance of the score comes from, but really conceptually, it's just sort of a way to acknowledge that a child or an adult has had experiences that were adverse to their development?
[13:56] SPEAKER_02:
The importance of this study is that it was a longitudinal study. It had about 17,000 participants. There's been over 100 peer-reviewed articles on it. The initial study came out in 94. There were multiple studies afterwards. And it's laying out, basically, that our definition of trauma, the old APA, American Psychological Association, the old APA, definition of trauma being a singular event no longer stands.
[14:25]
It's redefining that trauma as we refer to it as trauma can be a sustained stressor. And what we see from that is that within those sustained stressors, kids adapt, they adapt, right? Kids need to adapt. And so they're trying to survive. And so what they're adapting it to is maladaptive behaviors because it serves a purpose in that environment. And so as educators, what we see Is, you know, Johnny is pushing a kid down to get a toy.
[14:53]
Well, that's what you do in that house. Or that's what you have to do to get whatever you need.
[14:59] SPEAKER_00:
To get food.
[14:59] SPEAKER_02:
You know, to get food. Attention. Mom's attention. Dad's attention. You know, mom and dad. You know, and also it's something, you know, kids' parents may work in two or three jobs as well.
[15:08]
Right. It's not just, you know, necessarily. And that's neglect, unfortunately. The reality is that some parents do have to work two or three jobs. They don't want to be neglectful. But the reality of survival is neglect.
[15:18]
there is neglect in that household. And so these kids are, you know, their parents are trying the best they can, many of them, but unfortunately, the stressors that they have lead towards maladaptive behaviors.
[15:30] SPEAKER_01:
And what you guys have done in your work with the Continuity Group and the work that you do with school districts is to combine that understanding of adverse childhood experiences with the approach that many of us are familiar with of kind of an RTI model, a multi-tiered systems of support model. Talk to us about the MTSS portion of that.
[15:51] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you for saying RTI as well. It's RTI out of the 70s, based off the public health model, you know, tier one being something that we all get. So we all know smoking is bad for us. We know that. I mean, I'm sure if you haven't heard, if your listeners haven't heard that, surprise, smoking is bad for you. And the reason why I'm joking about that is because we've all heard this.
[16:11]
We've all seen it. We've all seen the billboard. We've all seen the commercials. We've all seen the labels on the side of the cigarette boxes. In Canada, you see, I don't know if you've been up in Canada, Justin, and seen this pack of cigarettes, but they have this grotesque lung on it or whatever. Again, it's about public exposure to show what happens, right?
[16:30]
And so through that, 80% of everybody knows, based off that alone, that smoking is bad for you. At the second tier level for smoking, say someone would get like Nicorette gum. They'd get Nicorette because it's a tier two intervention. It's individualized a bit, not completely, because anybody can get that gum. But then if they can't handle it, now there's like medication. So you can actually take medication.
[16:52]
A tier three for that smoker would be going to the medical doctor and getting a prescription given to them specifically for that addiction. And that's individualized. And so that would be the tier three support. So the MTSS model is based off the universal health model. It's based off the RTI model. It's the same thing.
[17:10]
It just happens to be now they're branding it as MTSS. It's a tiered system. Now we're taking the ACEs research, trauma-informed practice, and using that knowledge to help teachers and educators and school psychologists understand that you can actually do neurological rewiring based off this three-tiered system you can actually change behavioral patterns through these interventions. And at the same time, on a universal level, on tier one, you're giving the entire population just a base knowledge of psychology. So the understanding on a tier one level that we all experience depression, we all experience an anxiety. So imagine an entire community, an entire school population, an entire cohort of children coming out and understanding effective
[18:04]
interventions for themselves when they're dealing with depression or anxiety. Imagine what that would do for marriages. Imagine what that would do for domestic violence. Imagine what that would do for alcoholism. Imagine what that would do for all these maladaptive things we do when we try to cope with our own anxiety and depression.
[18:22] SPEAKER_00:
I think what we're trying to do with the work is help many schools, like you mentioned, have some of these tiered structures already happening in the school. What I certainly grappled with when I was a principal, and what we've seen as we consult with principals and school leaders, is that the children who are engaging in the tier two or the tier three behaviors, those are the ones that are getting kicked out of class. They're the ones that, you know, as an administrator, if you don't have good structures in place, you're dealing with those kids because they are doing things that are unsafe and you're trying to keep them away from their peers for a period of time, whatever that looks like. And when those tier two and tier three behaviors, when there are a lot of them, it's very tempting to say we really need to focus on tiers two and three. And while that's not incorrect, what we know, as Chris was talking about with his smoking analogy, is that often the
[19:16]
We're all guilty of this in school leadership. The tier one is really where we need to begin the investment because for those children that are experiencing high levels of anxiety, for example, if they can't count on the tier one or just the general classroom setting every day to be very consistent, to be supportive of them, to have spaces where they're allowed to take a deep breath and calm down and that's sanctioned and actually supported and taught behavior. to know how they're going to resolve issues if they come up with their peers or with their teacher, to even just know that every day at this time we go to this place and to be prepared for that transition and to have a routine and a ritual around that transition. Many of the behaviors that rise to the Tier 2 and even Tier 3 level, we know that when we can create those sound, supportive, trauma-informed Tier 1 conditions,
[20:12]
then we see a lot less of those other behaviors. And that's what Chris was talking about on a neurological level. Part of what we're helping educators understand and what I've certainly grown my knowledge of substantially in the past couple of years is how the brain develops in really throughout childhood, but especially in the zero to one age range and then the one to five age range. The brain is rapidly growing its neurology through every interaction a child has with adults. Um, and we know a lot about the fact that the brain actually develops through this back and forth engagement. So for example, when you have a baby in front of you and you make a funny face and the baby responds and there's this back and forth, back and forth, um, it's almost like you're passing a ball back and forth that engagement that when you and the child are mirror mirroring each other's faces, we know that those mirror neurons are firing and that that child is building substantial
[21:11]
brain networks just through those interactions. And for the child who, especially in that zero to one age range, doesn't have a consistent adult who they can trust to make sure that they're safe, to make sure that they're fed, to make sure that their diaper is changed, to engage in that back and forth mirror neuron ritual, those children clearly, of course, they're in a place where they their brain is still developing, but it's beginning to develop in a way that looks very different than the healthy development of a brain of a child that has those conditions. And over time, you know, if that child, for example, can't always count on getting its needs met around food, it's going to develop a pattern of crying, maybe way longer and louder than a typically developing child would.
[22:01]
And we see, so for that child, even a child, for example, I've looked at studies around You know, kids that for that developmental stage or really any stage between like zero and five, let's say they were in a bad situation and then they were taken out and put into they were adopted or they were in foster care or whatever. And those experiences happened at a time that they don't even necessarily remember in their working memory. But that child may, for example, when it's snack time in kindergarten, may behaviorally inappropriately and grab food from others. Or if they're hungry and they don't know how to communicate it, they might get aggressive. And we look at that behavior and say, why is this child doing this? The child's being bad.
[22:43]
Well, when the child was not being fed at that certain developmental time, this child learned that they have to really be aggressive or be really vocal about their needs to get fed. And that's just one example. But helping educators understand that that behavior in the kindergarten classroom is not the kid trying to hurt someone or trying to be defiant. It's the child's maladaptive behavior showing itself. And what Chris can speak to is what we're trying to help educators is to look at it in that way and then understand the interventions where we can help that child realize that they don't have to scream when they're hungry. And when we know that that's why, we can teach them.
[23:21]
And their brain is still growing rapidly. The brain has plasticity. It grows until the day we die. We know that. It's hard for us as educators to realize at times that we can teach those behaviors. It's very easy to say we can teach reading or we can teach math, but we can also teach those behaviors the more that we understand how to do that and how to understand what's causing those behaviors.
[23:43] SPEAKER_02:
And when Courtney's saying that the brain is growing until the day we die, what she's referring to is that the plasticity of the brain, the neurological pathways can continue. The actual physical size of the brain is not growing per se. It's that Neurological pathways can develop no matter what age we are. So the old adage that you can't teach a dog new tricks is completely false.
[24:02] SPEAKER_01:
I was reading in Paul Tuff's book, How Children Succeed, his first book on this topic, where he really does get into the science. It's very interesting, the specific neurological pathways that operate under circumstances of trauma and how those can be addressed. And then in his second book, Helping Children Succeed, which we talked about on Principal Center Radio, he kind of profiles schools that have been doing this work that have kind of kind of unlocked the key. But what he doesn't do is talk about the professional development work behind the scenes that schools have done to get to that place. And I wonder if you could talk about the work that you do with the school districts that you serve through Continua. What do you do to help schools put those understandings into place, to put those tier one supports in place, as well as those tier two and tier three interventions?
[24:51] SPEAKER_02:
The first thing that I recommend is that we start off with universal screening. And I typically recommend the SIBS, Student Internalized Behavioral Screener, and then SEBS, Student Externalized Behavioral Screener, both by Clayton R. Cook. And these screeners kind of give us a baseline understanding. And what often happens is that educators are surprised at the results. And what it indicates is that the percentage of externalized behaviors and the percentage of internalized behaviors that are occurring within the school.
[25:28]
And so that internalized can be anxiety, externalized are behaviors, of course, that we see all the time. Internalized can be anxiety or depression. And so based off that, the school gets an understanding of where they are on a baseline. And then once you put the model, the RTI, the MTSS, the whatever model you want to call it, the pyramid, the bottom 80%, you know, the 80% should be addressed based off the tier one, which is basically the environment that we're in. Well, once you have those numbers so high, they're realizing, wait a minute, our tier one's not working because we have kids like, again, if you're going to do this process and you have that screener, you're realizing, Oh, 50% of our kids are at tier two. Well, that indicates right away that we need to start addressing tier one.
[26:13]
So the first year is looking at a tier one approach, which would include PBIS, um, Because I recommend PBS because it helps provide an environment. It helps provide, it helps kind of establish the common language, common expectations. It provides external supports and reinforcements for students to go along the lines of the expectations from that.
[26:42] SPEAKER_00:
So I would add also, so as Chris was describing sort of the logistical piece for the school to start the year off is to do those screeners and to have that data and then have a team that's looking at that data and taking stock of what tier one practices are or aren't in place. Another layer though, that's really important is initially training the leadership as well as the entire staff about the ACEs study and about the importance of responding to students with ACEs through Tier 1 interventions and helping teachers recognize that a lot of the Tier 1 interventions that we know through research are effective for kids with ACEs are things that people are already doing, but maybe a matter of cleaning it up and making it a bit more consistent. So I mentioned earlier things like transitions and posting a common schedule.
[27:32]
Most teachers in elementary schools, for example, do that. In secondary, it may not be as common to post a schedule, but it's really important, I would say, for kids in the secondary to be able to come in the classroom and look on the board or wherever that is and know, okay, what are we doing for the next 50 minutes? What does that mean for me? That helps them self-regulate. And so teaching teachers about the idea of self-regulation and helping them practice not only how they'll lead self-regulation for kids through things like breathing exercises, mindfulness, some schools are doing yoga, other kinds of body and brain breaks, but also helping educators reflect on their own self-regulation. And so a lot of what we see when you're working with a school is is that, first of all, most of us as adults may have experienced some ACEs ourselves in our childhood.
[28:23]
So there's a bit of sense-making around that and even sometimes an emotional reaction to talking about that, which we try to be sensitive to. But also what we're trying to help schools think about is how are we engaging in self-care for ourselves as adults? Because as educators, we're very... likely to work more than we relax, to not really have a good work-life balance because our work is so urgent and so important and there's always so much to do.
[28:50]
But part of when we're helping a school take stock of sort of the ecosystem around social and emotional health that is going to support kids in tier one, that's not just about the kids, it's also about adults. And so really reflecting on what are we doing for everyone, kids and adults, and starting to teach some of those practices for both kids and adults to recognize that they can regulate their own emotions. They can calm themselves down. They can engage in practices that help their brain be healthy to be able to think and work and function and learn well.
[29:23] SPEAKER_02:
And so at the tier one level, we're looking at a school-wide social emotional learning curriculum. So with that social emotional learning curriculum, ideally that is being taught by the teachers, not by counselors, not by school psychologists walking around. The teachers are teaching it. It's usually a 20 to 40 minute lesson per week. Ideally, they're incorporating that lesson into their, to their instruction throughout the week. Um, again, the importance of the teacher teaching it because the teacher's aware.
[29:49]
And of course, with that knowledge, they can find those teachable moments where they can point out like, Oh, look in this story that this character demonstrated empathy. Let's talk about that. And so, and so you're incorporating that throughout the week. Um, As Courtney mentioned, you need to have a team that's going to be looking at the, um, data based off the screeners, um, as well as helping inform eventually tier two interventions. Chris Cronus, um, a colleague of ours and a fellow Dan fourth grad, um, has done a great job with his team. Um, we're going to be going in, uh, association of Washington state school principals.
[30:25]
We're going to start looking at how he has that structure and, um, They're meeting on a regular basis. They're able to get through at least five kids within an hour. That's remarkable. Designing interventions and it has streamlined to that point where they meet once a week and you keep adding or increasing the number of interventions going on. From the team, of course, at the Tier 1 level, you have, as I mentioned, the PBIS framework where, as Courtney was talking about, it's establishing cleaning up the environment. clean up the ecosystem of the school so that ideally 80% of behavior is already addressed based off this.
[31:05]
And ideally what's happening is reducing behaviors that teachers are having to address on a daily basis because there's common expectations. So every kid walking from class to class knows the expectations. The entire school has, you know, the three R's, respect, responsible, and ready. And so you're able, you don't have a bunch of don'ts across your school. You have a bunch of do's. We as scholars do this.
[31:29]
We as scholars do that. And so you're establishing the expectation of that culture and that environment. You're creating a culture.
[31:38] SPEAKER_00:
And attending to that culture, like Chris was saying. So part of what we want to help, it's kind of a layered approach, but really in the first year, focusing primarily on tier one and helping school systems and those leadership or data teams really focus on doing that tier one with fidelity. And that's another thing that we're often guilty of in education because we're expected to teach this new curriculum and take care of this new initiative. And by the way, that standardized test is about to happen in two months. And all of these pressures come on to what is limited by usually about six and a half hours in terms of the teaching day. And so it can be very easy for teachers and administrators to be fully committed to an idea like working on tier one, for example, and then the rest of the school year happens and things start to slide.
[32:30]
And if we're not paying attention to all of those practices that the school agreed to and really having ways to hold each other and ourselves accountable and measure that fidelity and have data that shows us whether or not we're having fidelity, Um, that's really sort of the implementation science behind the work that we want to support and where we know having been school leaders and teachers ourselves, um, that not because, not because we didn't want to do a good job or because we didn't work hard at our job, but because our jobs are so hard and because there are always new issues to tackle, we often are guilty in education of not implementing fully and, and with fidelity and sustaining that implementation implementation over time.
[33:09] SPEAKER_02:
Ideally, the Tier 2 is based off evidence-based interventions, and so I just want to make sure that that's being put out there, that the interventions you're using need to be evidence-based and research-based and peer-reviewed, not based off their own research. There are plenty of products out there that profess to take care of a lot of things that the research just does not back up, and yet they're making millions of dollars. And so I'm stressing that all educators make sure if you're using an internship intervention, you know the research behind it.
[33:35] SPEAKER_01:
So to kind of recap, at the foundational level, you talked about universal screening. So we know where we are. We know how all of our students are kind of doing in terms of these issues. We're putting in Tier 1 interventions that meet 80% of our kids' needs, that support everyone, that are across the board from classroom teachers. Tier 2, implementing some soundly research-based interventions. interventions that you know that that are known to make a difference where we're really focused on fidelity at both tier 1 and tier 2 and then when it gets to tier 3 I think often tier 3 is where especially at the secondary level we simply expel kids we simply ship them off somewhere else and we kind of give up hope because they've thrown a chair or they've they've threatened somebody or you know gone to jail or something and often we don't really have anything that at Tier 3, if we're honest with ourselves, especially when it comes to Tier 3 in terms of behavior.
[34:30]
We might have Tier 3 academic support, but behavior-wise, when we're dealing with students who've encountered severe trauma or have serious issues, what are some of the approaches that you take working with your clients to help them put effective Tier 3 interventions in place?
[34:44] SPEAKER_02:
Well, before any Tier 3 intervention occurs, you need to try at least two Tier 2 interventions with that child. And again, I want to stress the fidelity component of that because this is where there are so many false positives being brought up to a Tier 3 level. At the Tier 3 level, we should only be talking about 3% to 5% of our students. And unfortunately, a lot of schools, we're looking at like 20%. At the Tier 3 level, it's when you start the FBA, functional behavioral assessment, and then the behavioral intervention plan. That is the only time when you should get that going.
[35:19]
By law, an IEP should even be set up unless there are two tier two interventions used first.
[35:26] SPEAKER_00:
With data that shows you've measured the effectiveness of those tier two interventions over time.
[35:31] SPEAKER_02:
Now, based off that, if it's not working, you do need a tier three intervention and you get the FBA and the BIP going. Ideally, that student is also getting cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the gold standard or dialectical behavioral therapy. Ideally that student's IEP is addressing whatever that behavior is and has sound alternative behaviors. You develop a behavioral pathway chart for that student to actually understand the process of what they're working on. And within the cognitive behavioral therapy sessions, there is homework that they're working on throughout the week also. And that homework is helping them identify like triggers, antecedents, and then understanding when to use their alternative behavior, their preferred proper functioning, successful behavior.
[36:19] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Chris, I'm glad you mentioned the special ed process because obviously for students who do have diagnosable emotional and behavioral disabilities, We do have special ed law to consider. We do have IEPs that need to be potentially put into place. But often, in my experience, especially at the elementary level, the person responsible for writing IEPs possibly has a reading intervention background, does not necessarily have the background in EBD and the expertise that you've been able to share with schools. So often it is helpful to call in kind of an expert group that can advise on this. And I know you do that work with school districts around the country. If people want to learn more about your services through Continua Group and talk about possibly working together as a district, and as you said, over potentially a two to three year period, where can they get in touch with you and find out more?
[37:13] SPEAKER_00:
So you can go to ContinuaConsulting.com. That's our website, C-O-N-T-I-N-U-A-C-O-N-S-U-L-T-I-N-G.com. And you can also email either one of us directly. So Chris is Chris.Dikos, D-A-I-K-O-S, at ContinuaConsulting.com.
[37:35]
And I am Courtney.Dikos at ContinuaConsulting.com. So please check out our website or shoot us an email. We would love to have a conversation and help other leaders think through this really important and often really challenging work.
[37:50] SPEAKER_02:
One thing that I think needs to happen nationally as a shift in practice is using school psychologists actually as psychologists and not as psychometricians. And when I say psychometrician, I mean that we often take our school psychologists and just have them test. in test, in test. They're doing revalves. They're doing, you know, achievement testing, cognitive testing. Why not actually use these people that have training in mental health and actually use them in the schools to help address mental health rather than being the gatekeepers of special ed?
[38:23] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. And it's, and honestly, it's, it's the kind of shift where school districts, you know, the superintendent will hear that and assume that that means that's an incredibly expensive thing to do. What it would mean is probably increasing some of the FTE in psychs because often psychologists are not even allocated to an entire school building as a 1.0. Like, for example, when I was an elementary principal, I had a half-time psychologist, and her workload was more than half-time, but she also was serving another school half-time. If I had had her full-time, she could have attended to the special ed qualification and initial and re-avows, but she also wanted to and could have been more involved in our MTSS data team in designing those interventions.
[39:04]
She happened to have cognitive behavioral therapy training. She could have been doing that one-on-one with our tier three students. There are psychologists across the nation. They're learning when they go to graduate school about these designs and these interventions, but we are not using them as leaders and as educators, and we are neglecting a major resource that is an investment upfront, which would save way more money in the long run in terms of preventing that kid from getting expelled because they're tier three, for example.
[39:31] SPEAKER_02:
Well, saving them time for administrators because we do know that 5% of students represent 50% of all disruptive behaviors. And discipline. Imagine if you could actually focus on those kids with a school psychologist and how much time that would free up for all the administrators listening right now.
[39:49] SPEAKER_01:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's something I've honestly never heard, that we need to pay more attention to both how much we're investing in school psychologists and how we're kind of deploying their skills within our schools. So thank you for that recommendation and for your advocacy and for the work that you are doing and for joining us on Principal Center Radio. Chris and Courtney, it's been a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you.
[40:12] SPEAKER_00:
Yes, thank you so much. It's been great.
[40:14] SPEAKER_01:
And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership. So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation about trauma-informed, multi-tiered systems of support with Chris and Courtney Dykos? The tragedy that I see around the country as I talk with so many school leaders and district leaders is that students who really need that level three support, the students who really have gone pretty far down the spectrum of services that we offer and have kind of burned through what we're able to do for them. The tragedy that I see is that we have almost no recourse. We have almost no systems in place. And often, as I mentioned in our conversation, we're expelling these students, or we're sending them to alternative programs, or we're kind of warehousing them in a special room in our school where they really get no education.
[41:07]
And it's a tragedy, not just because of the outcomes that that produces, but it's a tragedy because it's avoidable. There are interventions that work. And as Chris said, neuroplasticity persists, as Courtney said, the brain continues to grow throughout our lives. And there are things that we can do as educators, as educational psychologists, to actually work with students who find themselves in that hard place, who find that as a result of a life of adversity and various experiences that they've gone through, that they're not able to function effectively in a typical school. You don't have to have a typical school. You can have a school that is designed not only to meet the needs of all students across the board, but that is specifically created to meet the needs of students who do need that tier three support.
[41:58]
So I just really want to challenge you to not ignore those students, to not ship them off somewhere else or to write them off or to just assume that they're never going to achieve anything, but to really understand and hear from people who are doing this work every day that there is potential there. We can do things to help students who have experienced severe trauma. And if you need help with that, I want to encourage you to check out Paul Tuff's books that we've talked about previously on Principal Center Radio. And I want to encourage you to get in touch with Chris and Courtney at the Continua Group. If you go to continuaconsulting.com, They would be happy to chat with you.
[42:30] Announcer:
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