Behavior:The Forgotten Curriculum - Chris Weber

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skills in teaching and supporting learning behaviors—and that is exactly what the tools in this book aim to do.

      chapter 1 provides tools for assessing your staff’s readiness for behavioral RTI before introducing readers to the first two steps of the behavioral RTI model—identifying and defining and making sense of behavioral skill priorities. This chapter emphasizes the power of high expectations, the importance of proactively preparing supports, and the need to plan for core behavioral curricula in the same ways that we educators plan for academic units. After first discussing the collaborative culture of commitment and foundational beliefs required to implement behavioral RTI in schools and providing tools to measure such mindsets in staff, chapter 1 then provides tools to identify and define key essential student behaviors and describes how educators can establish both overarching and content-area-specific curricula to prepare them for consistently, comprehensively, and explicitly teaching these critical behavioral skills.

      Next, chapter 2 delves into the effective modeling, teaching, and nurturing of behavioral skills within a Tier 1 environment. Within this chapter, readers will find a compelling rationale and specific suggestions for screening students; explicitly and comprehensively modeling, instructing, and reinforcing specific behaviors within the classroom; and nurturing these skills through supportive teacher-student relationships. Just as we incorporate sound instructional pedagogies and high-yield strategies for academics, we must apply sound instructional design to the learning of behavioral skills.

      Chapter 3 focuses on assessment, differentiation, and intervention. It provides examples of formative assessments teachers can use to gather evidence of student success in displaying positive and productive behavioral skills, allowing educators to analyze performances, provide immediate and specific feedback, provide differentiated supports, and intervene appropriately, when necessary.

      Anticipating that some students will need more time and alternative supports to confidently and consistently display the behaviors that we model, teach, and reinforce within Tier 1, chapter 4 thoroughly defines the Tier 2 and Tier 3 supports that educators can proactively prepare and provide when a student needs intervention. It provides tools for determining the causes or antecedents of student difficulties and suggests a set of research-based intervention strategies for use with students in Tiers 2 and 3.

      The book concludes in chapter 5 with the challenges that practitioners of behavioral RTI have encountered (and that you might experience as well) along with the strategies that we employed to address them.

      I and many other educators have experienced the impact that a greater focus on behaviors can have on schools, staff, and, most importantly, student outcomes. I hope the resources in this book will equip your schools to experience similar successes.

      The following are next steps in introducing behavioral RTI to your school or team.

      ■ With your staff or teacher teams, have open and honest conversations about the current state of behavioral supports for all students at all tiers.

      ■ Build consensus among your staff or teacher team on the role of schools and educators in developing the habits and attributes associated with behavioral skills.

      ■ Read, share, and synthesize information on the specific behavioral skills that students must develop to be successful students and citizens.

      chapter

      ONE

      Psychological factors—often called motivational or non-cognitive factors—can matter even more than cognitive factors for students’ academic performance.

       — CAROL S. DWECK, GREGORY M. WALTON, AND GEOFFREY L. COHEN

      Identifying, Defining, and Making Sense of Behavioral Skills

      If it’s predictable, it’s preventable. This core phrase is at the heart of RTI. It allows us to identify, anticipate, and prepare for our students’ needs, and to proactively respond to these before frustration and disengagement set in. We as educators predict and take measures to prevent student difficulties in academic skills—but how can this predict-and-prevent attitude apply to our model of behavioral RTI?

      We can predict that a lack of adequate core instruction in the behavioral skills as the introduction describes will compromise student success—both behavioral and academic. We can predict that not all students will possess the mindsets, social skills, perseverance, learning strategies, and academic behaviors that will lead to success in school and life when they arrive in our classrooms. Thus, we can conclude that if we do not identify, prioritize, and teach these critical skills, there will be some students whose success is negatively impacted. We can prevent this negative impact if we establish behavioral skills as a priority along with key academic concepts.

      In this chapter, districts, schools, and teams of educators will discover tools to assess the culture of their districts or schools and the readiness of their staff to proactively and positively nurture behavioral skills with and for all students—a necessary precursor to implementing behavioral RTI. They will then consider the first two steps in the behavioral RTI model:

       1. Identify the most critical behavioral skills.

       2. Define and make sense of these skills.

      Educators will learn to identify those behavioral skills that will most contribute to student success in school, college, career, and life, and define and make sense of what those behavioral skills look and sound like. They will then learn how to prepare both general and content-area-specific behavioral priorities for their classrooms in a manner that emphasizes consistency and prepares them for the next step of teaching behaviors.

      So, to begin our journey, let’s briefly address school culture.

      The first step in designing a system of supports that nurtures the mindsets, social skills, perseverance, learning strategies, and academic behaviors within students—behaviors that are so critical to their success—is for educators to accept responsibility for this critical but challenging task. Parents and communities can positively shape student behaviors, and schools should complement these supports. Schools, however, have the unique opportunity to nurture behavioral skills that educators can apply and practice when engaging in the intellectual tasks in which schools specialize.

      The nurturing of behavioral skills is consistent with innovative learning environments in which student voice, choice, and agency are priorities. Ryan Jackson, executive principal of the Mount Pleasant Arts Innovation Zone and practitioner of behavioral RTI, notes that:

      Schools adapting to the Netflix generation mindset, where purpose, passions, and empowerment reign supreme over compliance, standardization, and simple engagement, can be highly successful. These schools are building a sustainable model of behavioral skill success, starting from the ground up with trust and respect as a foundation, and goal setting and commitment as the catalysts. (R. Jackson, personal communication, June 19, 2017)

      Creating this sort of staff culture and learning environment starts with a belief in and high expectations for all students’ success and a commitment to not letting anything (such as poor attendance, apathy, or deficits in reading skills) get in the way. The central importance of belief and expectations should sound familiar to proponents of PLC at Work (DuFour et al., 2016). They are foundational Big Ideas. A culture of high expectations, of doing whatever it takes, and of recognizing that the only way to ensure that every student learns at high levels is through a commitment to collaborative and collective

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