Five NIU students receiving specialized, cross-disciplinary preparation to deal with bullying in schools recently applied their new knowledge with current paraprofessionals in DeKalb’s District 428.
Chelsea Cluchey, Quinn Galindo, Catie McGinnis, Bailey Schejbal and Gretta Ward designed and delivered the interactive April workshop at Brooks Elementary School, where the agenda included role-playing exercises.
All five are enrolled in the second cohort of NIU’s Project Prevent and Address Bullying Behavior at All Tiers (PPABB) program, funded by $1.25 million from the U.S. Department of Education to train future school psychologists and special educators.
Building on an earlier NIU initiative focused on the less-severe “Tier 1” bullying behavior, the current grant covers tiers 1, 2 and 3.
Paraprofessionals who participated found the afternoon accessible and highly relevant to their jobs, says Jesse “Woody” Johnson, a professor in the Department of Special and Early Education who supervised the NIU students.
Johnson’s hands-off edict: “Establish an environment where people feel safe sharing things they’re frustrated about and where people can openly talk about their problems so that we can give them ways around problems.”
“Our PPABB scholars did an absolutely beautiful job of engaging the group in meaningful discussions and problem solving,” Johnson says. “I believe the participants felt they were heard, supported and empowered to help the students with whom they work.”
McGinnis, a social-emotional learning specialist for District 428, hopes that the strategies given to paraprofessionals who attended the workshop will spread through a “trickle-down effect” among their colleagues.
Key to that, she says, is creating “a more positive motion forward” by “changing some of the language that they use when they speak to the students.”
“These kids, especially when they’re already at tiers 2 and 3, are already struggling. They’re working with a para, or have a para in their room due to their behavioral concerns or their academics, and so they hear, ‘Don’t do that. Stop doing that.’ It’s just nag, nag, nag – that really negative input throughout the day – and if you’re getting negative, negative, negative, the outcome is going to be negative,” McGinnis says.
“Think about your spouse doing that to you all day long, and you’re never hearing, ‘I love you,’ or, ‘You’re doing a good job,’ or, ‘Thank you,’ ” she adds. “When you’re that kid who’s getting the negative input all day long, there’s not really a lot of room for improvement or for feeling good about yourself.”
Rather, she says, it can lead to outbursts and aggression that escalate. In response, paras can motivate children by shifting their tone from punitive from encouraging.
Hey, you’re doing a really good job at this. Here are your two choices. Let’s practice this.
“It’s really about communicating differently. It changes how you’re presenting yourself to defuse or deescalate the situation, and it’s night-and-day in the response you’re going to receive back from the students,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that you don’t discipline. It doesn’t mean that you don’t tell students what they need to do. It’s that the delivery of that message is very, very different and very powerful.”
NIU’s coursework has demonstrated that to McGinnis, who worked in day care centers and in group homes for children and adults with mental and physical handicaps before entering special education.
“Having gone through this program, my approach is far more technical and different. Now I’m looking at, ‘What are the functions of the behavior?’ and ‘What are the steps?’ – the task analysis portion of going through and changing that behavior very systematically,” she says.
“I think I’ve always kind of done that, but now I have a lot of the language and a lot of the ‘why’ that goes along with it that I really hadn’t necessarily known before,” she adds. “Before, it was just my soft-squishy – like, ‘I’m really good at this’ – and now I have the technical part to really teach other people how and why we do it this way, and have it make sense to them.”
WARD IS COMPLETING HER FOURTH year as a teacher in the Specialized Opportunities for Academic and Life Skills Education program at Jefferson Elementary School in DeKalb.
She appreciates PPABB’s mission to team school psychologists and Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBA) to study behavior analysis and then apply that shared knowledge to manage bullying in elementary and middle schools.
“We want to try to catch it, and teach those skills, in elementary schools. We think that’s the most important time,” says Ward, who earned her NIU B.S.Ed. in Special Education in 2019.
“Ever since I’ve started, I’ve seen gen-ed teachers and the teachers around me struggle more each year with different behavior challenges,” she adds, “and I just want to learn strategies to help teachers who don’t have my experience, or don’t have my training, in how they can have a successfully running classroom and change the behavior of students.”
Unfortunately, she says, the bullying crisis is growing across schools and districts – and, she adds, “it might not look like bullying on the surface level.”
“It plays out in a lot of social relationships and peer-to-peer interactions,” she says, “so it starts with social skills and social-emotional learning, and learning how to interact with peers and how to responds to peers when there are conflicts. It’s about starting at those very basic social skills before it even gets to the problem of bullying. That’s how I’m seeing it manifest. If these skills aren’t taught, reinforced and maintained, it could lead to bullying behaviors down the line.”
The “eye-opening” workshop went well, she says, covering topics suggested by Brooks Elementary School Principal Donna Henry.
Beyond the prepared slides and strategies, however, the afternoon also was “a chance to talk about some of the challenges they’re facing and, actually, to just let them vent.”
“We have four to six years of training on this, and they’re just thrown in there, and have no background experience,” Ward says, “so we were just giving them a foot in the door with some basic skills they could implement the next day – not these big, lofty behavioral ideas, but quick, proactive strategies they could actually use in the classroom the next day, and they were really receptive and really open to it. I think it was something they’ve been wanting.”
Helping to deliver the workshop also clarified Ward’s career ambitions.
As she continues her path toward BCBA status, she eventually would “love to kind of step outside the classroom and maybe work with teachers on how to set up a classroom like mine or how they can manage a whole classroom of behaviors.”
“I think anyone will tell you that one of the biggest struggles right now in education is managing challenging behavior. People are seeing social skill deficits and behavioral deficits at a level they really haven’t seen before,” Ward says.
“Many teachers are trained in how to teach reading and writing and math, but a lot of teachers aren’t trained on how to teach a child to learn how to behave, or how the environment in the world affects a child’s behavior,” she adds.
“This program gives them the strategies, the background knowledge and the tools to implement in their classrooms and to share with other people. It answers a lot of questions and challenges that more and more teachers are dealing with every day. It’s no longer just special educators. It’s everyone.”
JOHNSON VIEWS THE workshop as an invaluable experience for the PPABB scholars.
“It’s going to be an integral part of their jobs. It’s going to play a big role as to whether they’re effective,” he says.
“One thing I tell my students all the time is, ‘You know, it’s good that you understand this stuff, and it’s good that you are able to assess situations come up with good plan. However, the extent to which your plan is going to actually change someone’s life depends completely on your ability to get other people on board with implementing the interventions you’ve developed.’ ”
PPABB scholars are equipped “to involve other folks in the process and to create a culture or a climate where those interventions can happen,” he adds, “and that was a big part of what I hoped would happen through the workshop.”
“That’s a very important piece and one that’s difficult to actually include in graduate training programs because it involves a substantial investment from the program and the school. The district is paying a group of paraprofessionals for a couple hours to spend some time with the NIU individuals,” Johnson says.
“Also, once these PPABB scholars who are teachers are in their roles, they’re going to be helping other teachers, and the scholars who are in School Psychology are going to be functioning as school psychologists,” he adds. “A big part of what they’re going to be doing is staff training and working with people to teach them skills. Most grad programs don’t really include a chance to practice that.”
Even the preparation process pleased the professor.
“I tried to back away really quickly, just to give the students a lot of room,” he says. “I sat there and kept my mouth shut, and they refined. I had given them some stuff that I had developed, and it was funny because they finally decided, ‘Well, this has too many big words in it, so we’re going to revise all this and make it more accessible.’ I got a kick out of that.”
Similarly, Johnson gives high marks to the PPABB grant.
His quintet of scholars who delivered the April workshop will finish the program this summer; their cohort’s school psychology students have another year. The final cohort of students will begin this fall.
He also is presenting this week at the annual convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis International, joined by an alum of the program.
“The feedback that we’ve gotten from the folks who’ve finished, and the folks who were involved, is that they really liked the powerful combination of coursework we’ve offered as well as the coordinated field experience,” Johnson says.
“For the BCBA scholars, it’s another pair of eyes,” he adds, “and the school psychology students talk about how much they learn in spending time in the classrooms of the BCBA scholars. They’re learning about many of the realities of being in a school and the things that teachers have to face, and that’s going to enable them to collaborate with teachers more effectively.”
