The article that I chose was about a study on formal training for Special Education teachers and functional behavioral plans. This study was created because in spite of the many behavior change methods only a narrow range of methods seems to be being used. The main goal of the training was to build competence in the use of the FBA. To do this they want the schools to establish a philosophical foundation that all students should remain in school, create support within school systems for implementing FBA, and educate professionals within the school in the competencies necessary to conduct FBAs.
This study targeted specifically the difference between the untrained and the trained teachers to identify the function of the student problem behavior as a result of a brief training program conducted by a large urban district and is there a difference in the ability of untrained and trained teachers to make recommendations to change problem behavior as a result of a brief training program conducted by a large urban district.
Basically they took 250 teachers in urban schools and provided them with a class on the steps to take to fill out a functional behavioral plan. They provided examples of methods to use in order to change the behaviors in classrooms. This class only met 3 times for 3 hours. After the class they were asked to fill out a form discussing their response to the class out of 250 people they received only 100 responses back. They felt that because of this many of the people who attended the class did not feel that the class was worth while.
After this they looked how the plans in the areas where developed. They did find that 30% of those who attended the classes did implement some of the techniques they where presented with. The other teachers did implement plans that seemed to be effective but did not include any of the techniques presented. The developers of this study felt that they should have made this class longer. Showed better case studies that these new or different methods were successful.
They feel that teachers do a good job creating FBA but the methods could be more varied.
I found this encouraging that teachers with out more extensive training were still doing a good job at providing a solid plan for children. I also liked the fact they this study pointed out the fact that they should have made their training class longer and provide better follow up.
Dukes C, Rosenberg H, Brady M. Effects of Training in Functional Behavior Assessment. International Journal Of Special Education [serial online]. January 1, 2008;23(1):163-173.
Nancy Giblin
That sounds like a very interesting study. It's nice to see they were able to be objective and come up with solutions to what could had been improved. It is important to properly train teachers, so it was nice to see that they felt a 3 hour training course was simply not enough time. Sometimes, as educators, we get a crash course training in something and schools feel this is enough. I'm glad to see the study was honest about the length of the training not being enough. Well written.
ReplyDeleteKristin
I found this to be a very interesting survey that was conducted in your article. It is interesting to note how they observed both trained vs non trained teachers. In my district, there used to be late starts that allowed for additional training time for topics such as these, but now that was removed due to enforcements from the state. We now get 1 hour professional development on this twice a month which is a great reduction in training. Thank you for addressing this, like Kris said, sometimes we get crash courses, when in reality, we should be given more time for training.
ReplyDeleteNancy,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the article. I thought that it was an interesting study, because it is very rare to see a study that compares trained vs untrained teachers in a certain topic. I feel that professional development is so useful in the field of education, especially in the first years of teaching. Just as they train us, it is important to take feedback from presentations. It is good to see that the program can continuously improve by attending to the feedback of the teachers who are part of the training course and making the presentation longer and more comprehensive.
This sounds like a very useful study, and I hope to see more like this. We ask a lot of teachers, but we need to find and research the most effective ways to prepare and train teachers for these expectations.
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