On a flight to New Orleans for the 2011 CCBD Conference this morning, I open the Southwest Airlines inflight magazine to pass some time. The first article, by the CEO, was about the importance of Creating Culture in the company. I immediately thought about how this applies to Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and schools too.

The CEO stated that creating the culture of Southwest Airlines began when the company was founded and continues to this day in very intentional ways, including the appointment of a culture committee. The company understands that customers choose them because of the way they conduct themselves in business, in services, and in client relationships. Everyone in the company, from the board of directors to flight attendants and baggage handlers are taught what to do and what SW airlines stands for. This is exactly what we are looking for in schools that implement school-wide PBIS systems. It’s not just the classroom teachers that are responsible for promoting safe, respectful, or responsible behavior in students – it’s everyone’s job. The expectations that the school chooses becomes the culture of the school. It must be intentional and it must be taught.

3 Steps for Creating Culture in School

1. Begin with a Vision
- Create an image, with words, of the place you want the school to become. What is the culture you want to promote? What is the end goal for your community? Think, this is who we are. And keep it simple. 

2. Disseminate the Vision 3 Ways
- Think like a business and decide how to market your vision to your community. A) Face to face: using meetings, assemblies, and announcements. B) Print media: including flyers, newsletter, posters, email and the school website. C) Social media: get your school on Facebook, Twitter, Fickr, YouTube and other social media sites to share your vision with your community of followers. 

3. Seek and Share Feedback
- Solicit feedback on the vision, get input, consider modifications until you get it right. And when you receive that feedback via surveys, polls, or public opinion forums make sure you share the results with your community so that people know that you heard them and that their voice matters. That too is part of the culture. 

Those are my thoughts and tips for today. Inspiration is everywhere. Now go forth and create the culture that you want for your school. 

What is the culture at your school? Share with me in the comments below.

3 Cheers

Three cheers to professional photographer Jennifer McKendrick who refused to photograph high school students when she saw that they dedicated a Facebook page to cyberbullying. The Huffington Post reported this story last week.

Jennifer McKendrick, from Indiana County, Pa., wrote on her own Facebook page earlier this week that she came across another Facebook page with nasty comments from four high school girls whose names matched her scheduled clients. She emailed the girls and their parents to cancel their senior photo shoots, while including screenshots of their comments to explain why she was calling off the session.

I commend Jennifer for making this stand and hope that other adults and professionals would take the same action.

It takes 3 to Bully

Did you know that every bullying incidents talks at least three people?

1. The Bully doing the harassing.
2. The Victim or target of the harassment.
3. The Bystander or bystanders who observe and have a choice to do nothing or to intervene.

This reminds me of the final episode of the sitcom ‘Seinfeld’ where Jerry and his friends do nothing but laugh as the victim of a robbery is fleeced. Funny episode, and a perfect example of bystanders. Don’t be a bystander. Stand up for justice because the next victim might just be you or someone you love!

What do you think of Jennifer’s actions? Will this hurt her professional career? Was it smart to turn down business in this economy? Comment below.

My First Time

I joined my first professional association as a student member (at a sweet discount rate) when I was completing my Masters degree in special education and have never ever ever regretted the decision. In fact, since that time I have joined more and currently belong to numerous professional organizations. I have also served as a board member of several organizations.

Why?

I join for several reasons:

1. Stay current on research and practices in education
2. Receive journals, magazines, and publications from the organization with helpful tips, tricks, and strategies
3. Discounts on car insurance to conference to books
4. Connect with other education professionals and experts

Connecting with Experts

The biggest reason why I stay associated with professional organizations is to connect to people like me and learn from people who share my experiences and have broader experiences and knowledge. This is a big part of my Professional Learning Community.

I’ve been a board member of the Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders for a while and today I want to share 5 Ways To Connect With Behavior Experts from this community (I encourage you to join too!)

1. www.Facebook/CCBDmembers “Like” us and post or view status updates on our page with comments and links relative to our members.
2. www.Twitter/CCBDmembers Follow us or send us a Tweet using @ccbdmembers or the hashtag #CCBD.
3. http://CCBDNing.ning.com Join our NetworkING community to share your educational stories, questions or comments.
4. www.YouTube.com/user/CCBDmembers Watch our CCBD Foundation public service announcement,more media coming soon.
5. This is a QRCode to a 4 Minute CCBD Video. A QR Code is a 3-D bar code that can be read by your smart phone or web enabled mobile device and can take you directly to a webpage, video, or map.

• Search for a “QR Code Reader” app on your mobile device and install.
• Use the QR Reader to scan the code with your device camera to connect to the media destination.

What professional associations are part of your learning community?

My First Time

I joined my first professional association as a student member (at a sweet discount rate) when I was completing my Masters degree in special education and have never ever ever regretted the decision. In fact, since that time I have joined more and currently belong to numerous professional organizations. I have also served as a board member of several organizations.

Why?

I join for several reasons:

1. Stay current on research and practices in education
2. Receive journals, magazines, and publications from the organization with helpful tips, tricks, and strategies
3. Discounts on car insurance to conference to books
4. Connect with other education professionals and experts

Connecting with Experts

The biggest reason why I stay associated with professional organizations is to connect to people like me and learn from people who share my experiences and have broader experiences and knowledge. This is a big part of my Professional Learning Community.

I’ve been a board member of the Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders for a while and today I want to share 5 Ways You Can Connect With Behavior Experts from this community (I encourage you to join too!)

1. www.Facebook/CCBDmembers “Like” us and post status updates on our page with comments and links relative to our members.
2. www.Twitter/CCBDmembers Follow us or Tweet us using @ccbdmembers or the hashtag #CCBD.
3. http://CCBDNing.ning.com Join our NetworkING community to share your educational stories, questions or comments.
4. www.YouTube.com/user/CCBDmembers Watch our CCBD Foundation public service announcement, more media coming soon.
5. This is aQR Code to a 4 Minute CCBD Video. A QR Code is a 3-D bar code that can be read by your smart phone or web enabled mobile device and can take you directly to a webpage, video, or map. Two Steps to read the QR code on this page:

• Search for a “QR Code Reader” app on your mobile device and install.
• Use the QR Reader to scan this code with your device camera to connect to the media destination.

What professional associations are part of your learning community?

1. Reflect on the Year

Think back on all the things you have done the past year. Did you remain true to your passion, did your passion change, did you do the best you could with your abilities at the time? Think of the successes, the challenges, and the outcomes. Reflect on who you helped, and who helped you. Examine opportunities won and wasted. Don’t get down if everything didn’t turn out as planned. In the grand scheme of life, this past year wasn’t the beginning or the end of anything, it was just the middle of your journey. There will be more opportunities to succeed and to screw up – so don’t take yourself too seriously. I’m betting you made a huge difference – to students, colleagues, friends, and family.

2. Reassess What Worked

Remember, as an educator you can never know where your influence begins or ends. But summer can be a time to reassess your perceived impact. As educators, we should be held accountable for impacting student achievement. We really can and do make a difference when we use evidence-based practices. Though we are rarely the sole decision-makers, we need to take ownership for those in our circle of influence. Maybe we can’t make policy changes in our school or district, but we can model best practice to our students and colleagues. Maybe we can’t change the politics of universities or states, but we can stand up for what we know is right – and share knowledge and truth with others. Reassess what worked and recommit to staying true to your integrity.

3. Renew Your Spirit

All work and no play can make Jack or Jill a dull boy or girl. Go ahead and take time off from work and take a vacation from email and your overly connected world. Your body, mind, and sole will thank you. Rediscover the balance in life between work and family/friends/hobbies that everyone says is so important to maintain, but most of us continually struggle trying to achieve. Stop and smell the flowers, watch a sunset, or go fly a kite – literally! When you return, it will be easier to convince yourself that life is far too short to be miserable. Then ask yourself, “What is my Passion?”

My Passion

I’ve recently experienced a job change. It caused me to reexamine my passion. Guess what? I still love to teach, I still love to build the capacity of educators to help students succeed, and I am still passionate about sharing the good news about bad behaviors! Expect to keep hearing from me for a long time.

What is your passion? Share  it with me.

Spread the word to End the word.

Last fall (October 5, 2010) the president signed Rosa’s Law to remove the word “Mental Retardation” from all federal statues and replace it with “Intellectual Disability”. And now a campaign is under way to give that legislation a little “oomph”. The website www.r-word.org has launch several initiatives to teach the public that the R-word should be treated like racial and sexual orientation slurs and be removed from our lexicon. The new End the Word initiatives include:

• a prominent website
• a public service announcement (see below)
• a Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter page

I encourage you to join this movement and help spread the word to make this a better world for all our children.

What is your experience with the R-word? Share your comments.

Teacher Appreciation Week 2011

This is Teacher Appreciation Week. One whole week (out of 52) when we are supposed to show teachers that we appreciate them. Thanks Hallmark for creating this brief annual occasion for an ode to our teachers. But I don’t think it is nearly enough. Educators deserve more!

Often, like many in our society, I tend to get a little down on teachers and continue to ask them for more. As a former classroom teacher, I argue that it is the teachers’ responsibility to be up to speed on educational research, education law, best practice and evidence-based practices for students with behavior disorders or behavior management issues. Our legislature is also asking for more and putting more and more accountability for student success on individual teachers, looking at pay for performance, and linking hiring/firing to student achievement. Now, there is a lot of empirical evidence that teacher quality makes a huge quantitative difference in student achievement. Not just one study, but tons. So maybe we should put the blame (and praise) on teachers shoulders?

But then I came upon this NY Times op-ed piece on April 30th, 2011 that gave an analogy that changed my perspective somewhat. I’ve included the piece below, but encourage you to also go to the source to learn more. Let me know your perspective on this story or this issue by commenting below.

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries
By Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari

WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.

We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. The first step is to make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates. This will take some doing.

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. For Erik Benner, an award-winning history teacher in Keller, Tex., money has been a constant struggle. He has two children, and for 15 years has been unable to support them on his salary. Every weekday, he goes directly from Trinity Springs Middle School to drive a forklift at Floor and Décor. He works until 11 every night, then gets up and starts all over again. Does this look like “A Plan,” either on the state or federal level?

We’ve been working with public school teachers for 10 years; every spring, we see many of the best teachers leave the profession. They’re mowed down by the long hours, low pay, the lack of support and respect.

Imagine a novice teacher, thrown into an urban school, told to teach five classes a day, with up to 40 students each. At the year’s end, if test scores haven’t risen enough, he or she is called a bad teacher. For college graduates who have other options, this kind of pressure, for such low pay, doesn’t make much sense. So every year 20 percent of teachers in urban districts quit. Nationwide, 46 percent of teachers quit before their fifth year. The turnover costs the United States $7.34 billion yearly. The effect within schools — especially those in urban communities where turnover is highest — is devastating.

But we can reverse course. In the next 10 years, over half of the nation’s nearly 3.2 million public school teachers will become eligible for retirement. Who will replace them? How do we attract and keep the best minds in the profession?

People talk about accountability, measurements, tenure, test scores and pay for performance. These questions are worthy of debate, but are secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly. There is no silver bullet that will fix every last school in America, but until we solve the problem of teacher turnover, we don’t have a chance.

Can we do better? Can we generate “A Plan”? Of course.

The consulting firm McKinsey recently examined how we might attract and retain a talented teaching force. The study compared the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea.

Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do.

And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it’s 1 percent per year. In Finland, it’s 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.

McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a maximum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari are founders of the 826 National tutoring centers and producers of the documentary “American Teacher.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 1, 2011, on page WK12 of the New York edition with the headline: The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries.

Share your opinion and comments with me below: Agree, Disagree, Other Opinion?

Sad boy

Last week, HR 1381, Keeping All Students Safe Act (formerly the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in the Schools Act) was reintroduced to congress. Why is this bill important to you and why should you care? Good Question. Here are some answers:

Why is this Bill Needed?

Every child should be safe and protected while in school. But an investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found hundreds of allegations that children have been abused, and some even died, as a result of misuses of restraint and seclusion in public and private schools, often at the hands of untrained staff. Many of these interventions were used disproportionately on some of our most vulnerable students — children with disabilities. Unlike in hospitals and other facilities that receive federal funding, there are no federal laws that address how and when restraint or seclusion can be used in schools. State regulations and oversight vary greatly and have often failed to protect children. It is also impossible to determine the full extent to which these interventions are used because there is currently no consistent reporting of data.

What would the Bill Do?

1. Prevent and reduce inappropriate restraint and seclusion by establishing minimum safety standards in schools, similar to protections already in place in hospitals and non-medical community-based facilities.
2. Require states to do their part to keep children and staff safe in school.
3. Ask states to provide support and training to better protect students and staff and prevent the need for emergency behavioral interventions.
4. Increase transparency, oversight and enforcement to prevent future abuse.

What Can YOU Do?

• Learn more about Myths and Facts about restraint and seclusion.
• Encourage your favorite professional association or your school district to join the list of supporters.
• Read the full text of this bill.
• Share these links and information with others! Talk, text, FB, or Tweet to get out the word.

Lethal?

While cleaning out my email today, I happened upon a story that I just had to share with you. It’s about behavior, schools, and worrying about the wrong stuff. When we will learn to react to what’s important in education and not over-react to the dribble?

You Decide – I’m interested in your thoughts about this tragic incident.

Originally Posted February 5, 2011 at 6:33 p.m. @ http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/feb/05/no-headline—2-6_thomason/ by Dan K. Thomasson who is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.

The US Department of Education recently unveiled a user friendly way to see data on 16 key educational issues. The CEC Policy Insider reports that the Dashboard is a little light right now on special education and disability data (I concur, but that should improve in the future) and notes that current indicators reported on the Dashboard include:

• High school four-year graduation rates;
• Graduates who took at least one Advanced Placement course;
• College enrollment data;
• Number of States reporting any school districts using student performance in teacher evaluation systems;
• Per pupil expenditure for students in high – low poverty areas

I took the Dashboard for a test drive and was not too impressed. For example, when looking at the Number of states reporting that any school districts are using teacher evaluation systems that include student achievement outcomes or student growth data, the answer was 8. But there were no charts of the data, no state-to-state comparisons, and only a US map showed which 8 states were compliant. No other details were available. On the other hand, when looking at 8th graders Proficient on the NAEP in reading for 2007 and 2009, the state-to-state comparison chart was fairly complete even showing trends for different ethnic groups. 

Over all, in comparison to hunting down educational statistics on http://data.ed.gov/ or http://ies.ed.gov/data.asp, this was a nice simplification. But until more information is pumped into this dashboard, the usefulness is rather limited. With so many companies such as Google, Facebook, and even Walmart mining data, it’s too bad that we have to be stuck with such elementary data analysis tools. 

What are your thoughts on the Dashboard – leave a comment and let me know.