Transcript of 12/8/16 AEDY Webinar:
Behavioral Assessments and Support Plans
Ryan Korn:Hey everyone, we're going to get started now. Today we are getting together to discuss behavioral assessments and behavioral support plans. If we could get a show of hands from everyone that they could hear me right now that would be great.
Dana Klouser:John click down right beside ... Show of hands please.
Ryan Korn:Show of hands please, just to make sure that everyone's hearing us.
Dana Klouser:Not good, up there’s one, see the bar to the right of it, John? All the way to the far right. Slide that up and down beside the names, yeah right there, yeah, perfect.
Ryan Korn:All right, it looks like everyone's hearing us, great. All right, well just to introduce all who's here, it's Ryan Korn with PDE - AEDY team.
Dana Klouser:And Dana Klouser.
John Esposito:John Esposito.
Ryan Korn:All right, so we're not going to have any documents to share or anything like that today because we just going to be discussing the concepts and procedures of using behavioral assessments and behavioral support plans. If you have any questions throughout please don't hesitate to ask the questions, but he will address all of those at the end once we got through everything.
Dana Klouser:Then Ryan has a special surprise for everyone.
Ryan Korn:Yes, if that's what you want to call it, okay. At this point, I'd like to discuss, we'll start off with behavioral assessments. For those of you who have been at the trainings, you've heard us talk about that behavioral assessments are a mandated aspect of AEDY. It's just what's written in SPACIA at this point, so we need to make sure that every program is utilizing them now.
To go above and beyond just the mandated administration of a behavioral assessment, what I'd like to talk to everyone about is the useful aspects of a behavioral assessment in that these assessments are designed to identify the triggers that identify behavioral symptomology of students to give the program a better way of handling situations, much like many of you have seen in FBA's with special education students and if you've worked in the mental health field. These assessments can be very useful in identifying more specific target behaviors and then also, goals that you can address to address certain behaviors.
For those of you, like I said, who have worked in special ed or even just seen FBA's, special ed goal planning with FBA's, you'll see that they are addressing behavior, a specific target behaviors and then creating goals to address those behaviors. Using this behavioral assessment, not as just something to complete but more as a tool to learn more about the student. The other really useful part of behavioral assessments and we've seen some programs have great success with this, is re-administering those behavioral assessments over a period of time.
We typically recommend every six to eight weeks or what you would know as a marking period to have it so that you're reviewing behavior, academics, attendance on at the same time, but you re-administer a behavioral assessment. Many of them like the BAS, the Behavior Intervention Monitoring Assessment System 2 (BIMAS-2™), SSMS, there's a lot of different ones out there that will actually be able to show progress, whether it's lack of progress or positive progress over time so that way when you're sitting down with that student to review their behavior, you can tangibly show them the results of how they've been doing.
So that it's no longer a power struggle during that meeting and a student saying that they're doing great and they go back and the team is a saying, "Well, actually, you still have some things to work on." Using that behavioral assessment as that measurement tool you could show them in a tangible nature what is actually going on and how they've been doing with regards to their behavior.
The other big piece to this is that it can be used as something as you put as a tool in your formal periodic reviews if you'd like to use it at that point. It has a lot of different uses. I know that you have a list currently on the guidelines and there will be one on the future guidelines of ones that the department has already reviewed and approved.
However, what I'd like to also state to everyone that doesn't mean that you have to go on that list. If you choose, if your program would like to use a behavioral assessment that is not on the list provided by the department, all you would need to do is provide the documentation also on what you'd like to use, allow us to look, review the tool you want to use and make a determination.
Basically, what we're looking for is that it is behavioral assessment in nature. It is evidenced-based. We've already done this with a couple programs that can attest that it was a really simple process. They provided us with the documentation. Like I said, as long as it's a behavioral assessment, it's evidenced-based and supported, it shouldn't be an issue.
The teams just didn't want to go through making a comprehensive list to cover all the behavioral assessments that could potentially be used by anyone at any given point. This point, I guess I could take some questions if anyone has so far? John, if you could open up the question box, before we go into talking more about the behavioral goals as well. If you drag it out, it will expand.
Dana Klouser:Click all the way up where it says questions. If you click on that you can pull it out of the whole list and put it on the middle and make it larger. Right there, grab it and drag it.
Ryan Korn:Okay, is there a PowerPoint from what you're presenting? No, there's no PowerPoint. This is basically, our opening up the discussion to it. A lot of this information is what we do in our AEDY 101 that we've been doing throughout the state. If you have any specific questions, please let us know.
For those of us knew to AEDY, we'll be sharing an example of what a behavioral assessment looks like. As far as the behavioral assessment tools themselves, we've seen them doing site visits. We do not purchase the behavioral assessments and that would be really the way it would look like. We do have a list that's available on the current guidelines and will be there for the future guidelines that you could actually pull from that list and look at them.
For those of you who are not familiar to AEDY and have worked in education for a while, having most likely seen an FBA, which is a Functional Behavioral Assessment, you're going to have seen what you would typically see from a behavioral assessment, which is going to identify specific target behaviors, triggers that actually the student is responding to and also, potentially be used to identify positive triggers that the student responds well to in responses and interventions that have worked well.
Where is the list of acceptable resources located? If you go on the PDE website keyword and you search AEDY, you'll find the first link is the AEDY art teams website within PDE. On that website, you'll see the guidelines down near the bottom. If you click on those and go near the end of those guidelines, there will be a list provided there of ones that are already pre-approved. Like I said, if you have one that you want to use that is not on that list, all you need to do is shoot us an email, give us a phone call and we can discuss it, review some of the resources and then let you know if it would be approved at that point and then we would add it to that list.
Would you need am PTR for a behavioral assessment or just FBA? You can certainly use an FBA for a behavioral assessment. It is a behavioral assessment and we've talked about this with regards to special ed students and I guess I can address that a little bit here now. If you have a special education student that's just received their NFBA, based on the behaviors that you're looking to place in AEDY and it happened recently, you can use the FBA as a part of what would be that student’s behavioral assessment going into AEDY.
This is case-by-case because like I said, it should be the FBA that occurred in response to this new behavior that you're looking to placement and it should be a recent FBA, so that it's actually useful for the current behaviors that are going on. If it was one that was created last year, then we wouldn't want to use something like that because it's not going to help any of the programs. Could you provide a hyperlink for the location of the site?
Dana Klouser:Site.
Ryan Korn:Site, okay, yeah, we could pull up the website. John is going to pull it up right now while I start talking about some of it and he's going to pull it up in the background.
Dana Klouser:I don't know if he's going to show it though?
Ryan Korn:All right, while he pulls it up I'm just trying to see if we can look at a couple more questions. Oh sorry, I'm just going to pull the screen up for ya real quick. Okay, if you guys could give me a quick show of hands that you're seeing the screen and I have right now?
Dana Klouser:The PDE website is what it should be.
Ryan Korn:What you guys are seeing is the PDE website. What I did is I went into the search box and did AEDY and the first link that you see here, this is the AEDY website. If you want to bookmark that that will really help you out. On this website, this is where we share a lot of our documentation. On the right side, you can see our parent flyers, SharePoint information, our calendar of what we're doing in the field.
If you scroll down and you'll see the guidelines, 2013-15 guidelines. The guidelines that our team has revised is currently in the review process through the higher ups at PDE and hopefully, will be out as soon as possible. If you click on those guidelines, it will actually pull up the current AEDY guidelines. If you look through, and I usually just do control F, and then you can search for different things. See, get these things out of my screen.
Dana Klouser:When you get a chance there Ryan, you probably could do a demonstration on how to bookmark? Maybe everybody doesn't know how to do that?
Ryan Korn:All right, so here on Behavioral Assessment Tools, you'll see a list of the behavioral assessments. Like I said, this is not a comprehensive list. You will have a larger updated list and the new guidelines, but it just gives you some of the ideas of what used to be approved. We will have a more comprehensive list. Even some of the ones I referenced today are not here, so like I said, if you're using one and you're not sure if it's approved, just reach out to us and we can certainly help you out with that. It will not be a problem at all.
Let me just scroll up and make sure I got on the questions that people were asking? Who is qualified score of record behavioral assessment results? That's a great question. Typically, it should be the person conducting the counseling in your program because they are the ones that already at that point certified and they are qualified to conduct mental health and behavioral health interventions, so they should be conducting it.
However, you should look at what behavioral assessment you're looking to use because the actual companies who design these will identify they feel are qualified individuals to administer it. Some of them also request that people do trainings, so they can effectively administer the behavioral assessment. I really do encourage that. If you can get some kind of certification and training from the companies, like I said BIMAS-2™so that you understand all the tools that are available in using that assessment.
See, just making sure I answered everyone's questions? The SSBS-2, so that somebody is using that? Yes, that is one of the ones that is approved. I think that's all the questions we have right now. All right, so, looking forward to the behavioral goals. Now that you have conducted a behavioral assessment a large part of AEDY, the basic core pieces of it are creating behavioral goals.
I'm a former social worker working in the former DPW-DHS world where treatment goals and behavioral goal planning was a large planning aspect of what we did, so today I'd like to review some creative ways that you can create goals that will help meet a lot of the needs of the program and the students that we're serving.
Just to make sure everyone understands to start off is that behavioral goals are the sole determining factor for a student returning to regular education settings. Therefore, you're going to create goals based on one of those seven reasons for placement and those goals will determine when the student is ready to return. We get a lot of questions about how to address academic issues and how to address attendance issues if the student is not placed for truancy. I've been talking about people how to get really creative with goals so that you can address some of those issues, while it's still being a behavioral goal based on the student’s reason for placement.
For instance, you're having a large issue with the student not completing assignments and the program was to address it, but you can have academic goals, but they can't be a reason for the student to stay. From my case management days, if you would take that behavior, which is not completing course assignments and look at it more from the behavioral standpoint of what behavior is going on and it could be that the student's not following directions from the teacher, the student is talking back to the teacher, whatever that behavior might be that precedes the not completing work assignments that's what you would want to create a goal for.
So the student will follow the direction of the teacher or prompts, whatever it might be that you're trying to address X amount of times a day or X amount of times a week that is essentially addressing that assignment issue, which is an academic issue, but are addressing it through the behavioral goal. It's not making an “academical” behavior, but it is addressing academics through using and looking at the behavioral problems or behavioral issues that student is having.
The other thing I said to people is that you can also tie in attendance into a behavioral goal. Through effective measurability, the way you could do that is if there is a certain behavior you want the student to work on you can have it documented that the student will complete such and such behavior four to five days a week. Essentially, what you've done at that point is if the student only attends three days a week they can't effectively meet their behavioral goals due to in attendance issue.
Ultimately, they should be tied together in a certain way in that sense because you want the student to be present so they can work and address the behaviors that are going on. If you use measurability to your advantage, you can essentially address all the behavioral consents you might have, whether they be behavioral, academic or attendance.
Now that's not to say that we want you writing academic goals and then holding students for it. It has to be tied to a corresponding behavior. You can't have a student held in a program because they don't have all C's or above and a student can't remain in placement for and attendance goal if they're not there for truancy. What we want to make sure is that when we're writing these goals that they still are based on a poor behavior that is based on one of those seven reasons that the student was placed. They have to constantly tie back to that piece to it.
Now if you really want to get good at writing these goals, I encourage you to reach out to community-based mental health organizations such as MFP, family-based and if you have these members, these providers open with your kids, have them come in and help write those goals during that admission because working in that department of human services field, where you don't get funding if you don't write the goals effectively enough, these people have become experts in writing very creative goals to address the students' behaviors with a lot of measurability and very individualized.
If you don't have those people available, look to your counselors and if you still are having difficulty I have no problem with people reaching out to me. I can certainly discuss some potential ideas for goals to address a behavior that you're not sure on how to put it into an individualized or measurable goal.
Now the team does have a behavioral support plan, a behavioral goal plan that is a draft format that you guys can have if you like and we can certainly I guess as we said, everywhere we go if you'd like any of our documents, please just shoot us an email and we can have those sent out to you. You can use those for what you need to do, but it is not something you have to do. You can create your own documents to document your goal plans. Ours is just best on all the best practice pieces of what we feel should be present in there.