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Pyramid Recording
JC: Welcome, I’m Judy Carta from the University of Kansas, and today I’m representing TACSEI, which is the Technical Assistance Center on Social Emotional Intervention. And what we’re doing today is presenting a webinar that will describe the Pyramid framework that can be used for infants and toddlers. So, we’re going to be describing the Pyramid and talking about how it can be applied in early intervention programs. Joining me in this webinar—my fellow TACSEI drivers are Mary Louise Hemmeter from Vanderbilt University, Linda Broils (sp??), who is the director of Head Start and Early Head Start programs with the South East Kansas Community Action Program, and Kathleen Baggett, who is an assistant research professor at the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project at the University of Kansas. Good morning, everybody. Today, as I mentioned, what we’re going to be talking about is how we’re applying the Teaching Pyramid to programs that serve infants and toddlers and their families.
I want to begin just by saying that this is really a work in progress, and we’ve probably been working on this for about a year now. But we think that there’s enough interest, and it’s an exciting enough concept, that many of you would be interested in hearing about some of our preliminary thinking, in terms of what this model might look like for infants and toddlers. We’re going to be sharing this information in one hour, which you’re listening to and watching in this webinar. But then, on September 9th, we’re going to be having a teleconference, and we’ll be live answering your questions. So, you can join us then, and we can continue the conversation. There’s also an opportunity for you to ask questions and to post them right on the website for this webinar. And so if you’ve got some questions, jot them down and forward them to us. We’ll be looking forward to answering as many of those questions when we get together on September 9th. So, just a little background about what we hope to accomplish in the next hour. What we’d like to do is provide the rationale, give you a little introduction for the Teaching Pyramid. I’m sure that many of you have heard about the Teaching Pyramid a lot, as it’s applied to programs serving preschool aged children. And we thought that some of you might want to learn a little bit more, or get a little refresher on the Pyramid. So, we’re going to begin with that. Then, we’re going to talk about why we think the Teaching Pyramid is a useful model for thinking about social emotional development for infants and toddlers—how we’re translating that for infants and toddlers. And so we’re going to give you that background and then talk about what we think some of the key features of the Teaching Pyramid are, as applied to very young children and their families, and then talk some about some of the promise and the challenges of such an approach.
So, that’s what we’re gonna do in the next hour. I guess I’ll begin by just refreshing you on the Teaching Pyramid. And I’m sure many of you have seen this Teaching Pyramid before, but we see this as another model of multi-tiered support for children. I know many of you have heard about response to intervention for positive behavior support. The Teaching Pyramid is another example of this type of multi-tiered intervention. And probably the most important aspect of the Teaching Pyramid are the bottom two levels, which are nurturing and responsive relationships, and high quality, supportive environment. These are central to the Teaching Pyramid. These are the things that are part of the curriculum or the strategies that promote social and emotional competence for all children in the program. At the next level, for those children who need an additional level of intervention, there’s an individualized approach focusing on caregiver-child interactions. And then for children who need even more support for their social emotional development, there’s a level of intensive intervention. But at the very base of the model, once again, is the strong foundation that’s important in all multi-tiered systems of support. And we think that this is really the most critical element of the Teaching Pyramid, because if there is a strong foundation at this bottom level, then we think that most children won’t need any more intensive intervention. So, this can serve to prevent a lot of challenging behavior—if a core, high quality tier one intervention is in place.
The Teaching Pyramid, just like other multi-tiered intervention approaches, is based on evidence-based intervention at all levels. So, in the Teaching Pyramid, what we’re suggesting is that at the base level the nurturing and responsive environment, the high quality, supportive environment are all based on what we know best in terms of evidence-based practice. That bottom level—that foundation of the model—is for all children, and it promotes universal intervention for all children. For children who need additional support, the middle level—or tier two—is all about secondary prevention to address the needs of children who are at risk for social emotional challenges. So, if children need more support, they’re given more individualized intervention. Then, for children who need more support than what’s available in tier two, there’s a more intensive level of intervention, and this is for children who may have persistent challenge, or more—I think three challenging behaviors.
But of all of those features, probably the most important aspect of the Teaching Pyramid is the foundation. And the foundation is really critical, because if this is in place, if those responsive caregiver interactions are in place as well as the supportive environment that is based one evidence-based practices, we know that most children won’t need more intensive intervention. And so what we concentrate on in the Teaching Pyramid is making sure at the foundation there’s high quality, nurturing, responsive relationships and also high quality environment. I think at this point ML is going to expand on that and talk about how the Teaching Pyramid can be applied—or has been applied—to preschool aged children.
ML: Okay, thanks, Judy. So, just to review what Judy said and to give a little background on the Pyramid—when we were developing the Pyramid approach—the Pyramid Model—we were interested in developing a classroom model that would address those social emotional and behavioral needs of all children in an inclusive classroom setting. And so we were interested in a model that would support the social emotional development of all children, including typically developing children, including children who are at risk, including children with disabilities—and we knew that there were social emotional curricula out there that would support some children, and we knew there were individualized approaches around behavior that would support other children. And what we were really interested in was putting that together in a comprehensive model, such that teachers would have an approach that if they implemented it with fidelity would meet the needs of hopefully all of the children who you might find in an inclusive classroom setting. When we look at the Pyramid, as Judy said—she talked a little bit about--you see a little bit different graphic of the Pyramid right now—she talked a little bit about the levels of the Pyramid, the universal, secondary and targeted levels of the Pyramid. The Pyramid that’s on your screen right now also has a yellow base to it. And after we had done quite a bit of work on this model, we wanted to represent the supports that we felt were necessary for teachers to be able to do this well, and so that’s what the yellow part of the Pyramid represents. We’re not going to talk a lot about that today, but we wanted you to be aware of that being there.
So, when we think about the Pyramid, there are really—I think—two key areas in practice that are key to promotion and prevention, that are key to supporting the social emotional development of all children. The first key area of practice is the focus on promotion and prevention. So, in the Pyramid Model, we have been real focused on how you—we have avoided focusing on reactive procedures. So, rather than focusing on, “What do you do when a problem behavior occurs?” we’ve been focused on, “What are all the things you can do about how adults interact with children?” about how the classroom’s designed, about how we do good instruction in a way that will promote social emotional development and prevent challenging behaviors so we don’t have to have as many strategies, or we don’t have to spend our time reacting to problem behavior. So, our focus has really been on, “Let’s do everything we can to prevent challenging behavior from having.” And some of the practices we think are key to being able to do that—and Judy mentioned some of these—are this notion of positive interactions and relationships. And we think that’s important both in terms of interactions between adults and children, but also interactions between teaching staff, caregivers, families, administrative staff—that we’re focusing on building these positive relationships that not only serve to support children’s social emotional development, but also serve as a context for addressing issues when issues arise in their behavior—in children’s behavior. Another key piece of the promotion and prevention is really this notion of predictable and consistent routines in the classroom. And we think that’s important in terms of supporting children and being able to predict what’s going to happen during their day, to prepare for what’s going to happen during their day, and we do this by having a schedule and a routine and transitions that are well planned, that are predictable, that happen in the same way every day. We do this by making sure that we explicitly teach children the expectations of the classroom routine, teach the children the expectations during transition—and that children get a lot of support around not only learning those expectations, but practicing them across the day. Then, the other key feature is around engaging activities, and this is kind of based on the assumption that when children are engaged in meaningful activities, they’re less likely to be engaged in challenging behavior. So, we work a lot on insuring that there are developmentally appropriate activities going on that are appropriately challenging to the children in the classroom. The other key feature is the focus on intentional teaching of social skills and emotional competencies. This is our—it’s based on our knowledge about the relationship between social skills and challenging behavior, and that often children engage in challenging behavior when they don’t have the social skills or emotional competencies to engage in more appropriate behaviors. We focus on understanding the function of children’s behavior, understanding why children—matching our strategies to the function of the individual child’s behavior, rather than using the same strategies across all children—and then we focus on teaching social skills and emotional competencies across the day, rather than just in response to problem behavior. So, teaching children a problem solving process that they can use across the day, and hopefully that can serve to prevent challenging behavior. And then I think finally related to this part of the Pyramid is a focus on giving children strategies they can use, rather than just splinter skills. We focus on giving them strategies like problem solving strategies, like strategies for handling their emotions, strategies for interacting with their peers—and so we’re really teaching children a set of strategies that they can use across a variety of situations.
JC: Thanks, ML. That was a great overview and a reminder of what the key features of the Pyramid are.
To follow up with that, Linda Broils, as I mentioned, has been the director of a Head Start program that’s been using the Teaching Pyramid for a number of years now. How many years has it been, Linda?
LB: I think we’re starting on our seventh year.
JC: My goodness. That’s great. Linda really has been a champion of the Teaching Pyramid, so I thought it would be helpful to hear from Linda, as a consumer of the Teaching Pyramid in her program, what she has noticed over the years as some of the benefits of the Pyramid Approach. Linda, can you tell us a little bit about some of the benefits you’ve seen in your program in rural Kansas?
LB: Sure. I think one of the first thing I’d have to say is this webinar is only one hour long, so there’s no way I could tell you all of the benefits, because they’re too numerous to mention. I’m just gonna highlight a few.
This model reminds us how important relationships are at all levels, and we know that, but now we intentionally build a relationship from the very beginning. Even before a child enters one of our classrooms, we’ve met twice with the parents. And we do that to gather information about the family and the child. We understand that the parent is the primary educator of that child, and we want to access the knowledge that they have to set up our classroom environment so that we can better support each child’s success. When a teacher knows what a child likes to do, then they can have that activity available, and they can always redirect the child to a favorite activity. So, that’s kind of a little added thing that they have that might help them redirect a child if they’re having a challenging behavior. When the teachers know the children better and they know what they might be able to expect from the child who comes into their classroom, then they can make plans to help prevent any behavior that could be disruptive. But even more than that, they can also know how to develop strategies that would keep them—the teacher—from intentionally reinforcing undesired behavior, because all of us understand what trips our trigger, and if we know that children have a tendency to exhibit some of those behaviors, we can have strategies in place so that we don’t come undone if that happens. We have to step back and look at what our contributions are to challenging behavior. Families tell us about their children, and we have to really use that information to work with the child and help the family know that it’s a partnership—that we can’t do this without them, and we have to count on them to give us information and to help us, because we only have the children for a short amount of time during the day and what happens at home certainly affects what happens in the classroom. There have been times when families have told us they couldn’t hardly wait for school to start so that they would not have their child at home because they couldn’t do anything with them. And, as a result of this model, I think we’ve been able to work with families to better understand child development, and we’ve helped them see that sometimes the children are experimenting, and that’s the way they grow and develop, and that it’s not that they have a bad child. It’s simply challenging behavior. So, many families have told us, “You know, you’ve actually helped me like my child again.”