Classroom behavior doesn’t seem to get much media attention until bullying results in serious injury, a student suicide, or the prosecution of a child as an adult on a murder charge. At that point, forces beyond the school district take over and what is already an educator’s worst nightmare can turn into public outrage.
Schools are finding that technology can be an important element in making their behavior programs more proactive from an administrative and an instructional perspective. Applications that streamline data collection and analysis and that engage students in positive social interactions can turn the tide in a school’s anti-bullying efforts.
The challenge is matching behavioral objectives with the right technology. To leaders in the Dallas Independent School District (TX), the goal was getting better at identifying effective points of intervention, perhaps even before an actual bullying incident could take place. At the same time, there was the challenge of dealing with a tight budget and the demands on the time of classroom teachers who have more than behavior problems to deal with.
“You don’t go from being a model student to ending up in a DAEP [disciplinary alternative education program],” says Suzie Fagg, executive director of student services for the Dallas ISD. “This is a progression, and when you’ve got technology, it’s easier to see that progression and intervene before it gets to a point where you’re sending a child off to a DAEP.”
Describing her district’s Student Welfare Freedom From Bullying plan as “one of the most comprehensive anti-bullying policies in the country,” Fagg says the effort is directed at preventing and reducing acts of bullying before they ever have the chance to get out of hand. Dallas ISD already collected reports on bullying incidents, but the data were disparate, not allowing for the kind of analysis Fagg believes will help schools identify problem areas.
“All of the data, when you take it together and look at trends, that is what your school environment is all about,” Fagg says. “If you have a lot of incidents of bullying going on and you know that a lot of it’s happening [for instance] on this stairwell, then you need to begin to address the issue of that stairwell. How can you deploy staff there? How do you educate staff about what they need to be looking for? How do you educate students on what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior?”
Real-Time Data
To implement her anti-bullying policy, Fagg turned to Review360, a hosted software program that helps educators collect relevant data and improve student behavior. The data collection begins with a customized incident-reporting form that matches the process educators were already using at Dallas ISD, but a host of pull-down boxes were added to the online form to ensure consistency of incident description and streamline reporting. The form standardizes the language used to describe behavior, eliminating the need to interpret subjective language–making the data easier to take action on.
“We have an office of student discipline, so they collect discipline reports. But unless you act on those reports, they’re just numbers,” Fagg says. “It’s not just discipline referrals. It’s about using the referrals and the data from those referrals to maybe improve on the operation of our schools, as well as the relationships between our students and our staff.”
Fagg sees the new technology as a way to intervene at the very outset rather than after the fact. “If it’s a paper referral, you stick it in a folder,” she says, “but if we can see [real-time] data on this student and say, ‘This student hasn’t acted out at all, and now all of a sudden we’re seeing these referrals come through,’ then we need to intervene before it’s too late.”
“We know what works with kids with behavioral problems,” says Stewart Pisecco, a behavioral psychologist and the creator of Review360. “Our biggest challenge isn’t coming up with what works, but rather how to get what works implemented consistently in the schools.”…
– Margo Pierce