80. Behavior Management in the Secondary Classroom

Ellie 0:00

Hey there. I'm Ellie, and I'm here with my friend Brittany.

Brittany 0:22

Hello.

Ellie 0:24

And on today's podcast the teaching toolbox, we have a great guest who will give us all kinds of tools to teach students who are learning disabled. Please join me in welcoming Laila Modzelewski.

Brittany 0:36

Hi, how you doing, Laila?

Laila 0:39

Thank you so much for having me.

Ellie 0:40

Laila 1:02

Eight to one to one class has eight students, one teacher, and at least one paraprofessional, although most of the time I usually had two to three.

Ellie 1:09

Brittany 1:41

We've all had students who are learning disabled in our classrooms, whether we were open or self contained, but what kind of disabilities are we going to talk about today? What have you dealt with?

Laila 1:57

I've dealt with so many various disabilities in my classroom in the school I taught for back in New York, 90% of our students had emotional disabilities so that was very challenging, because that brought along a lot of behavior issues. I've dealt with various degrees of autism, ADHD, mood disorders. and sensory input disorders as well.

Ellie 2:18

Now when you say that a lot of your day was spent on behavior management, what types of behavior issues did you find to be the most common, and what strategies did you use to handle them?

Laila 2:27

So work avoidance was a big issue, just general opposition was also a big issue. I've had many students who have O.D.D. oppositional defiance disorder, and so much of their day is just spent trying to not do whatever my paras and I are trying to ask them to do. But all of that was very challenging. Sometimes they would have violent outbursts that would just pause learning for a while, and it was really tough, but I think over the years, it's made me a much better teacher, and what I've taken away is how to strategically ignore certain behaviors and to encourage, like, even the tiniest bit of improvement to get the desired behaviors that I'm looking for.

Brittany 3:07

I actually, I'm gonna interrupt here. I actually had a student who had oppositional defiant, and I kept trying to, you know, get help for him, and they just didn't see it and didn't see it. And then one day, he threw like everything he could find at me, a desk, a chair, markers, folders, everything. And then they recognized it, and they moved him.

Laila 3:36

It could be so challenging.

Brittany 3:37

Yeah. So what kind of support do you use for those kids?

Laila 3:41

So what I really try to do is I focus on the individual needs, and I try to think of things that will boost their engagement. I use lots of visuals in the classroom, lots of praise - I'm my students' biggest cheerleader. Anytime I see anything that they are doing good, anything that I have asked them to do, meeting my expectations, I want to give them feedback. I want them to know that I'm pleased with them. But I also can't interrupt my instruction all day long to say, good job. You're doing a great, great job. So what I've done is I have these little visual traffic lights on their desks, and it's just a red, green, yellow, and inside it says, Good job, check your behavior, or pause and take a breath. And I can just walk over to my students very wordlessly. Point to the green. Let them know, Hey, you're doing a great job. Or if I see somebody might be about to get themselves into trouble, I can point to the yellow or red, and they know to just pause, take a deep breath, check themselves, maybe even ask to go for a walk or go to the bathroom. I also give out praise all day long. So I give out a lot of positive notes home, because I really believe strongly in home school connection can help students succeed.

Brittany 4:53

Yeah, I love the idea of positive notes home. Do you have a quick way to do this? Or a particular system for doing it?

Laila 5:03

I do. I created a bunch of positive behavior notes, and I have seasonal ones, and I have ones with little characters on them, and it just says the student's name, and it'll have like, three check boxes, like, kept their cool today, was kind today, worked hard under pressure, and I can just write their name, check off what they did, and write a quick note and give it to them to put in their folder. I print them out, I cut them up, I keep them on my desk. And my students know where they are, so they get super excited if they see me walking over to my pile of notes. And you know what? It makes me thrilled to give the positive reinforcement. And I've heard from parents that they're just, you know, sometimes when your child's in special ed, all you hear is the negative, and you want to you want to hear the positive. And so what seems so simple to us, just a little note that says, Good job can mean the world to a parent and a student.

Brittany 5:50

I love sending positive notes home, but I never had a good system for doing it, so I rarely did it. So that's a great tip.

Ellie 6:00

What about seating? Is seating something that you find is helpful to have a certain strategy for seating?

Laila 6:06

Oh definitely flexible seating is a real game changer in my classroom. I have wobble chairs, lap desks so they can sit at the rug, stools, and resistance bands on their desks and on their chairs, and it's really fantastic for them. It makes the classroom more comfortable, and it gives them some autonomy with choosing where they get to work.

Ellie 6:25

Can you tell me about the resistance bands? That's not something that I've seen before.

Laila 6:28

Yeah, they're really fantastic. I was so excited, this year I was able to get myself a class set. So they were like, $30 for 30 on Amazon, and they look just like the resistance bands we work out with, except they're a little stronger. So you can wrap them around the back legs of the desk or the front legs of a chair, and the students can prop their feet up on them. It gives them a little bounce, and it gives them that sensory input they're looking for to help them focus.

Ellie 6:55

That sounds like something I could use when I'm working. I find myself like twisting around a lot and things like that. That would be pretty helpful.

Laila 7:02

Yeah when I sit at a student's desk, I always put my feet up on them. It's really great.

Ellie 7:06

That's awesome.

Brittany 7:07

These all are some really great strategies, but let's shift a little and think about resources. When we're looking at resources in the classroom for learning disabled students. What kinds of things should we be looking at?

Laila 7:20

So I always look at the work that I give my students, and I ask myself, Is this accessible for them? Are they going to look at this and are they going to feel completely overwhelmed? Are they going to feel defeated before they even start? And obviously that's the last thing I want. So differentiation is key in my classroom, and a lot of times we hear the word differentiation, and we think, Oh, no, I can't make, you know, so many different versions of this. But it really doesn't have to be that big of a deal. You know, if I'm giving out a graphic organizer, I know some of my students will see, you know, those blank boxes or circles and just be like, ah, what do I write? So they get lines. Other students will get visuals. Other students will get, if it's a multiple choice test and there's four options, I'll cross out one or two to give them less options. It's just all about making the material accessible for them. And like I said earlier, visuals are just so important, whether it's the behavior prompts on the desk or Student Checklist, just so they know, like, let me check on my desk this list. Do I have everything I need to succeed? Because some students will get all set up and ready in the mind zone, and they don't even have a pencil. You know, there we are, back in square one, and they're like, I need a pencil. So if they have that visual checklist, like, what do I need to succeed? What do I need before I get started? They can take ownership of what they need, and they can check themselves.

Brittany 8:44

What about manipulatives? Do you use those at all in the classroom?

Laila 8:48

I do use manipulatives a lot. And when I was first getting started as a teacher, you know, they give you these curriculums and they have all these manipulatives, and I was like, ah, there's no way I'm giving these to these kids, because it's going to be a total disaster.

Ellie 9:01

right?

Laila 9:02

So for my first few years, I really did shy away from it, and then I said, You know what? They're here for a reason. They're going to help my students. I just have to figure out how to manage it. And so now what I do is I just take two or three days before we even use the manipulatives, and I go over, how do we use this? I try to make it fun. I will demonstrate how I use it, you know, if we're doing math and we're doing place value, I will demonstrate how I would use it. Then I give them the manipulatives, and I'll play like a little game with Simon says, This is how I want you to set it up in front of you on the table. We always start here. This is our starting place. And then I'll play a little game, you know? Miss M says, touch the 10s block, Miss M says, touch the hundreds block, can everybody hold it up? And then, you know, after a few days of that, we'll use it all together. I'll do a lesson where we'll use the manipulatives together. And then once I feel like they're confident to use it by themselves, if I see they're working independently and maybe struggling, I can say, Hey, do you need those 10 block? and I can say, you could go get them yourself and use them. So it's all about them showing me that I can trust them using it. And by now, my students know if they show me, they can use it properly, they'll be able to use it more often, and they know that it helps them.

I just bought a ton of fun math and ELA manipulatives because I just wanted to learn more about them and you know what they're for and how they're used and how they're used correctly, because a lot of times I just use them how I felt I needed to use them, and not necessarily, maybe how they were supposed to be used. And so what are your top tips for teaching kids to use them correctly?

Just like I said, make sure the expectation is clear and you're going over the expectations again and again and again. These are not, you know, I have some kids who would get a manipulative and immediately it becomes like a sword or something for them to come off of, and they always get a kick out of me when I act incorrectly. So that's something I do with my classes to set expectations. I will purposely use something the wrong way. Does this look like it's appropriate? I will model the inappropriate way to use it, and they giggle and laugh, and I say, Well, if you do it, that's what you're going to look like. And nobody wants to wants that to happen. So just really practice, practice, practice. Make sure the expectation is clear. Why are we using these tools? Make sure they know why we're using these tools. And what I found is really cool is sometimes my students will think of ways using manipulatives in ways that I haven't thought of. I'll catch them doing something like I have a lot of letter tiles or word tiles, and one time, I caught a student making acrostic poetry with the letter and word tiles. And I never would have thought of that in a million years.

Yeah.

So they can do some really cool things with it, too.

Yeah, everybody's mind goes a little bit different direction, and there's so many things we can learn from just watching what they're doing. So many of the strategies and resource adaptations or accommodations you've talked about sound like they could be implemented or many of them need to be implemented in non special ed classrooms. So we often have 504s that we have to implement, that require accommodations of some kind, or we might be team teaching with special education teachers. I know, for several years, I team taught with a special education teacher, and she ended up with her desk housed in my room, so we were together quite a lot of the time, and, you know, became really the team in that classroom, and that was a really good experience, but sometimes it can be challenging to be working together with potentially different objectives in what we're trying to do with students. Do you have any tips for team teaching?

Yeah, a few years ago, when I made the transition from New York to New Jersey. I actually transferred mid year, and I went from being a self contained Special Ed teacher to being in a team teaching role. And I had never met this teacher before. I just showed up one day in his classroom like, Hi, I'm here. But that experience was really fantastic, because he was teaching a Gen Ed, special ed mix classroom all by himself for half the year. So by the time I got there, he was exhausted and he didn't know what to do, and he was just so happy to have me. So I just went in with the attitude that, you know, you've been here, you know these kids, but what can I do to help these children and make your life a little bit easier? So if you really approach it, you know, with the sense that you are a team, you know you're there to make each other's lives easier, not to make them harder. Our jobs are hard enough. We should all be helping one another. It can really be a great experience. And I loved my time in that classroom, because sometimes we forget how we think might be different than other people and just take it for granted. And he really helped me realize that, like, Oh, I do kind of have some good ideas here. And then he had great ideas that really helped me out. I remember one time we were getting the kids ready, we were preparing a test for the students, and it was a very curriculum based test, and he looked at me, and he said, How are your students going to access this - they can't read on grade level, how are we going to make this happen? They're never going to pass. And I said, Oh, come on, we're going to cross out some of those multiple choice answers. We're going to add some visuals, we're going to take out this extra wording that's here, and we're just, we're going to make it happen. They're going to do great. And I remember he looked at me and he was like, You're a genius. And I was like, not really, not. But it was so funny, these things that I do every day that just don't even cross my mind,

normal. It's normal for you.

Yeah, blew his mind. But on the flip side, he was doing things with the kids that, you know, I tend to hold on tightly. I want my students to succeed, and so I, you know, I'm a mom, and sometimes I do tend to hover. And my experience working in that classroom really told me, back off, give them space. If they don't fail initially, you know, they might not have the skills to persevere and succeed in life, in the future. So what my takeaway from that experience too, is just back up a bit, you know, Let them struggle. Let them figure it out. They're gonna be okay, and if they do need help, they're gonna come to me. They're not just gonna sit there, they're gonna come and ask me for help. So it was just a great experience. I really - now I'm in a school that has a combo of gen ed classes and special ed classes, and you know, my interactions with the gen ed teachers in the faculty lounge, you know, I really find that I get a lot from them because they think in a totally different way than I think.

That sounds like a great experience and some excellent ideas in there. I only once ever had a team teaching scenario once in my teaching experience, and we didn't plan together or anything. He just showed up every fifth period, and we worked together, but we bounced ideas off each other well. He came in with the same kind of mindset that you came into that classroom with, and really helped me, and we worked well together for those kids. So that's very nice to hear your experience.

Any other thoughts that you'd like to add before we wrap up?

I just want to encourage teachers that you know, even through those bad days, because we all have them, there are days where I'm teaching and I can see that nobody's paying attention to me, and I just think to myself, Should I just stop talking? And it's usually at those moments I don't let myself stop talking, and about five or six minutes later, somebody will come up with - one of my students will volunteer and say something, and I'm like, wow, you've got it. You were paying attention. So just persevere, because you never know when that Aha moment's going to happen. And just keep going. And you know, if something you're doing isn't working, try something else. You know, just don't be afraid to be flexible. My school district's motto for the year is throw the Play Doh at the wall. So don't be afraid to throw the Play Doh at the wall and try something new, because you just never know where that great idea is going to come from.

Totally agree, that's awesome.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today and giving our listeners some actionable tips and some dependable tools for their teaching toolbox. Where can our listeners find you?

You can find me on my website, www.modzbylaila.com, or at my Teachers Pay teacher store Modz By Laila. Thank you so much for having me here today. It was fun.

Oh, awesome. We will add that information to our show notes so our listeners can find you.

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Bye.