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Behavior Intervention Plans
CARE consultants, under the supervision of Board Certified Behavior Analysts, are able to develop and implement Behavior Intervention Plans derived from the Functional Behavior Assessment process in order to address individual student behavior.
This training is designed to teach your staff how to write efficient and effective Behavior Intervention Plans (BIP). CARE consultants will instruct your staff on how to select evidence-based, data-driven intervention techniques that promote student success.
CARE consultants, under the supervision of Board Certified Behavior Analysts, are able to develop and implement Behavior Intervention Plans derived from the Functional Behavior Assessment process in order to address individual student behavior.
This training is designed to teach your staff how to write efficient and effective Behavior Intervention Plans (BIP). CARE consultants will instruct your staff on how to select evidence-based, data-driven intervention techniques that promote student success.
Our consultants will train staff members to:
- Facilitate the development of a BIP with various team members.
- Use information gathered during the FBA process to develop a Behavior Intervention Plan.
- Identify preventative measures that will serve to decrease the likelihood that the problem behavior will occur. This may include various environmental, academic and behavioral supports.
- Identify replacement behaviors that serve the functional equivalent to the problem behavior.
- Identify a step-by-step plan for teaching the replacement behavior to the student across settings which may include the identification of specific behavior analytic procedures.
- Develop appropriate consequences that will effectively reinforce the use of the newly taught behavior and reduce the likelihood that the student will engage in the problematic behavior.
- Develop a simple data collection system for ongoing monitoring of BIP goals and evaluation of BIP effectiveness.
Charter School Support
Collaborative Autism Resources and Education (CARE), LLC was founded in 2002 by Dr. Janet Schaefer, BCBA-D after serving as a board member and then as a special education consultant to Odyssey Charter School in Las Vegas, NV during its inaugural year in 1999. Dr. Schaefer has worked closely with Clark County School District and the State to assist public charter schools throughout Nevada in meeting the federal and state requirements to ensure that a free and appropriate public education was being provided to students with disabilities. She also served as the charter school representative on the State Special Education Advisory Committee during her tenure as an administrator at Odyssey Charter School and represented the state at federal conferences related to charter school operations. She has presented at several conferences related to serving students with special education needs in a charter school setting.
The model of service delivery that the CARE consultants provide is on a fee for service basis. The charter school chooses from a menu of special education and related services and contracts for those services based on each student’s individualized needs. If the student moves, the service is ended with no additional fee to the charter school. If a student is identified that requires an evaluation to determine if he or she is eligible in the state of Nevada as a student with disability, qualified consultants holding the appropriate licensure in the state of NV can conduct all or part of the evaluation for the charter school. This model has been very effective for charter school operators who can’t afford to hire a full-time or part-time employee. The charter school can contract with CARE to provide those services such as hiring a school nurse to conduct hearing and vision screenings and providing staff training on CPR and/or Universal precautions.
This model saves charter school operator’s time and advertising costs when they are faced with trying to find a related service provider to fulfill requirements of a student’s IEPs in a timely manner. This model has also been effective in providing qualified school-based consultants that are typically hard to fill positions such as: Speech Language Therapists, Physical Therapists, and Occupational Therapists, as well as consultants providing support to students with Low Incidence Disabilities such as those with hearing and/or visual impairments.
Dr. Schaefer and her team of consultants have extensive experience providing special education and related services to public charter schools for over 14 years and understand how to provide services to students with disabilities who are participating in these innovative programs. We look forward to your calls to discuss your charter school’s needs for the upcoming school year.
Classroom Support
Team Teaching
CARE professionals will work side-by-side with the classroom teachers to facilitate seamless application of interventions and methods taught in one of the CARE training sessions. These team teaching sessions are designed to provide a supportive and constructive work environment for the teacher. The CARE consultant will model trained methods and observe the instructor implementing those methods to ensure correct application.
Our goal is to ensure your staff is ready to implement a learning environment that gets students excited and fosters success!
Hands-On Classroom Design
Your staff just received a CARE training which presented new and innovative ideas on classroom design techniques that foster student success! Now what?
CARE is still available to assist your staff in designing their classroom! Our professionals are highly experienced in working with spaces from small classrooms to a vast life skills settings while ensuring the most effective instructional environment is available to your students. Our professionals will work side-by-side with your staff to ensure they make the most of the space they have for instruction. CARE will consider student population, subject matter, IEP goals and much more!
Related Service Personnel Support
This hands-on and interactive training will focus on the paraprofessional’s requirement to facilitate student independence. The key audience will be teacher-paraprofessional teams; however, both teachers and paraprofessionals will individually benefit from the interactive discussion of strategies that scaffold student independence and self-advocacy skills. Trainers will highlight the role of the paraprofessional; teacher-paraprofessional relationship dynamics; guidelines for student and parent interaction; and useful student-focused, age-appropriate strategies and tools.
Collaborative Technical Assistance and Support
What is CTAS?
The Collaborative Technical Assistance and Support (CTAS) Model was designed by CARE Consultants after reviewing the federal scaling-up literature along with the definitions and descriptions provided by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs for what constitutes intensive technical assistance and basic technical assistance.
Using the federal definition as a foundation, the CTAS model was designed to ensure that technical assistance and support would be provided with a clearly defined purpose and set of outcomes. CARE consultants ensure careful attention and planning are utilized to determine how those outcomes can be most efficiently achieved.
Although basic technical assistance (traditional training and support) is effective in many contexts, it may not be sufficient to achieve sustainable classroom / organization / systemic changes in other contexts. CTAS is a multi-pronged, long-term strategy to address this.
The CTAS model includes a purposeful, planned series of activities designed to reach an outcome that is valued by the school district. Intensive TA provided through the CTAS model typically results in changes to policy, program, practice, or operations that support increased recipient capacity and/or improved outcomes at one or more systems levels.
This is typically a multi-year approach that includes the use ongoing evaluation and feedback strategies.
The CARE approach to CTAS allows us to divide the types of training we do into basic technical assistance versus intensive technical assistance activities through the CTAS model. This results in systems change and building capacity within an organization such as a school district.
Why CTAS?
CARE consultants agree that intensive technical assistance services require a stable, on-going negotiated relationship between the agency and the school-district receiving assistance.
Our professionals also recognize that there are times when there are issues encountered in education than can be solved by providing basic technical assistance via information and supports to already knowledgeable and skilled teachers and administrators. Recipients of this type of support take responsibility for making good and effective use of the information and training they receive through workshops and other professional development activities designed to enhance the knowledge of those participants.
- Office of Special Education Program’s (OSEP’s) recommendation: “to provide purposeful, planned series of activities designed to reach an outcome that is valued by the host organization” (June, 2009).
- National Implementation Research Network (Fixsen et al, 2005) concluded: “there is good evidence that successful implementation efforts require a longer-term multilevel approach.”
CARE’s entire multidisciplinary team participates in Collaborative Technical Assistance and Support (CTAS) with individuals, families, schools and organizations across the US.
Facilitating Parent Meetings
Preparing for Parent Meetings
CARE consultants provide support to the school district during parent meetings by providing training to staff on research-based, best practice interventions and data collection procedures that will provide parents all of the information needed to ensure their student is in a productive and nurturing environment.
Our consultants will facilitate the development and implementation of parent trainings provided by personnel who are knowledgeable about topics that are relevant to parents in Spanish and in English. They will also model for staff members how to develop and conduct effective parent meetings and support groups within the public school system.
Parent Training
CARE consultants have developed trainings to address the needs of families who have children with Autism and related disorders; families and caregivers who have children that exhibit challenging behaviors in the home and community settings. Parent trainings are developed for school districts by conducting needs assessments and/or conducting focus groups with the families and then working with them to develop a priority for trainings.
Functional Behavioral Assessment Process
Ever wonder, “Why is he doing that?”
Do you want to better understand the function of a student’s behavior? Let CARE help!
BCBA CARE consultants will conduct or facilitate a team-based Functional Behavioral Assessment process. The goal of the FBA is to identify and operationally define the problem or target behavior. The team then develops a hypothesis for the function of the target behavior and determines whether the target behavior is a skill (can’t do) or performance (won’t do) deficit.
Team will also look at antecedents that may trigger the behavior as well as consequences that may serve to reinforce the behavior. The team will outline various strategies that have been tried with the student and then rate the level of effectiveness. The team will determine if through the FBA process enough information has been gathered to develop a Behavior Intervention Plan or whether there is a need for more data.
CARE’s approach to conducting FBA and BIPs is to facilitate a process that involves parents and other team members who interact with the student or client on a regular and ongoing basis to develop and implement a plan that contains preventative measures, teaching of functional equivalent and/or replacement skills and that uses reinforcement that is likely to increase the student or client’s use of the new skills being taught using evidenced-based practices in a very systematic and highly consistent manner.
Individualized Education Programs
Facilitating IEPs
- Use of Formal and Informal Assessment
- Linking Assessments to IEP Development and Instruction
- Standards-Based Goals and Objectives Training
- Grading Guidance for Students with Disabilities
CARE consultants provide training to teachers, administrators and others involved in the IEP development, implementation and ongoing progress monitoring using a systematic approach that ensure that all staff are conducting assessments (such as state assessments, teacher-made tests, multiple choice tests, work samples, observations, progress reports, curriculum-based measures, rubrics, parent information, observations, state assessment confidential student reports, etc.) that lead to establishing a baseline and a summary addressing strengths and areas of concerns that lead to the development of Present Levels of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance (PLAAFPs).
Our team will share how to develop measurable goals and objectives based on state standards from the PLAAFPs and use ongoing progress monitoring to determine whether adequate progress is being made on the goals and objectives.
The CARE team will also demonstrate how to ensure that the IEP team members can addresses how the student’s disability impacts involvement/progress in the general education setting, as well as its impact on functioning in everyday life; address the need for accommodations/modifications; and provide a description of academic, functional, and transition needs.
CARE consultants can also provide training on how to utilize IEP rubrics across the district so that as IEPs are being completed they are being reviewed to determine if they meet technical adequacy. The use of rubrics provides a consistent and objective way to review IEPs and determine where additional training and technical support may be needed by different teams across the district so that targeted support can be provided and/or feedback on how to improve the technical adequacy of IEPs by various teams and/or individuals.
Understanding and Implementing Accommodations and Modifications for the Special Needs Child
(1 day / 2 trainers)
The proposed training will discuss the important differences between accommodations and modifications to curriculum for students with special needs. This training is hands on and interactive. Trainers will provide and highlight specific examples of differentiating content to meet the needs of the special needs learner.
Guiding the IEP Writing Process
(2 days / 2 trainers)
Federal guidelines governing the IEP process will be a key focus of the proposed training. Trainers will guide educators and administrators through the maze of forms and processes involved in the IEP process, and prepare them to write an effective and legally binding IEP. Finally, trainers will highlight the strategic importance of involving parents as active members of the IEP team.
Positive Behavior Support
PBS is a set of research-based strategies used to increase quality of life and decrease problem behavior by teaching new skills and making changes in a student’s environment.
Consultants from CARE will train district administration and staff on PBS principles and techniques that can be utilized throughout both their classroom set-up and academic lessons. Research has shown that the continued implementation of PBS techniques in the classroom improves student behavior, academic performance, and motivation to succeed.
Positive behavior support combines:
- Valued Outcomes – Positive behavior support (PBS) strategies are considered effective when interventions result in increases in a student’s success and personal satisfaction, and the enhancement of positive social interactions across work, academic, recreational, and community settings. Valued outcomes include increases in quality of life as defined by a student’s unique preferences and needs and positive lifestyle changes that increase social belonging.
- Behavioral and Biomedical Science – Positive behavior support is based upon behavioral and biomedical science. Research in applied behavior analysis has demonstrated the importance of analyzing the interaction between behavior and the environment. From this perspective, behavior is considered purposeful and is under the control of environmental factors that can be changed. Positive behavior support assessment and intervention strategies are based upon research in applied behavior analysis and emphasize the importance of implementing intervention strategies that are effective in natural everyday settings.
- Validated Procedures – Positive behavior support professionals implement system-level interventions to ensure the success of multiple interventions while working within everyday settings. Data collected to evaluate positive behavior support outcomes can include program evaluation measures, qualitative research, surveys, rating scales, interviews, correlational analyses, direct observation, and self-report information.
- Systems Change – Many excellent positive behavior support plans are never implemented because of problems that are related to how a PBS plan was developed. These problems can be related to resource allocation, staff development issues, team building and collaboration, and the extent to which a positive behavior support plan is a good fit for the people who will implement it. Assessment and intervention strategies that consider the larger environment within an organization or home are needed in order to ensure the success of a positive behavior support plan.
PBS Techniques:
- Token Economy – Token economies are based on the principles of applied behavior analysis (ABA) and emphasize the use of positive reinforcement to target behavior change. Token economies help students to visualize progress, accept and work for delayed reinforcement, learn to self-monitor, and learn to regulate behavior.
- Antecedent Interventions – When assessing problem behavior, we might find that a simple change in environment, setting, tone, or task load might have prevented the onset of a given behavior. These are all examples of antecedent interventions. An antecedent intervention is an evidence-based practice in which you change what causes the behavior.
- Teach A Replacement Behavior – Intervention plans should target specific skills that will allow an individual to meet his or her needs in more efficient, effective, and appropriate ways. These might include replacement behaviors and other skills that improve overall functioning (e.g., independent living, social skills, leisure/recreation).
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These are examples of techniques CARE professionals will train MISD staff in implementing. There are a multitude of additional techniques available that will be included in training to help all MISD students increase motivation and academic success. School-wide positive behavior supports (SW-PBS) is an additional training CARE professionals offer for specific campuses over the course of two calendar years.
PBS also promotes staff members working as a team to discuss interventions and successes. Team building among staff members is an integral part to making PBS as successful as possible.
Programming for Students with Significant Disabilities
Current educational practices must be especially responsive to the occupational programming needs of secondary level students with disabilities, including transitional and community placement. CARE consultants recognize secondary level students with disabilities need comprehensive occupational programming and curriculum planning to reach their goals and achieve their full potential.
Today, secondary level students with disabilities face educational challenges posed by the increase in general education standards and differing state graduation and certificate exit requirements. CARE consultants are able to guide educators and parents of secondary students with disabilities through the many challenges confronting them.
Collaborative Autism Resources and Education LLC.
Phone: (877) 712-2735
Email: info@educatorscare.com
