06/05/2024
The Critical Staff Skills Needed to Teach At-Risk Youth
📚✨ At Atlantic Academy, we understand that to help our kids meet their goals, we must prioritize teaching our staff the skills they need to be successful with our students. In brief, here is what we aim to teach our staff:
1. Understanding Behavior: Identify and recognize the conditions and variables that contribute to behavior challenges. Understanding leads to effective and personalized care and treatment.
2. Building Positive Relationships: Engage with empathy, validation, reflective listening, and a high ratio of positive to corrective feedback. Avoid coercion.
3. Managing Disruptions: Use techniques like prompting, pivoting, and differential reinforcement to evoke appropriate behaviors and minimize problem behaviors. Avoid coercion.
4. Effective Reinforcement: Utilize the principles of deprivation, immediacy, size, and contingency to increase the effectiveness of our feedback and programmed reinforcement. Avoid coercion.
5. Teaching Critical Skills: Utilize behavior teaching skills like modeling, setting expectations, skillful prompting, and role-playing to optimize learning. Avoid... you guessed it...
6. Responding to Escalation: Using our own self-regulation skills to effectively address crises, maintain safety, and honor functional communication. Avoid the C!
7. Professional Flexibility: Learn to adapt to curve balls that life throws beyond our control.
8. Data Recording: Maintain accurate data tracking and incident reporting using a functional-contextual approach, and to ensure data-based decisions are made (i.e., follow the hard evidence versus the stars 🙂)
Together, these skills create a supportive and effective learning environment, helping our students thrive and achieve greater opportunities and choices in life.
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