Setting Up Distance Learning for Behavioral Success

Cindy Lopez:
Hi, I’m Cindy Lopez and I’m happy to welcome you to our Voices of Compassion podcast series, where we hope you’ll find a little courage, some connection and a whole lot of compassion. So today we’re talking about setting up distance learning for behavioral success. So, how do you effectively support your child? And how do you deal with behavioral issues that come up? Our guest today is Jody Miller, she’s a behavioral expert and head of Esther B. Clark Schools at CHC. We’re excited she’s here with us today and she’s going to share some tools and strategies that you can use from her years of experience in working with kids with social and behavioral challenges

Thanks so much for being with us here today. How do you think kids are actually doing with distance learning right now? What have you been hearing from parents and teachers?

Jody Miller:
Yeah, at Esther B. Clark school, we’ve kind of got a mix of kids that are doing okay, and kids that are doing not so well. And I think that as we’ve moved through the last many, many months, part of the reason kids are doing a little bit better is because we’ve made a lot of adjustments to our platform: a lot of communicating with families and really trying to pinpoint what the struggles are within the home and how kids are accessing remote learning and distance learning. And we’ve made a lot of those adjustments over time, so it’s made some improvements for some kids. But we still have a lot of kids that are struggling, struggling with just being able to access the technology to log on to the platform. You know, we have students that have some executive functioning issues and just logging on and finding the Google platform assignment and then completing that is a struggle. And so really, without the support of an adult, it’s really, really difficult for a lot of students to access distance learning, at least the students that we’re working with. And at Esther B. Clark most of the students have some emotional challenges and some behavioral challenges and so that just is another barrier to them being able to access those platforms.

Cindy Lopez:
You talked about adjustments that you’ve been able to make to the platform. Can you give a few examples of that?

Jody Miller:
So one of the biggest things we did was we scheduled everything in a calendar. And I know that sounds fairly simple, but we really needed to make it as organized as possible for our families so that they’re able to access the Zoom links, and there are multiple Zoom links because we may have the classroom teacher uh with you know, the math and language arts Zoom links, but then we have all of the therapeutic services that students are receiving. So there are multiple Zoom links and multiple things that we’re encouraging and hoping that kids attend uh on a daily basis and making that as organized as possible was one of the adjustments that we made.

We also tried to offer as much support in those individual sessions as possible. So when students were struggling, not only having the support of the adult in the home, but also an extra support from a staff member, maybe we would have the student go into a breakout room and do one-to-one intervention for that student that’s struggling. We also did a lot more training of the parents on the platform. And we initially did that when we went into shelter in place in March. And as we kind of moved through those months and made some adjustments, we needed to retrain and retrain and retrain. And so, we also took advantage of the short period of time that we had kids returned to campus, and we actually went through a whole training process with the students, while we had them on campus with us. So that’s been you know helpful, really communicating with our families, offering more training opportunities so that they’re fully understanding the platforms that we’re using.

Cindy Lopez:
That’s great, I think it’s really important. You mentioned the piece about training the parents. And were parents pretty receptive to that?

Jody Miller:
Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that’s been just remarkable in this whole process of the pandemic and us having to go into remote learning. Our families have really just responded in the most positive way. And they already have a lot on their plate with students that are having emotional or behavioral challenges and obviously this is just putting more on them. And so what we found is, you know, we’re just trying to communicate as much as possible with our families, making sure that they feel that they can always reach out to us. I hold a bi-monthly town hall so that they have an opportunity to communicate with me. Obviously they’re still engaging in family therapy which is one piece of Esther B. Clark that is probably much different when we’re talking about kids being able to access distance learning and online platforms. The students that we have are receiving a lot of interventions and a lot of therapeutic interventions, that many kids that are in distance learning right now don’t have access to. When we care for our families and we care for our students, the ability for them to actually access those platforms in this kind of different way of learning, they’ve been more available to do that.

Cindy Lopez:
Wow, it sounds like you and your staff have really  thoughtfully approached the whole distance learning thing and really set up your students for success as much as possible and parents too, which is a big piece of that. So you just talked a little bit about platforms and more kinds of systems and school-wide things that you’ve done. Let’s take it down to like the individual student for a minute. How do you as a parent create a learning environment that’s similar to school or conducive to learning at home?

Jody Miller: Yeah, that’s a really good question and uh I had my own experience with my son Nash. I have a five-year-old that went into kindergarten this year and you know, prior to him even entering kindergarten, when we were in shelter in place and he wasn’t able to be at preschool, we saw a significant deterioration of his emotional wellbeing, things that we had never seen him do. He started to be very dysregulated, his body, his emotions and you know it basically boiled down to everything was off, right, his schedule, his routine, his ability to interact with friends, which is a big deal for a four and five-year-old and at any age really, even adults.

And so we had to make some changes for him, even before he went into kindergarten, so that he was being better cared for in our home. And the two most significant changes we made for him was structuring his day and we actually used an app, just an iPad app where we were able to use really kid-friendly icons and we did a mixture of you know sit down activities versus really active movement activities. And we were able to add in some learning and that really significantly helped. And the other thing we did was in that schedule, making sure that we had ample opportunity for him to exercise and exercise through play. And I know that sounds really simple, but when you have, you know, two parents at home working, and you’re just trying to make it, you often forget about some of the things that you need to do to care for your, your own child and I work in education and I had to kind of take a step back and say okay, what am I doing to support my five-year-old. And then, you know, he went into kindergarten and there’s been more support obviously cause he’s got a team now of people to help him.

There are lots of things that we can do to think about how to make sure kids are in a space to access learning. And the first thing is actually designing a space for them to do that. We want to make sure that we have a space designated for learning – that it’s you know very limited or you’ve eliminated any distractions that are present. And that means noise to the best of your ability and also just items, right. We don’t want to have a learning space for a student and they have access to their video games or all of the toys that they may have in their room. We want to try to limit that, we want to make the space as similar to a classroom setting as possible. We want to make sure that there’s adequate lighting and make sure that there’s some energy in that room by adding and offering lighting that’s appropriate for learning. We want to make sure that the space that a student has to work on is large enough so that they can spread out and remain organized and that they have the materials that they need available. Um and again, these are things that happen every day in a classroom setting, but you have a team of professionals typically working through and making sure all these things are present. And we’re not always thinking about that when we’re at home. Um, and we’re certainly not always thinking about it when uh the adults or the grownups that are available are also working and also under a significant amount of stress. And so, I think bottom line, it’s not easy, it’s not easy for anyone.

So the other things that we can do is look at the types of seating that are available. When we’re doing you know sit down assignments, we want to make sure there’s a proper chair available where the student can have his or her feet on the floor. Um and they’re able to sit up straight, but when there’s a more relaxed activity like reading, they could be sitting in a beanbag chair, something like that. So you want to look at your seating again, kind of keeping in mind that we are trying to replicate a somewhat of a school type learning environment.

We also like I said before, what I did with my own son is trying to set some routine, some schedule so that the student regardless of age really knows what’s expected of them throughout the day. Hopefully your learning team, your academic team from school has supplied that, but within that schedule, you can actually add and enhance to make sure that they’re getting breaks, those opportunities for movement and exercise, obviously opportunities for food and drink and snack and restrooms, all of those things that are built in. And I think depending on obviously the age and whether a student has a disability, your involvement as a parent or an adult is more or less in those situations. Some students are able to do that and some students are going to need more guidance with that.

Cindy Lopez:
Thank you for tuning in! Just a note, before we continue on with today’s episode, we hope you’re following us on social media, so you don’t need to wait a whole week between episodes to get engaging, inspiring and educational content from CHC. Our social handles are linked on our podcast webpage at podcasts.chconline.org.

If there are one or two things that you say to parents, like if you can’t do everything, at least do this one thing or these two things, would that be?

Jody Miller:
Yeah. I certainly think that having a schedule is highly important, just to keep everyone as organized as possible, but also to let the learner know, this isn’t you know academics all day; you’re going to have opportunity to move about and I also think that should be reviewed at the beginning of the day so the learner knows exactly you know kind of what’s coming and what’s up ahead, that will relieve and eliminate some of the stress that may be caused by you know just the day of learning. And that’s a really good you know strategy to always have in place. And I think, you know what I said about my son is having those opportunities for breaks and exercise. Even as adults, we need to, you know, get up from the computer and take a walk, maybe get some fresh air.  Certainly when we’re in a stressful situation and kind of feeling the effects of not being able to I guess engage in our typical day, what we’ve been accustomed to prior to this pandemic, we need to be able to get up and move about, exercise and reenergize, and that helps with coming back and be able to refocus and attend to the activity that may be up next. So I would say those two things: breaks, exercise and making sure the schedule is in place and reviewed.

Cindy Lopez:
Thank you, that’s great, and I can’t believe that Nash is already five years old.

Jody Miller:
I know, he’s five years old and he looks about seven years old though. So he’s a very tall little guy or big guy.  He’s doing pretty well. He got his first report card and he had meeting expectations for every area with the exception of resilience. So that was the one area. And I don’t know if that’s the, some of the effects of just what’s happened over the time that we’ve been in shelter in place and the pandemic, but it’s certainly something he struggles with, and it’s much more visible in the home environment than it is at school. We actually talked to the, you know, the school about how he was navigating through you know times of frustration. At home, it looks much more dysregulated.  At school he’s down on himself. He doesn’t want to lose, you know, he wants to be perfect, that’s the one area that he needs you know more support in.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah  well, I can’t imagine trying to be a parent and think about a kindergartner, right? A kindergartener and distance learning, like just doesn’t go together. So you know, thinking about your own experience as a parent and thinking about what you just shared with parents about kind of how to set up a learning environment at home. So what if parents have done all those things? What if they’ve created the structure and the routines, and they’re still seeing some problem behavior, do you have some advice for them?

Jody Miller:
Yeah, I think that the first thing, if you can, is to reach out to your learning team – reach out to the teachers, the staff at the school and see what extra supports or how you guys could just strategize together to make maybe changes within the schedule or changes within the assignment. I mean, sometimes you have to look at, you know, the volume, the rigor of what’s being offered, taking into account we’re in the these times that are just uncharted and are difficult for our kids. And so maybe we need to take a little bit of a step back so that we get some success and momentum going. See if there’s anything that you maybe don’t have in place or if you have it in place that you may alter it or change it a little bit based on your child or your learner.

You know, If you’ve done all the things that you know to do the most important thing to do is actually ask your child, if possible. So you know, kids are really insightful and when they’re able to communicate and you can ask them what’s going on, what’s not working, what’s working, that feedback is invaluable. At EBC school, we do this all the time with our kids um it’s one of the most fruitful pieces of you know designing a plan or designing a program that we could ever have in place, is to make sure that we’re getting information from the student, hearing their voice, hearing what they say is troubling or challenging. And then trying your best to implement that, that also will help with the buy-in from the student, if they feel like they have some say in what’s going on in their education and in their lives, they’re more apt to, you know, to participate in that, so I think that’s the most important thing if possible, right. I know there’s students with disabilities that may not be able to participate in that way, but if it’s possible, that that’s a great strategy to use.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, that’s interesting that you say that because a lot of the experts that we have had as guests on our podcast series have also said the same thing   you know, ask your child. Dr. Elliott said that when he was talking about ADHD and Tony Cepeda said that as he was talking about creating mental wellness. And that’s so funny cause I think that’s one of the things we don’t think about is like, why don’t you ask your child?

Jody Miller: And it’s also a way to validate their feelings, right. We want to make sure that they feel like their voice is included, especially when it’s something about them.

Cindy Lopez: Yeah, and it’s so much easier to implement strategies or whatever that they’ve had some input on. When we started this way back in was it March or April, we all thought, okay, we’re going to do this for a month or whatever, right. And we don’t know, what it’s going to look like going forward. So given all that, like you know, you can kind of keep it up for a month, but how do you keep it up for a year? How can they kind of keep up any positive momentum they’ve got going.

Yeah, so I think, you know, trying to figure out what’s working and continuing to do that. And it may not be exactly what you expected and that’s okay, you know, that that’s okay because you want to continue the success. You want to continue the momentum that you have. Um, and we use this term a lot at EBC school, just to kind of frame how we need to approach situations when things aren’t working, that we go back to the last successful step.

And then the other thing I would say is kids and just people in general really thrive off positive reinforcement. So if you want to keep the momentum going, you want to make sure that you’re telling your learner that they’re doing really good work, as often as you can. And we use a five to one ratio at EBC school, in that we try to do five positives to every one corrective, um so that we ensure that we’re going to hopefully see those behaviors that we want to see repeated over and over and over again because we’re acknowledging them when they’re occurring. So to keep the momentum going, go back to the last successful step and use positive reinforcement.

Cindy Lopez:
So Jody, you talked about the five to one thing, which is really important. And what if as a parent like, I’m sure you’ve heard this any number of times, like I can’t find five things to be positive about, like what do I do?

Jody Miller:
Yeah, and one of the things I’ll share with you, Cindy is, A Hundred Ways to Say Good Job, because we don’t want to repeat good job, good job, good job, we want to make it really specific to the learner, but I promise you, you can find things that the student is doing well. It may not be exactly, what you’re requesting, but there are things throughout the day in that moment whether it’s sitting nicely, trying something that’s really hard, all of those things are things that we can use as a verbal positive reinforcement. But sometimes you have to be creative and sometimes we have to come at it as our goal is to find things that the student is doing rather than looking at the things that the student is not doing. But I promise you, you can find many things because our kids are doing many, many things throughout the day that are exactly what we want them to continue to be doing.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, and I think it’s really good if you’re intentional about that, you’re kind of looking as a parent or a teacher even, you’re looking through a different lens and it makes you focus on the things that you want to be focusing on, so.

Jody Miller:
Right, and we talk about with our staff and our families that you kind of have to think about, um, how am I going to exaggerate this to get this behavior? This thing that my child is doing, how am I going to have this happen over and over and over again? Because it’s what it is, exactly what I want them to do. So we have to exaggerate sometimes that positive feedback that we’re giving. We have to contrive those situations and we have to exaggerate those situations so that we hopefully set it up for those behaviors to be repeated in the future.

Cindy Lopez:
Thank you. Since our podcast is called Voices of Compassion, what role do you think compassion has in this whole process with parents and their kids and distance learning?

Jody Miller: [
I think it’s safe to say that everyone has been challenged through this pandemic. I don’t think there’s anyone that’s going to jump out and say, this has been an easy time period for me to walk through or navigate through.

But it’s important for us as adults and the grownups in the child’s life to practice self-compassion so that we’re available to show empathy and compassion to our children. And that’s really hard right now because the adults and the grownups are also highly stressed. And so it’s important for us to take a step back and do some self-care so that we’re emotionally available to support our students, who, you know, have never gone through anything like this and us as adults have never gone through anything like this. And so it’s hard for everyone, but it’s certainly much more difficult for our kids whose kind of traditional way of learning, traditional way of being able to socialize has completely been uprooted and derailed. And as adults, we have many more strategies to kind of work through crises and catastrophes, uh you know, versus our children who don’t really have all of those developed at this point. So, I think definitely practicing self-compassion um so that we’re available to respond and support our students is a really important thing to remember as we continue to move through this pandemic.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, I think so many times in my experience of working with kids and in education is just remembering if they could, they would, right. [Totally] So as parents just know that, they’re just trying to cope like you are. So Jody, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and insights and expertise with us today. One last question: if there were one thing that you would hope that our listeners would take away from our episode today, what would that be?

Jody Miller:
I think it’s you know, kind of what I hit on just now is the self-compassion piece. There’s a, there’s a quote that I’ll share and end with that, by Bill George, uh, “that you must have some empathy and compassion for oneself before you can truly be empathetic toward others.” And so I think that’s what I would like to end on.

Cindy Lopez:
Nice. Thank you, Jody.

Jody Miller:
Thank you.

Cindy Lopez:
So to our listeners, thank you so much for joining us today. Have a great day.

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