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Rethinking Behavior: Adopt a Skill Not Will Mindset with Jenny Walmsley

• Jennifer Hofferber - Special Education Teacher and Coach • Episode 170

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Welcome to a thought-provoking episode of the Sped Prep Academy Podcast, where we are joined once again by Jenny Walmsley, a seasoned special education teacher turned behavior coach. With her Masters in Applied Behavior Analysis and as the founder of Braving BSEL, Jenny brings a wealth of knowledge in supporting the behavioral, social, and emotional learning of both students and educators. In today’s episode, we dive into the concept of "Skill Not Will" to approach challenging behaviors in the classroom with a fresh, constructive mindset.

Highlights:

  • Current Mindset and Misconceptions: Jenny begins by addressing the common perceptions among educators that frame student behaviors negatively. She discusses how these views can hinder the educational process and stresses the importance of recognizing behavior as a skill to be taught, rather than a problem to be suppressed.
  • A Different Mindset: Jenny explains her philosophy of "Skill Not Will," encouraging teachers to view challenging behaviors as opportunities for teaching and growth. She emphasizes the importance of equipping students with the necessary skills to behave appropriately, rather than merely disciplining them.
  • Proactive Strategies: We explore a range of proactive instructional strategies that Jenny has successfully used. These include setting up a supportive environment, using positive reinforcement, and incorporating traditional educational techniques like read-alouds and role-playing into behavior management.
  • Success Story: Jenny shares a powerful success story about a student who learned to channel frustration through a safe alternative behavior, demonstrating the effectiveness of the skills-focused approach.

Conclusion: Jenny wraps up the episode by highlighting resources for educators interested in further exploring the "Skill Not Will" approach. She mentions her upcoming free training session and directs listeners to the Braving BSEL website for additional information and support. This episode is a must-listen for any educator looking to transform their approach to behavior in the classroom, fostering an environment where students not only learn but thrive.

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Additional Resources:

Join us next time on Special Education for Beginners for more insights into enhancing your teaching practices and effectively supporting your students' special needs.

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Speaker 1:

All right friends. Today I have a repeat guest. I am thrilled to welcome back Jenny Walmsley, a seasoned special education teacher turned behavior coach. Jenny was a guest back on episode 44, entitled how Self-Reflection Makes you a Great Teacher. In this episode, jenny is helping us do a little more reflecting and is challenging us to rethink our approach to the challenging behaviors. In the classroom, we discuss the prevailing mindset among teachers and common misconceptions that can hinder progress. Hopefully, after listening to this episode, you can begin to see the importance of shifting from a problem-focused to a skills focused mindset, emphasizing skill, not will. Jenny shares practical strategies and success stories demonstrating how proactive behavior teaching can lead to significant improvements in student outcomes. Stay tuned as we uncover how to approach each challenging behavior with a mindset that prioritizes skill development over disciplinary measures, and learn how to equip our students with the tools they need to succeed not only in school but also in life.

Speaker 1:

Let's jump in. Hey, special educator, are you overwhelmed by the absurd amount of paperwork on your to-do list? Do you wish you had the skills to build a rock-solid team with your staff? Do you find yourself scouring the internet for how to meet the needs of each student on your caseload? Well, hey, there, I'm Jennifer Hopperberg, an award-winning veteran special education teacher and current instructional coach, who has walked in your shoes through each of these challenges and, yes, I have the metaphorical blisters to prove it. I have cried your tears and felt your pain, and now I'm here to support you in the way I wish someone would have been there to support me.

Speaker 1:

Listen in each week as my guests and I dish out practical wisdom to help you handle all the classroom curveballs that are thrown at you and learn how to laugh in spite of the chaos, to celebrate those small yet significant victories that only a special educator can understand. So are you ready? Wipe your tears and put on your superhero cape, because together we are going to learn how to survive and thrive in the ever crazy, completely overwhelming laugh. So you don't cry. Profession of being a special education teacher. Well, hey there, jenny Walmsley, I am so excited to have you back on the show for round two.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for having me. I am happy. Excited to have you back on the show for round two. Thank you so much for having me. I am happy to be back.

Speaker 1:

So the last time you were on the podcast we chatted about self-reflection and improving ourselves as teachers, and today's topic kind of follows that same line of thought changing our mindsets to become a better teacher. But I want today's discussion to focus more on the behavior aspect of your expertise. But before we get started, would you remind the listeners about who you are, share about your experience, what you do and your journey within the field of special education?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely so. I am a former special education teacher turned behavior coach. I recently finished my master's in applied behavior analysis and I'm working towards my BCBA. I have experience teaching in co-taught, self-contained and resource special education settings, and now I'm in the field of behavior, spreading all of the good strategies to teachers who need it most, mostly because I felt really lost with behavior when I first started out, and so I just want to share that with as many people and as many teachers as I can. That's awesome.

Speaker 1:

I know I've said this on the show before, but I am in awe of you teachers who focus primarily on behavior, because it's one of the most stressful aspects of being a special education teacher, and I know many educators really struggle with addressing challenging behaviors. But it often goes back to managing our own behaviors and our own responses. So I'd love to hear more about how we can transform our approach to not only improve our classroom management, but also enhance the learning experiences of the students. So can you start by giving us a brief overview of the current mindset that most teachers have regarding challenging behaviors, and how do you think that this mindset affects their strategies that they're using in their classrooms today?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so even the word behavior tends to have almost this negative connotation to it. We talk about behavior problems and behavior issues and we bring in a behavior specialist when we're having those behavior problems in our classroom. Sometimes I hate this, but sometimes people even refer to like the behavior kids, and usually when we're talking about behavior we're talking about it in that negative context. This can be really really challenging, because once a behavior starts, it's already happening, right, it's already going on. You can't prevent a behavior that's already occurring, and so that can be really really challenging for teachers, because until we learn how to prevent behaviors, we're never going to really learn how to truly address them and ultimately decrease them, both for the well-being of our students and for ourselves. Behaviors are like you said, they're stressful, and it really contributes to a lot of the burnout I think we're seeing in our field right now is this idea that we only talk about behavior when we're already at our wits end, so to speak.

Speaker 1:

Right, and I totally agree that it is a negative topic that we are trying to learn how to deal with. But if we always have that mindset that it's a negative thing, then it's very difficult to break through that and to try to find better ways to do things. So I like that that approach isn't just about addressing the negative but about actively teaching and reinforcing positive parts of behavior. So can you describe that a different mindset, I guess, that educators might adopt when approaching challenging behaviors? And what does this mindset entail?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I always use the phrase skill, not will, so that when our students are engaging in these challenging behaviors, they're not willfully or intentionally trying to make our lives harder. They have some type of a skill deficit and behavior is In this context, these challenging behaviors. In our classrooms, we have this tendency to think that students should come to school just knowing how to stand in line, just knowing how to take turns, just knowing how to stay in a chair, just knowing how to be safe, knowing how to learn, how to participate in a learning environment, and that's not necessarily always the case. And so when we start to break it down into those skills that students might be missing, we can do what we do best and we can teach. And there are so many strategies that we are already using in the classroom, for maybe it's academic skills or maybe it's functional skills that we can apply to some of these behavioral skills that can help our students participate in those learning environments in safe and conducive ways.

Speaker 1:

It just sounds so simple when you put it that way. It's just we need to focus on building skills instead of managing behaviors. So it's more of a proactive response versus a reactive one, correct?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. That's one of the best ways to maybe summarize it is that, rather than reacting to problem behaviors, we're preventing them from having happened in the first place.

Speaker 1:

So can you give us some of those strategies that you mentioned that have worked well in your experience for responding to or not not responding to challenging behaviors, but for setting the students up for success ahead of time?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely so. Think of what you're already doing in some of your other academic areas. Some of the really really great ones are things like using manipulatives. We know that that's going to be helpful for students with disabilities in general. So how can you incorporate manipulatives into teaching things like self-regulation? Or teaching things like impulse control, basic social skills, behavioral skills, how to interact with other people, how to control our own body? I know Julia Cook has a lot of really wonderful read-alouds that are very explicit in the behavior skills that they teach, even teaching vocabulary. I actually just was reading some research and diving into some things that really shows that teaching students emotional vocabulary allows them to tap into alternative ways to express themselves so that they're less likely to engage in challenging behaviors when they need to communicate.

Speaker 2:

Upsetness of some sort and role playing. We use role playing in all sorts of different academic activities, but also with social skills. But even with practicing those behaviors Things that you do at the beginning of the year, like practicing lining up to go to lunch why do we just you do at the beginning of the year like practicing lining up to go to lunch? Why do we just do it at the beginning of the year? If you have a student who's struggling with that practice. It often Repetition, right? The same way, we want our students to be fluent in things like math facts. We want our students to be fluent in things like following directions or keeping their hands to themselves. So practice, practice, practice or keeping their hands to themselves. So practice, practice, practice. And just all those other really, really great strategies that you already know. Things like visuals, things like even graphic organizers contingency maps are a really phenomenal graphic organizer to teach behavior. Those are just a few, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And I feel like new teachers especially they go into this job. I feel like new teachers especially they go into this job and this is such a hard aspect that they get down on themselves because they think I can't do this, I don't know how to do this, I don't have the tools to do this. I can see how changing your mindset from being reactive to proactive has helped me become a better teacher, and it's really just helped even my sanity, because I knew that I was intentionally putting things into place that were going to help me be successful and help my students be successful. So I think that that's important for teachers to realize, or to understand, is that it's a progression. You're going to make mistakes and it's going to be hard, but if you change your mindset and address it in a proactive way, I think you're going to be a lot. You're going to set yourself up for a lot more success.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and another thing to kind of add on to that, which is sort of another mindset shift but very much related to what we're talking about, is we're often pushed towards meeting these standards and pushing through curriculum and we go at this speed through academic material.

Speaker 2:

That is important, right, but if we're having challenging behaviors with our students and we're not taking the time to step back from the academics or the functional skills or whatever it is that we might be teaching that they're having behaviors during, if we can't step back from that to teach these behavior skills, you're never going to make progress in those other areas anyways. I always say that behavior is sort of the gateway to everything else. So don't be afraid to say, okay, if I keep pushing through these things, that maybe the higher ups or whatever are telling me that, like, I have to focus on this stuff, that this is my job responsibility. That is true, it is your responsibility to help students learn. But learning behavior is still learning and if you don't have the behavior in place, you will never get any of the other learning done anyways.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, and you're going to have so much more success in those areas and it's going to make you feel so much better because I lived it. You know, I was a teacher for 27 years and it took me a long time to figure this out, and so I appreciate that you're here talking to us and helping us learn that it's okay to shift that mindset. You're going to be a lot better off in the long run. So can you share a success story that maybe you had, where a change in mindset led to a positive outcome with a specific student?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, now, in my experience I mostly worked with students who were in a self-contained classroom, so their behaviors were to agree that they couldn't participate in a general education classroom when they would first start with me.

Speaker 2:

And so I do want to give a caveat that there's all sorts of things around like function based interventions and functional behavior assessments and all that kind of stuff that plays into it.

Speaker 2:

But essentially I had a student who, when they would get frustrated, they would engage in some really unsafe behaviors like throwing. They were a strong child throwing chairs and desks and tables, throwing large furniture objects across the room, obviously disruptive, obviously unsafe and obviously related to a lack of self-regulation skills and needing some of that sensory input when they got to that point of frustration. And so what we started doing is we started using scaffolding which we as teachers know that that's starting with those lower skills and building upon them and using manipulatives, and we eventually taught this student to line up at the door when they got frustrated and then go to an alternative space where, instead of throwing chairs and tables and desks, they were throwing a weighted ball against the wall, and we were actually able to even shape sort of that manipulative to it being a lighter and lighter ball over time and all sorts of interesting things, but we ultimately got it to a point that this student was doing it so consistently he was using this replacement behavior on such a regular basis independently and doing such phenomenal job with it, and those unsafe and disruptive behaviors in the classroom setting had decreased to basically zero, and so this student was able to start attending things like specials and start going out to like math class, because that was a strength of this child's, and we were able to see this child transition from being in this really restrictive environment to being able to participate with their peers. It was an amazing thing to watch. It's not the only success story, but it's one of my favorites for sure.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing. It seems like that approach not only helped manage behaviors in the moment, but fundamentally changed their life for the better, where they're able to go out into different situations, different environments and be able to internalize what they had learned into other situations. So that's a great success story, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And I got to say as hard as behavior is. Because behavior is hard, I will be the first to tell you it is tough and I'm the kind of person who likes things that are tough, and so maybe that's why I'm like, drawn to behavior. I'm like, oh, this seems impossible. I want to do it. But I will say that one of my favorite things about working specifically with students with challenging behaviors and working with the teachers who support them is those success stories, because it is so challenging, but when you do have that success, it is the greatest feeling in the world because you do know that you are legitimately changing their lives for the better.

Speaker 2:

Not that every teacher doesn't do that. Every teacher is impacting their students' lives, without a doubt. But there is something very tangible about getting to the other side of the behavior change process with a student that is not to get real behavior nerdy is really reinforcing for me, and so I just encourage teachers to not give up when you're really in the thick of it, because it takes getting to the other side of it to build up that confidence and seeing students' lives change for the better, to really start to believe in some of these things and to know that they work and to experience it for yourself Very well said.

Speaker 1:

I feel like having people like you who can provide us with that knowledge and that information is very important, and I agree with you being able to help out in situations like that and be successful in it. This kind of adds a little self-confidence, gives you a little bit of swagger whenever you're called in to help with the situation, and they know that you're kind of the person that can make a big change there when somebody else can't. So, yeah, I see what you mean. Well, Jenny, I know that this information will help a lot of new teachers, a lot of new special education teachers, and even ones who have been in the field for a while. You know they're struggling with this too. It's not just new teachers who are struggling with behavior. So if we wanted to learn more and perhaps implement some of these strategies, what other resources or tools would you recommend? Where can they go to dive deeper into this approach?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I'm actually doing a free webinar this July where the whole topic is skill, not will, because I want to get this into as many teachers' hands as I can, so we'll dive a little deeper into it there. I also have some resources on my website. We have on my blog a whole list of books that you can use to teach behavioral skills and some other strategies and things listed there, and I'm always sharing strategies and things on my social media, either at Just being Jenny Walms or at Braving BSEL's account, which is just at Braving BSEL. Braving BSEL is my business that provides education, support, training and resources for teachers on these topics.

Speaker 1:

Well great. Is there a waiting list that they can sign up to for that skill not will training? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

There is a link for the waiting list, so hopefully your listeners will be able to find that pretty easily and they can also find the link to the waiting list on my social media pages.

Speaker 1:

Well, great, well. Thank you so much for joining me again. It's always nice to reconnect with others who provide online professional development. It's just so needed, I think, and I feel like it really helps teachers learn from others who have been in the trenches and who are now providing that practical application piece for other teachers' classrooms. So thanks again, jenny, for sharing your expertise and for all the work you do in supporting educators and students alike. Thanks so much for having me.