Teach Effectively!

Kansas (US) State Board of Education met to hear proposed guidelines for the use of restraints that might be needed for students who are out of control, according to a story by Gena Terlizzi Lawrence Journal-World.

Advocates for the disabled said the mandates are necessary to prevent mistreatment of the students.

Rocky Nichols, executive director of the Disability Rights Center, said during the 2005 legislative session he heard many parents speak about the mistreatment of their children.

“Hundreds and hundreds of parents from around the state came forward, testified and talked about how their kids were secluded and restrained inappropriately,” Nichols said. “We have kids who have been sat on by gym teachers. Their arms have been duct-taped together as a form of restraint. They’ve been rolled up in gym mats. They’ve been placed in little boxes.”

There are effective instrucational procedures to (a) create environments that reduce the probability of students behavior escalating to out-of-control status and (b) teach student appropriate ways to respond to difficult situations without losing control. One would hope that local and state education agencies (as well as teacher education institutions) prepare special and general educators (and administrators) to use those procedures. Sadly, this is too rarely the case. (See Ms. Frizzle’s illustration of a staff development session devoted to this topic reported previously here on Teach Effectively.)

Although Ms. Terlizzi’s story is about restraints, it also mentions “time out” (TO). Sadly, the discussion of TO perpetuates myths about the procedure. The term “time out” is routinely used in a generic way to refer to exclusion, especially placing a child in a physical space away from others. There is a more formal use referring to a well-studied procedure which involves, essentially, making reinforcement temporarily unavailable. I would like to encourage folks to distinguish between the informal and the formal uses, if for no other reason than that the formal use of TO very effectively reduces the frequency of targeted behavior whereas the informal use has, as far as I know, little or no scientifically documented effectiveness.

Link to Ms. Terlizzi’s story. Check the sidelinks to other coverage, too.