193. When Your Back-to-School Plan Isn’t Going to Plan

0:00Welcome back to Special Educators Resource Room Podcast. This is Jennifer from Positively Learning. I'm so glad that you're tuning in. I want to talk today about something that you might be saying to yourself maybe in the past week or so depending on when you went back to school. I know I have said it many times. It seems to be every August, every September. I've heard it from teachers with two years or less experience. I've heard it from teachers with 20 years in. Here's the thought. This isn't working. It's the worst feeling. Maybe students aren't quite where you expected them to be by now. Routines that you've modeled and practiced and practiced. Back in week two, they're still messy. The schedule that you adjusted with the real data that we talked about last week is still not quite right. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, a thought chose up. An uninvited thought. And that is, this isn't working. Now, I'm not here to tell you that observation is wrong. What

1:01you're noticing is very likely real. But what I do want to talk about is the verdict. That final decision that we attach to it. Because when we say, this isn't working. And this is one month into a very long school year. Those are two very different sentences. They're describing two very different situations. And only one of them is actually true right now. Here's a great analogy to describe what's happening. Let's talk about building a house. Nobody's going to walk past a lot that has a house under construction. They're framing and they're scaffolding. There's materials in the yard. And they call it a failed house. Because you can see what stage it's at. It's very obvious when you look at it. There's visual cues. That is in progress. And it's very obvious from the outside. But when you're in the classroom, we don't have that outside view. It's like you're standing inside it. You're standing there every single day. It's so easy to forget that that framing that

2:02we talk about with the house is what it's supposed to look like at the stage. And you don't get to walk past your classroom and see it from the distance. The way I might see it or the way we might see someone else's half-built house. You're inside it, which makes it much harder to separate that in the progress from that feeling that everything's failing. And that's just the way it's like to be inside the process instead of outside observing it. And guess what? Here's my confession. I don't like it. I don't love back to school. Everybody's so excited and I do love back to school shopping. I like new school supplies, new outfits. But I do not love the first six weeks of school. I would much prefer another time of year when my students know the expectations and we're functioning as a community moving through routines. That's just my preference. If you're feeling pretty miserable right now, you're not alone. And there is nothing wrong with you.

3:06Back to the topic. We're looking at the first month of school or the first few weeks wherever you're at, I would suggest treating this time period as an opportunity to collect some data, to do some research, to gather some evidence instead of thinking of it as a permanent verdict or permanent situation. If it's not working now, we don't want to say it's never going to work. And I understand if you feel that way because I always did that too. But now I am suggesting that there's three areas we can look at and decide, okay, what actually needs to change? And what's the evidence of that? The first area to look at that's probably staring you right in the face is routines. We want to look at which routines need re-teaching and which just need to be completely thrown out. If a routine from the first week or two of school is not fully holding, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's never going to work. Most routines, especially with students who might need more repetition to generalize a new expectation, it can take longer than two

4:12to three weeks to become reliable. So by the time we get to week four, we often think it's not going to work. This is a failure. It's time to switch to something else entirely. I want to encourage you to resist that feeling. Instead, ask yourself, has this routine been taught consistently? Meaning the exact same way for long enough. Now, routines are not always going to be the exact same way. You could have a different person leading it, a different starting, a different ending, and that's okay. Routines don't have to be the exact same all the time, but when we're teaching it, that consistency is everything. So if that consistency has switched, which is very normal, that just might mean you need a little bit more time with it before we just completely toss it. The second thing to look at during this first month, things that are not going too well, is to think about, do students need something different than what was on the paperwork we read? You know, you read through those

5:16IEPs, that's the starting place to build with the best information we have at the time when that IEP was written. But that doesn't guarantee exactly what a student's going to need once they're inside your classroom in September with different peers, a different grade level, this school year's demands. This first month is where we find out which students might need more support than that paperwork suggested. Maybe they need less. Maybe they need something that the paperwork never anticipated at all. That's not a failure on your part. That's just data. That's evidence. That's the plan. Doing exactly what a first month is supposed to do. The first area we looked at were routines. The second is the types of supports that we may have anticipated. When we looked at the paperwork, maybe they need to be re-evaluated. The third and final thing that I think we can collect data on when it feels like nothing is going well is looking at which parts of the system are working.

6:17Even if they don't feel like they're working enough. I think this is the step that we all tend to skip entirely. And of course we do because we're so focused on what is not working, what still feels unsettled. But somewhere in this very messy back to school season, there has to be something that's going better than it was on week one. Maybe it was a transition that used to fall apart every time. And now it only falls apart half the time. Maybe it was a student who needed constant redirection and now needs a little bit less. We want to find that thing. We want to name it. It's very easy to let these unsettled parts kind of drown out all of the other evidence that something's actually working. I know I've shared this story, but it's been a long time. There was one year. Really it was the toughest year I ever had. I had a student must have been like fall back to school quarter one. And this student had outbursts like full on tantrums. And I would say

7:21maybe 20 times in the morning, 20 times in the afternoon. It was making me feel like the worst teacher in the world. I mean we were disruptive. We were disrupting everyone in the hallway, in other classrooms. It was so tough and I took it all on my shoulders. And of course, I wasn't blaming the situation. It wasn't blaming the child. I was blaming myself for all of it. I was clearly doing something very, very wrong. Even though I was trying my best, we were setting boundaries. I was struggling. Another teacher who was more experienced than I was made me keep data on those tantrums, which of course made me feel worse, right? Because I'm like, oh great. Now there's evidence that this child is tantrumming. But she knew what she was doing. And she could see this from an outside viewpoint. And she could see what was working and how the tantrums were getting slightly better. Things were moving in the right direction.

8:22But I could not see it. Because once you get past like 15 tantrums, you just really can't see or recognize progress. But anyway, I collected the data and sure enough around, I don't know, maybe day eight or nine or 10 or whatever it was, the tantrums were reducing just a tiny bit. And by less, I mean instead of 20 tantrums, maybe it was only 15. And then we moved to 11 and then to nine and eight and seven and so on. We moved in the right direction. And actually everything did turn out pretty good for that school year. It was not an easy year. But we did get past the tantrums. Now I can be in a position to share this with you. Data can really help you decide what to adjust. We started off this podcast episode with the idea that something's not working. This isn't working. And that's a verdict. That's a decision. That's saying, I'm going to drop this.

9:22I'm going to abandon this. I'm going to find something new. The data says this specific piece isn't holding yet. Here's what I've learned about why. Here's one adjustment worth making. The first way leaves you starting over and over again. The data way is going to guide you on how to build it. Your homework this week has two parts. First, write down one specific thing that is actually going better now than it was in week one, even if it's something small. The second part of the homework is writing down one thing that you do want to keep working on. We're not going to throw it out, but you want to keep working on it. You want to collect the data. So we don't want to list everything that's still wrong. For your homework, we want one win and one commitment. That is it. Next week. Now that survival mode is going to start easing a little bit, we're going to get into a question a lot of you might be ready to ask.

10:22What should the rest of the class be doing while you're teaching a small group? I cannot wait. The task box club and the independent work club are linked in the show notes. If independent work is one of those things that still feels unsettled for you right now. Thank you so much for tuning in. I know it's a busy time of year. I super appreciate it. And I'll catch you next time in the Special Educators Resource Room. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'm dying to ask. What'd you think? Be sure to hit the follow or subscribe buttons that you never missed an episode. You can find the show notes and links for everything mentioned in this episode at positivelylearningblog.com. See you next week for more special education solutions.