Intensive 2-Day Workshop: Cracking the Behavior Code: High Impact Trauma-Informed Strategies for Challenging, Oppositional & Aggressive Students

CPD

Handouts

Faculty

Nancy Rappaport, MD Related seminars and products

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Dr. Nancy Rappaport, MD, is a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist and is a part-time associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her research, teaching, and clinical expertise focus on the collaboration between education and psychiatry. Working as a science teacher at an innovative elementary school in Harlem, NY where she advocated for support for struggling families was a life-altering experience and inspired her to enter medical school. Dr. Rappaport received the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Sidney Berman Award for the School-Based Study and Treatment of Learning Disorders and Mental Illness in 2012. She also received Cambridge Health Alliance’s Art of Healing Award in 2013 – an award given to one who “transcends boundaries, joyfully embraces humanity, and profoundly inspires the healing of body and spirit.” Rappaport is the author of The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students, written with behavioral analyst Jessica Minahan. One reviewer notes that “The Behavior Code gives teachers the tools to transform the behavior patterns of some of their most challenging students. By using this essential book, teachers—instead of punishing or ‘writing off ‘ troubled students—can get them onto a path for success.” Rappaport is also the author of the memoir In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide, winner of the Boston Authors Club’s 2010 Julia Ward Howe Prize.

 

Speaker Disclosure:

Financial:  Nancy Rappaport has an employment relationship with Cambridge Health Alliance. She is an author for Harvard Ed Press and receives royalties. Dr. Rappaport receives a speaking honorarium from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.

Non-financial:  Nancy Rappaport is a Distinguished Fellow for the American Psychiatric Association; the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; and the Massachusetts Medical Society.  

Objectives

1. Describe why traditional behavior plans of reward and consequences often do not work for students with challenging behavior.
2. List at least 6 concrete strategies for building underdeveloped skills that impact behavior.
3. Evaluate trauma’s impact on behavior and implement strategies for creating a traumasensitive environment in your school.
4. Design communication strategies for difficult conversations with families about challenging behaviors to defuse potential conflict.
5. List the 4 functions of challenging behavior and the tools to build the corresponding missing skills.
6. Demonstrate the Behavior Code approach to analyze a case and consider the appropriate interventions for a child with self-defeating disruptive behavior in school.
7. Identify key questions to ask when assessing potentially concerning behavior and determining how to intervene effectively.
8. List the components of a comprehensive safety assessment model and why they are necessary for determining student risk of acting on threat.
9. Characterize behavior that is within typical development range such as power struggles with authority and impulsivity from concerning behavior such as increasing desperation or agitation.
10. Develop concrete ways using creativity, humor and empathy to foster resilience and fuel a sustained commitment to working with challenging students.
11. Identify students who do and do not pose an imminent threat of targeted violence to themselves and others to create a safe school climate.
12. Apply key factors to maintaining one’s resilience to fuel a sustained commitment when working with challenging students.

Outline

• 3 ways trauma affects learning
• 4 paradigm shifts and strategies to better engage students
• Create a trauma-sensitive classroom environment

• 4 SOS tips for challenging behavior
• Address skill deficits that often underlie challenging behavior

• The FAIR plan approach to deciphering behavior and developing an effective plan:
  • Determining the function of behavior
  • Accommodation to change the behavior
  • Interventions to stop a negative cycle
  • Response to an agitated student
• 4 functions of challenging behavior

• Manage transitions and previewing
• Concrete tools, apps, and checklists
• Embedding choice in instruction
• Self-calming techniques
• Classroom-wide strategies to improve self-monitoring

• Effective strategies for interacting with challenging students/parents
• Approaches to difficult interactions with role playing
• Effective responses to diffuse challenging behavior
• Breaking the cycle of power struggle – improve communication

• School violence in context
• Critical questions for comprehensive evaluation
• Differentiate between typical vs. concerning behavior

• Step-by-step approach to evaluating threats and intervening
• Comprehensive assessment components
• Prioritize risk factors without profiling students
• Differentiate between transient threats or substantive threats

Target Audience

• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Counselors
• Teachers
• School Administrators
• Principals
• Occupational Therapists
• Speech-Language Pathologists
• Marriage and Family Therapists
• Other Helping Professionals Who Work with Children