Uniting adolescent support systems for safe learning environments

CURRENT RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

For the second stage of this project, we are being guided by the following assumptions:

* Uniform coding of behavior increases accuracy of documentation and reporting.

* Comparison of observations by several teachers increases reliability of reports.

* Training faculty members to use PDAs and pagers can improve school communication.

* Information sharing facilitates faculty awareness and collaboration.

* Collective detection can identify early patterns of student dysfunctional behavior.

* United discipline interventions can be monitored systematically for their effect.

* Recognition of commendable behavior can help support character development.

* Quick notification about misconduct allows parents to assume their guidance role.

* Faculty reports about good behavior should be reinforced at home and at school.

* Parents can perform more effectively with access to a suitable agenda for dialogue.

* Students can learn to take individual responsibility for the prevention of abuse.

We have increased sites of operation to include several schools in which most students come from low-income and minority households. Six components are concurrently undergoing development and implementation.

The first component focuses on establishing a model for training middle school and high school teachers to use SCORE and PASS communication. Competency testing will determine efficacy of teacher training to record behaviors of students and send pager messages to their parents. Some tasks for testing involve accuracy rates for data entry of student numbers, parent pager numbers, and SCORE numbers onto PDAs. Additional tasks include electronic data transfer from PDAs to personal computers, beaming of information between PDAs, and knowing how to share observations with colleagues using other data formats. Faculty members will identify the benefits and shortcomings of their training program.

A second component centers on the discovery of ways for increasing faculty collaboration. Teachers should work together to resolve the problems of students they have in common. Unified responses to pervasive discipline cases can provide greater consistency than when teachers independently pursue strategies that may contradict ones used by colleagues. Unified efforts are also less confusing to parents. Collective efforts can be monitored to assess student progress and identify corrective measures that appear most effective with individuals and classes.

The third component requires formation of a data bank enabling continuous examination of individual, group, and school-wide behavior patterns. All schools should be expected to report their progress in helping students learn the social skills required in a team-oriented society and their relative success using remediation efforts to overcome social deficits. Educators must move away from advice about discipline given by media-portrayed experts whose recommendations lack empirical evidence. These sources should be replaced by reliance on school site data banks. A data bank is essential for tracking misconduct, good behavior, and institutional responses and evaluating the outcomes of disciplinary practices. When this information is accessible, faculty members can respond as a unified team rather than react as isolated professionals.