In this video, Ellen Reinhardt shares how schools can help to support staff during DBI implementation. 

Question: How can schools support staff within DBI implementation?

Answer: So I think the importance of paying attention to how we support the adults in the building can’t be overstated. Mostly, we do that through what happens in team meetings and then what happens between team meetings (pretty much that encompasses the whole day anyway). But in team meetings — think about youth sports — it needs to be made very clear, what are we going to be doing when we get together for practice or a game. Who is going to be doing what? And it’s very important that everyone involved has something to do or we get the kids doing cartwheels out in the outfield. Same thing happens with adults. We need to all come to a meeting knowing what to expect, what’s going to be the sequence? What should I bring? What is going to be expected of me? And we need to all know that something is going to be expected, or we are going to have folks say, “I’m here wasting my time”; it’s going to erode the progress the team can make. So that’s teams. Everyone has a role, everyone has actions in the meeting and afterwards. And then between meetings, when we are talking about individualizing instruction and intensifying instruction, we are talking about changing the behavior of the adults. We are asking them to do something different and we should approach that the same way we approach children trying to change their behavior. They need support, so we need to not say, “Here’s the plan, here is how we are going to progress monitor, we will see you when we get back together with your data.” One of those follow-up actions for somebody on the team needs to be to follow up with those implementers, quickly to say, “How’s it going? What obstacles are you encountering? What support to do you need?” To make sure that you don’t come back four weeks later or even two weeks later with data and you don’t have data, what you have is someone saying, “I couldn’t get it done. I couldn’t get the materials, couldn’t get the schedule.” So, paying attention to how we support adults in the meetings, outside the meetings, in between, very important.