Jan - Coffee Talk Tuesday Summary

TFI: Fidelity Check-Up

What a great way to start the new year, by having a robust discussion with colleagues! Thank you to everyone who joined us for our virtual coffee talk session on January 9, 2024.

What we ❤️ about these chats is getting to meet new friends from across the nation.

We hope you will join us next time.

Tiered Fidelity Inventory - TFI

January’s coffee talk centered on the topic of the Tiered Fidelity Inventory (TFI). As a reminder, the TFI is a research and evidence-based survey provided by the national center for PBIS and available for free from PBISapps.org. This website has valuable videos, documents, manuals, and instruction on how to use this and other tools to measure the fidelity (quantitatively and qualitatively) of your PBIS/MTSS systems, data, and practices.

The TFI is used by school teams to self-assess whether or not their PBIS/MTSS systems are being implemented with fidelity. It can help highlight what’s going well, and also indicate if it may be time to revisit and recommit to basic practices in order to build consistency and positive outcomes! We talked about the Tier 1, 2, and 3 sections of the TFI and heard from participants about the ways they use the TFI at the school and district level. As always, KOI offers an abundance of free tools on our online resource page.

Strategies To Address Challenges

When discussing the TFI, one issue was the need to help our school personnel use the results to create an action plan. This process is not always easy, so guidance from coaches is essential. Our conversation included contributions from site-level and district-level coaches around some of the experiences they’ve had when it comes to this phase of the process. One frequently cited challenge was the need to build, maintain, or sustain buy-in and ownership for using PBIS practices. It so easy to loose momentum and slip into negative or unproductive practices, especially with staff turn-over being so high across the nation. This is something many teams report experiencing from time to time….so much so that staff ownership is a big topic on the Insights page of our website! Chat facilitators shared two recent blogs posts that seemed particularly relevant:

Our participants were excited to learn about the information shared in these posts, and we hope the content can help you too!

 
 

The Role of Reinforcement and Positive Relationships

We also talked about reinforcement and the role of tickets or electronic point (hint: they are excellent opportunities for staff to build relationships with students!). We reviewed a 3-second, 3-step approach to reinforcing students that includes: 1) State the expectation demonstrated, 2) state the specific skill from that expectation in that location, and 3) give the ticket or electronic point. This method is detailed in the PBIS Tier 1 Manual. We also discussed five common myths about reinforcement and how to address them with your staff and school community. What came up over and over again as a theme in the chat was the essential role that positive relationships play in any effective PBIS system.

The Daily Progress Report

We closed out our chat by talking about strategies and tools teams can use to improve their Tier 2 intervention systems. The Tier 2 Resources page contains a number of options including this Daily Progress Report template for use with the Check-In, Check-Out intervention. Tools like this really help students understand what they’re getting their points for. As we discussed in the chat’s final moments, this is knowledge that will support students in succeeding in school by meeting the school-wide expectations more frequently.

The Behavior Flowchart

Teaching adults how to better support students was definitely a theme of this month’s chat! The role of the behavior flowchart came up as we discussed tools to support adults in effective implementation of PBIS/MTSS. Our participants shared ways flowcharts can facilitate equitable responses to student behavior, offering teachers and staff the opportunity to redirect, reteach, and reflect prior to an office referral. Adults aren’t the only ones who need to understand the flowchart though, students do too! We specifically discussed two tools that can be found on the KOI Education Resources page: one for use with adults and the other for use with students.

 

Hope to See You Next Time!

Thanks again to all who participated! If you happened to miss January’s coffee chat, please join us for the next one on Tuesday, February 13, 2024 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. We will be discussing behavior, ODR’s (Office Discipline Referrals), flowcharts, and much more! We’d love to have you be part of the conversation. If you’ve already registered, no need to register again–you will be invited to all the chats for the remainder of this school year! If you have not attended before, please sign up at our Events page. As always, If you ever have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

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