Since Mark Thomas and his team began fully utilizing Rethink in their classroom in the 2014/15 school year, they have seen tremendous progress with their students, in part because of the training opportunities Rethink has afforded the entire classroom team.
At the beginning of the school year, Mark had all of his paraprofessional staff complete Rethink’s Training Center, which features 11 video modules reviewing the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis. The Training Center has given Mark the opportunity to collaborate with and empower his paraprofessional staff to become more involved in teaching, in data collection, and in programming for their students, who now review data with him, find teaching resources on Rethink, and even make suggestions for lessons to teach students.
Jennifer Harris is a special education teacher in Denver Public Schools in Colorado. She works in a self-contained classroom, which is, unofficially, the last stop for students before being sent out of district. Earlier this year, she got a new student in her classroom with severe behavior problems who had recently been moved out of his family's home into a group home due to his behaviors.
Using Rethink's Behavior Support, Jennifer and her classroom team were able to develop a behavior intervention program for the student, significantly reducing his problem behaviors. As a result of the progress this student has made, not only will he be able to remain in district, but his family is looking into moving him back into the home.
The special education staff in Holmdel, New Jersey began using Rethink in the fall of 2012. They use Rethink in a variety of capacities. Rethink provides their core curriculum in their self-contained classrooms, serves as a data collection and progress monitoring system, and helps provide training and resources for paraprofessional staff.
P352X is a group of five schools in the Bronx, New York for students with autism and other disabilities. They split students into three levels according to severity: green, blue, and yellow. In September of 2014, they began their second year using Rethink.
They began their first year piloting the program with a select group of teachers and have since expanded implementation across all classrooms.
Their emphasis on using Rethink to standardize curriculum and data collection across classroom teams and using the Rethink lesson and training videos to train school staff in instructional best-practices has lead to increased opportunities for inclusion for their students.
In October of 2014, two teachers at P352X, Justin Ravitch and Michael Mitterbauer, sat down with us to talk about how Rethink has impacted their students and their teaching practice.
