Mid-October Coffee Talk; Strategies for Attending and Engaging

By Colleen Smith, MA, BCBA – Director of Behavioral Health

We are halfway there (cue Bon Jovi). October is almost over but the Halloween Hurdle is yet to come. Check on your work friends! Stick to together to get through these tough days. OTs, PTs, and SLPs, when allowed, run some co-treatment groups with other provider to change things up and add share the workload. BCBAs, help out our related service provider friends by stopping into sessions and helping them trouble shoot behavior sessions. Tag team with teachers who may need some extra breaks in the day. Take a turn reading a story, guiding centers or just pop-in so the teacher can pop-out for a bathroom run.

All of you fantastic service providers, across disciplines, can help out school staff who are affected by increase of behaviors often seen in October by hosting open mic nights or coffee talk morning sessions (You can call these by any clever name you think of too). In these micro professional development sessions, the host selects one area of concern for behavior and invites others to drop in and troubleshoot for solutions together.

When planning these you can send a survey beforehand to determine what the most challenging behaviors are or where they are happening, or you the host can choose a common topic from what you are seeing around you. Invite the teams to meet for drop-in session for about 20 minutes.  These can be in person with coffee before the students arrive or at the end of the school day on a virtual meeting with a bring your own candy bar theme. Keep to one topic, identify the issue and come up with 3 workable solutions. A couple tricks and a few treats for all who attend.

A talk guide deck can be found in the October Provider newsletter.