OTS 117: Supporting Teachers: A Win-Win Situation

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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 117 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.

Being OTPs in a Teacher’s world is not always easy. In this episode, I am sharing a supportive tool I have used to support my students and build rapport with the teachers I work with daily. I have provided small and large group collaborative in-services for teachers since my third year in school-based OT, so I am excited to share with you some research that supports this strategy for all of the reasons I know and love.

Listen in to hear how you can use live and recorded in-services to support teachers, students, and yourself.

Resources:

• Read the full article here (a subscription may be required)
  

• Join OTS Collaborative, where you can earn professional development and get support implementing best practices in school-based OT.
  

• Article Citation: Jamie Mac Donald & Heidi Baist (2022) Using Virtual Collaboration and Education to Increase Teachers’ Ability to Promote Self-regulation, Journal of Occupational Therapy, Schools, & Early Intervention, 15:4, 403-417, DOI: 10.1080/19411243.2021.1983497

Episode Transcript

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Jayson Davies   

Hey everyone, and welcome to episode number three of 2023 and before we kick off today's episode, I want to take a time machine back to 2019 before the pandemic kicked off and and remember how little technology played a part in your therapy world at that point, you know we weren't using zoom at all, or at least, very few of us were. We definitely weren't using zoom for treatment or Google meets for treatment. I know some of you had to bear along with Google meets, like I did for a little bit, but we didn't have all that now fast forward back to today, and everything that we've gone through from 2020 2021 2022 and now here to 2023 we have used technology for so much more, whether it's using zoom for treatments, using Google Forms to collect data, using email and other services to collaborate and consult with other team members on the IEP, we have done so much, and just because now that we are getting back into the schools, supporting our students in person, doesn't mean that we have to forget about all of that technology. Today, on the podcast, we're going to look at an article that talked about using virtual collaboration to support students self regulation. So it's pretty awesome. We're going to use all that technology that we used during the pandemic, that maybe some of us are using less so today, now that kids are back in campus, but let's use it to our advantage. Let's not just let those three years of online therapy go to waste. Let's go ahead, use what we learned to continue to promote self regulation. So let's go ahead and Cue the intro music for today, and when we come back, we are going to dive into an article titled using virtual collaboration and education to increase teachers ability to promote self regulation. So stay tuned and we'll be right back. 

Amazing Narrator   

Hello and welcome to the otschoolhouse podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies, class is officially in session. 

Jayson Davies   

All right, before we dive into a little bit of the background information and the literature review that the authors did, let me go ahead and share with you exactly what we're diving into today. The article is titled, using virtual collaboration and education to increase teachers' ability to promote self regulation. This comes from the Journal of Occupational therapy schools and early intervention, and it was published in October of 2021 the authors are Jamie McDonald's OTD, otrl, and Heidi based OTD, M, E, D and otrl. So let's go ahead and dive into the background review, and then we'll talk about the hypothesis and what they did as part of their methods. There were three main themes that I gathered from reading their literature review, and the first is that they identified what self regulation is, as well as some populations that may have difficulty with self regulation in a school setting. And I'm not going to dive into all the details, but what I really appreciated about this particular part of the lit review. In fact, the entire lit review is that they pulled information from both occupational therapy research as well as education research. Now they don't allude to this at all, but I can just tell from the references and their in text citations that they obviously went outside of the occupational therapy realm to gather some information about this. The second thing that I wanted to point out is that they really took a moment to both understand and describe the CO occupation that exists between teachers and students. Now this is something unique that you don't often find in research, or at least I haven't, but they took a moment to kind of share how the struggles that a teacher may may have or may exhibit can impact the students, and vice versa, the struggles that a student may have can then impact the teacher. And it's kind of like a circle. It goes back and forth, back and forth, and you have the teacher impacting the student, impacting the teacher, and that constant co occupation going back and forth can have impacts that you may never see in another classroom. Right? No two classrooms are the same, and each classroom has its own dynamic. And I thought that was a really awesome part that they actually included within their lit review. The third and final theme that I took away from their lit review was something that you're probably already familiar with, and that is that, well, it's two parts that teachers don't necessarily know how to address self regulation, and in part, that's because they're not really taught about self regulation. Right? And then tying into that theme is that OTS can support teachers in understanding self regulation better, so that they can support their students in their classroom. They noted that the more that OTs and teachers work together, collaborate together, there are benefits for that. So the more that they collaborate together, you see increased carryover of therapy plans. You see improved rapport between the OT and the teacher. You see classroom specific recommendations from the OT to the teacher, and likewise, you see both of the professionals, the OT and the teacher, learning from each other and improving together. There is, of course, more to their literature review, but these were the three main themes that I pulled away from it that I really wanted to share with you based on that lit review, and what they were able to find by looking at some previous research. The team developed two main goals for this project that they were working on, I won't say first, because they go hand in hand, but the two goals were a to just basically help general education teachers better understand occupational therapy through both education and collaboration, and then also through that process, They wanted to increase the teacher's knowledge of self regulation. So increase teachers knowledge of self regulation, and also increase teachers knowledge of what occupational therapy practitioners do and can do to support them. To do this, they recruited seven teachers, although two did drop out. So they had five teachers that completed the study from start to finish, and these were all general education teachers with that said, one of the five teachers did have a background in special education, and you'll see that that skews the results a little bit, because it seems as though that teacher with special education background knew a little bit more going into this than the other teachers might have. Also, one thing you might notice as I'm talking is that there was only five teachers who completed this study from start to finish, and yes, that is a very small sample size, but as we get into the intervention used and also the results, I just want you to keep in mind that you don't have to have a huge study for something to be meaningful. And I really do think that what we're about to talk about right now can be individually implemented by you, and that you can see results by doing this. So let's talk about the intervention. The program itself lasted five weeks and consisted of two activities a week, those two activities being an asynchronous video as well as a synchronous live collaboration time that lasted between 15 to 30 minutes. In addition to those five weeks, there was a pre intervention week as well as a post intervention week, where data was collected, the recorded modules that were presented covered topics such as self regulation and social emotional learning, the role of OT in the school system, self awareness, adaptive seating, as well as teacher impactful interaction, so how teachers can have those very strong interactions with students, the synchronous collaboration times included one or two teachers in addition to the OT and were kind of a reflection on the lesson that was asynchronously presented, so any follow up questions that might have come up, or maybe even a specific student that someone wanted support with, that is What they used that synchronous time for now, I know some of you might be saying, Okay, well, how long did this take? They said that the synchronous collaboration session lasted about 30 minutes. They didn't necessarily say how long the videos were, but I would assume probably in that same 15 to 30 minute range as the collaboration time. So all in all, we're looking at maybe up to an hour per week for the teacher and for the occupational therapist. It was really 15 to 30 minutes of the collaboration session, plus however long it took to initially record the synchronous, sorry, the asynchronous videos that were put out. And of course, those can be reused. So if you were to do this program again, then you would only have to do the collaboration sessions. This was five weeks. So if we put it at one hour per week, then we're talking about five hours total per program session. So five hours, that's not too bad. They were able to help in five hours or a little bit longer, with all the different various collaboration sessions with a few different teachers, they're able to help five teachers to better understand occupational therapy and self regulation. So that's not too bad. Imagine doing this on a little larger scale. You could potentially help more teachers in a fairly safe. Similar amount of time if you increase the size of the groups, so not bad. One other thing to consider is that this did happen in September of 2020, so six months about after the pandemic started, everything was virtual. They did have to change their plans a little bit. They really wanted to incorporate more adaptive seating and other strategies that they were really training the teachers in, but as you know, during online instruction, that was a little tricky, so they kind of had to adapt a little bit, but they were still able to get some data. And with that, let's dive into the data itself. The researchers used a self created pre test and post test to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. Again, that was the week leading into the program and the week following the program. They used some Likert scale questions, some true false questions, as well as some open ended questions, to get that qualitative data prior to sending out the test and survey to the teachers. They actually had some pre testing and piloting going on behind the scenes with OTs and teachers just to check for validity and make sure that the questions were actually asking what they thought they were asking. The Likert scale questions that they asked revolved around asking the teachers if they really understood occupational therapy and what an occupational therapist might do, asking them if they understood self regulation, and then also asking them if they knew what to do if they were having difficulties with self regulation. And students of those 10 Likert scale questions, they found significant statistical changes in five of the 10 questions, no change in two of the questions because they were already maxed out, and then no statistical significance in three of the questions. Now I'm not going to read all the questions. If you want to see all of them. You can check out this article, but to see that five of the 10 questions has statistical significance of an increase with the the teacher's understanding of either a occupational therapy in the schools or B self regulation among their students, that's pretty significant to see that there was an increase among education of the professionals through this five week program. The no changes that we saw, I think those are significant, because the teachers already understood that general education teachers can be supported by OTs and social emotional learning students. So there was nowhere to go from there. They already strongly agreed that OTS could support likewise, there was no change. When asked if telling my students when I have a strong emotion is beneficial, all the teachers strongly agreed that that was correct. In addition to the Likert scale questions, the researchers also had a truefalse quiz. And what's nice about the truefalse quiz is that there are correct and wrong answers, and so you can quantitatively score it. So the pretest results range from 33 to 100% for the individuals with a mean score of 65 the average post score was 93 which, again, is a statistical significance. So we are seeing that this five week program did increase the knowledge of self regulation in educators. And just like the Likert scale questions, if you want to see all the different truefalse questions that were asked, please check out the article. They're all there, listed for you, plain as data C and the final part of the qualitative analysis here within their questionnaire or survey was the open ended part. They wanted to see what the teachers would input if they were given some space to share about social, emotional learning, self regulation and what causes a student to frequently fall or move around their chair? And the only thing that I really want to mention here is that the terms that were used before this intervention were fairly you know what we'd expect. Some terms included emotions, triggers, awareness, discomfort. But after the program, we actually start to see some of the educators use terms that we might use, such as poor strength and proprioception challenges. These are terms that were not used in the pretest. But after the intervention, we're seeing that teachers are better understanding how proprioception challenges might actually impact a student's behavior in the classroom. All right. So there you have all the data. And now I want to jump into some of the author's conclusions before I also provide some of my own conclusions and takeaways. And so the first author conclusion that I want to point out is that something that's very important. Important, you know, they found that the teachers had increased perceived understanding of the OTS role in self regulation. And they also pointed out, right in the same sentence, that this was happening during covid. So it's not like this was happening when, when teachers were self regulated themselves, you know, they were stressed out, and they were having to deal with new technology. And even while all that was going on, the OTS were still able to get through to the teachers and help them better understand OT and also help them better understand self regulation and how self regulation impacts social emotional outputs. So that's pretty great because, you know, it's hard enough for us to get through to our teachers when we are on campus, meeting with them in their classroom, maybe talking to them after school. They were able to do this during the pandemic. That is a pretty big achievement. One other thing that they pointed out that I haven't mentioned yet is that they found that virtual, asynchronous instructions paired with interactive elements is what really worked in this situation. I don't know that they would have had the same outcomes if they only sent out an asynchronous video, that synchronous interaction that they had on Friday afternoons for 15 to 30 minutes, I think really tied it all together for the teachers. So after reading this article, I came away with really three of my own key takeaways. And the first is that I really like this. I like what they did here, and not only because it worked, but also because of its feasibility, the modules that they provided to the teachers were recorded and thus were taken in by the teachers asynchronously. Now asynchronous is not always the best way to provide provide information to teachers. It's not always the best way to provide information to anyone, but when you follow that up with the synchronous collaboration time that they did on Fridays that really worked well. Now, because they had those recorded modules, they can repurpose this and redo this, this intervention, not just this, not just this research, but also this intervention. They could redo it relatively easily, right? So maybe they did this at one school, they could pick this up and move it to a new school with relative ease. They only need to then send out the videos, which they already have, and then redo the collaboration time with the teachers for 15 to 30 minutes, as they did. So I really like that. It's very much scalable in a way. So that's awesome, not to mention you could also change it up, right? They did it for self regulation and social emotional skills. You could easily record five videos about fine motor skills, about handwriting, about recess behavior, something like that. And you could redo this in different ways. So I really like that they did that. I think I've already mentioned this one. But again, knowledge does not come from passive watching. Knowledge comes from intentional back and forth interactions, and they did that with their Friday collaboration times. I think that is amazing. You cannot just give someone a video and expect them to learn everything we need to make sure that we are actually collaborating with them, having those discussions and supporting them and implementing what maybe they did learn from those asynchronous models. In fact, I love this so much that we are using a similar model in our OT school house collaborative community, where we are doing live professional development courses that can also be watched recorded, but then we are following up every single professional development course with an interactive component where we kind of talk about what we learned in the professional development activity and how we can incorporate that into our practice, just kind of like what they did, they provided the asynchronous video, and then they had the synchronous collaboration time. So yes, knowledge comes from intentional, back and forth interactions, not passive watching. That's something I really took away from this. And then finally, the last takeaway that I really had was that ot practitioners, us, both OTs and OTs, we need to get out there more and seek out opportunities to provide professional development or to provide resources for teachers. Not only is it going to help the actual teacher to better support their students, but it's also going to open up doors for us. A lot of people ask me, What is the easiest way to start pushing into the classroom? And my answer is often, get to know the teachers. The more of a rapport that you have with the teachers, the more you consult with them, the more you collaborate with them, the more you say hi to them in the lunchroom, the more likely you are to be effective when you start working with them in the classroom. So this is one way that gives you a purpose of actually providing that a. Uh, that intervention with them or to them, but it also helps build that rapport that you so desperately possibly want, right? We all want to be more included in the school, so we need to find a way to make ourselves more included in the school, and by providing resources and and services, whether they're synchronous or asynchronous, that can be a great way to build that rapport. All right, so that's going to wrap up our session for today. This is the otschoolhouse, Comcast number episode number 117, I cannot believe we are up to 117 the article that we took a look at today was titled, using virtual collaboration and education to increase teachers ability to to promote self regulation. It was authored by Jamie McDonald as well as Heidi based and yeah, it was just a great article. And I really hope that this helps you moving forward. Maybe you take this and you run with it, and you produce your own set of videos that you can send out to teachers, and also set up some collaboration time. If you do, let me know. I would love to hear how it goes with that. Thank you again, so much for being here. I really appreciate you, and I look forward to our next session together. Take care. Have a great week. Bye, bye. 

Amazing Narrator   

Thank you for listening to the otschoolhouse podcast, for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now. Head on over to otschoolhouse com, until next time class is dismissed. 

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