This week, we're talking about High-Leverage Practice #14: Teaching cognitive and metacognitive strategies to support learning and independence. And Alex, oh my goodness, you have done this as a practitioner directly. You've supported families and staff under you to be able to implement these strategies to actually get that independence from your individuals. And now you're in a position where you're reviewing plans of other providers to make sure that all of this is still true. So, for you, what does this practice look like?

I definitely feel that this practice means that we are doing everything we possibly can to ensure that this member is not dependent on the staff around them, so that they can do everything on their own. I think a very good example of this, as a practitioner, I have a lot of examples, but one that comes to mind so eloquently. One of my members, he was one of my OGs that I first started in the field with as a BCBA. Super smart type of kid. I look at him, and I'm like, you're gonna go places in life, I know you are. What you're doing as a four-year-old is insane. Like, I don't think I've met any four-year-olds, including myself, when I was a four-year-old, and I don't think I was doing half the things you were doing.

He was just one of those kids who was just so bright. But you know, at the end of the day, he had a learning disability. He was diagnosed with ASD, and then he also had ADHD, and his ADHD was very severe. He was just always in his own little world, always saying something, thinking about something, talking 20 steps ahead of you because he's already thought about everything in your conversation. But with him, he was challenging because when we first started working with him, we were in a daycare setting. And in the daycare setting, everything was perfect, everything was chill. Like he did great, even to a point that mom and dad bought us some kindergarten workbooks, and we were trying to like on our downtime, we were like, ‘okay, we're gonna do some work,’ like schoolwork. But we made it fun for him, you know, it wasn't necessarily like us like, ‘you're gonna do work for fun time.’ It was a fun activity book. But we've gotten to a point that he did amazing, and I was like, ‘Wow, awesome! Woohoo!’

Then he went to school. We weren't allowed in the school, so we were anxious because I mean, it was his first time in school, he was in kindergarten. Didn't have that pre-K buffer before, so it didn't go well. And it went so poorly that they asked us to come into the school. So I found my next new challenge with him. By the time he started school, I kind of felt like I didn't know what else to do with him because he's advancing so quickly. And then I got to school, I'm like, oh, I guess this is the next challenge. He didn't have the self-management skills needed to be successful in that setting. He was a brain. You could ask him things, and he would know it. But his being in a group setting was very difficult for him. So it took me a while to kind of hone in on what could work for him, you know, okay, like this is his skill set, this is what he can do. And he could do so much. This is what he is currently going through internally with his skill set and what he is currently capable of in the Venn diagram, which lands in the middle?

And then I was like, he does have good rule-governed behavior. So I was like, let me try something with him. And I bought bracelets for him. I bought a blue one and a red one. And I was like, ‘all right, hey, when the blue one's on, you gotta like look at your teacher. And then when the red one's on, you can talk.’ You know, so if obviously the blue one's on, the teacher's teaching, the kids can’t talk. So the red one wouldn’t be on. If the blue one's off and he's doing work, that red one would stay on. So he learned the rules of each of their bracelets very quickly. I mean, I wasn't surprised. He knew the rules like the first day he put them on. And then we also had him on an intermittent schedule. We started off very dense. It's like, ‘hey, every five seconds you're paying attention to your teacher, you get like a little tiny piece of candy that we're going to break up into pieces because if not, you're going to have a sugar rush.’ And he quickly understood the concept. He understood, okay, cool, this is on. I got to pay attention. Whether I like it or not, I got to pay attention. And before I knew it, we were able to increase that time. He was already able to be there for a few minutes, attending to his teacher before getting that terminal reinforcer. So it was awesome. It was awesome just seeing him, like, the idea eventually was to phase out the bracelets and then just give him the ability to have that self-management skill without the need for the aid.

Also, he liked to ask a lot of questions. He was very funny like that. He'd always ask a million different questions about any little thing. He'd always ask like, "Oh, what am I supposed to be doing? What am I supposed to be doing?” So then, another skill that we wanted to teach him was to write down the steps of everything he had to do. And then just for him to cross it off after each time he did it. So it's like, “Hey, you're done with page 13! Cross it off your list.” And he crossed it off his list. And like, the satisfaction he would get from, like, knocking things off a list was reinforcing to him. And that's like just one example of like hundreds I have with members. But the most important thing is finding what worked for him. And I could definitely pull components of this and use it for another case. But I specifically put all these components together, knowing what worked for him, what he liked, and what was reinforcing to him. And I made sure that whatever we did with him was individualized to him. So that's just one of many examples of using these strategies in order to foster that independence in many of my members.

Yeah, and I think that's a really cool example too, because it's blending some of that attention regulation. It's also sort of the monitoring piece of what I should be doing right now. And is my action matching whatever those expectations are in my environment? I think you're hitting a lot of those metacognitive, cognitive-styled strategies, but I think you did it in such a concrete way. I think in education, where sometimes a lot of our practitioners will struggle, is that you just kind of intuitively come into these things, and you leverage something so concrete.Like this color or this bracelet, when it's on, when it's off. Like it made something that was so ambiguous or intangible so overt that then the skills could just naturally progress from seeing how that connected. It's a really neat expression of how you actually teach that.

So I'm curious, when you've taught, you're leaning into all of this independence. When you're teaching these things, do you find it more successful to teach them something and then go generalize it? Do you find it more successful to just sort of integrate it into what is going on in their day-to-day to see where that fits in? Or is it a combination of both? Like, how do you actually teach these skills to your people?

I think the answer is it depends. Depends on what we're doing, where the member's at, how old the member is, and what is expected of him. There are just so many different factors that take place. In the case of the member that I spoke about before, my goal was to integrate that into the classroom setting. And I also would do teacher trainings with his teacher, so I could teach her, “Hey, like, this is what we're doing.” At some point, we can't be here anymore. Like, they're not going to want us here anymore. Not the school, but the insurance.

So I was like, “I need you to, like, kind of pick this up and be able to, when we step out, you know, carry that baton.” And it's difficult when the teacher is by herself. And not that my client was difficult. He was not difficult, but he was hyper. And I can only imagine being one teacher in a classroom full of 20 kids, and you have one very hyper one, and, you know, some of the other kids doing their own thing. It could be a lot, and it could be overwhelming. So my goal was to get him to such a point that she could carry out that intervention and teach a class, and it would not be so intimidating trying to carry out so many different things. She had a lot going on already. So my goal was to make it easy for her and then to ensure that the member was able to just do it on his own, and then to find it reinforcing to do all those things on his own, and to be successful in the classroom and be able to use those skills whenever he needed.

And I think something that you said before resonated so much with me, ‘turning something ambiguous into concrete.’ And I love the way you eloquently put that, because that's exactly how I felt trying to figure out, how am I gonna get him to understand what I'm trying to tell him to do? For instance, ‘pay attention.’ You could tell a child, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention until you're blue in the face. But if they're not paying attention, you saying it's not gonna do anything. So I was like, how can I, like, make him understand that?

So then, once I realized, oh, I can give him some rules. He does great with rules. If I tell him a rule, he can recite that rule to me. He knows that rule. And I think once I was able to conceptualize it and make it concrete and make it understandable for him, it was just like a night and day difference. It was awesome. And on top of that, I also had a very good team that was able to implement it as written, the protocol, and make sure that everything that he was working on, that he was getting reinforced for that, and making sure that that intervention is carried out to the T.

And I think at the end of the day, that's one of the most important things when it comes to teaching self management strategies and these metacognitive strategies to a member where that can seem very abstract is to make sure that everyone's on the same page, everyone's following the same protocol and everyone is making it conceptualized for that member in a way that they understand it versus just expecting them to get it after a hundred times of you telling them to pay attention because that doesn't work.

You're talking about it's got to be strategic. It's got to be systematic. Everybody's got to be on the same page. There's got to be some very concrete groundedness to the what are we doing and how are we doing it? And we've all got to do that in this explicit kind of way. But we can't just teach it one and done and then assume that it has stuck. Especially cognitive metacognitive skills. Like, there's so much that goes into that, and it's so contextually relevant that there are going to be some times where it doesn't fit, and you shouldn't use it. So like, please don't. How do you know where that fits and where that doesn't?

And that's those multiple opportunities. Like, how can we get so many different reps in that we can then start to see how this fits, how this doesn't. And I can actually give myself my own feedback as practicing and learning some of these things with that team that is doing it in such a structured and systematic way. I think that's so cool because you're just guiding them through all of these opportunities with this embedded feedback, but maintaining that structure so that they can just like connect that right into those environments, those scenarios, and then that's where it facilitates independence. And that's such a neat example.

That was always the idea, and again, I wish I could have been there longer to see it through all the way to the end, but I always felt that the baseline skills were there. It was just about focusing him in and teaching him how to help himself focus in those moments, and eventually phasing out all those things and getting him to a point where he could just do it on his own. Any member I feel was capable to some degree of achieving those results. And then with him in particular, I just felt like he was there. He just needed that guidance to get him there, so that way he could have that skill and apply it whenever he needed to.

Well, before we sign off today, I'm wondering if you can give a little bit of guidance to our educators who are a little leery of this one. Most educators are coming in as content experts or are very comfortable in that academic realm. And when we step into some things like this, although especially our practitioners who work with this population, they know it's necessary and that it has to happen, but they don't always feel the most equipped to be able to help their students learn some of these skills.

I'm curious if, practitioner to practitioner, you can give them a little bit of guidance or encouragement to sort of step into helping their students learn these things in that structured, systematic, explicit way, as opposed to just sort of hoping that it naturally comes out as a part of them engaging in the rest of their school experience.

I would definitely say it's very tricky. Any of the kids that we work with in this population, it's all individualized, and it's up to their needs. But I have seen in my many years of doing this, so many different classroom management strategies that have essentially conceptualized these practices that we're talking about. I think the perfect one that sticks to my mind is the color chart that if you're on green, that's the best. If you're on pink, you had a pretty good day. Yellow is. It's like, whatever. And then orange, oh, you're not doing too good. And then red, oh, no, I have to write in your binder about it. I think that one has always been a very good classroom strategy. If you’re a teacher, it's difficult when you have a big classroom, and you're all by yourself. So using that type of strategy is, I always found very effective.

But at the same time, depending on your kid, it may not be effective. And in my member's case, it was not effective. It was funny because he was always anxious about making sure he was on pink or green, but he just didn't care. So he would just be like, ‘Oh, whatever. Like, I want to be there, but if I'm not there, I'm not gonna, like, lose sleep over it.’ So I think it's very important for a teacher to really look at a member and if they have an IEP, look at that IEP, see what their accommodations are, see where they're at in their current developmental stages in life, and see, okay, like, this is where he's at. This is what his IEP is. These are his accommodations. What can I pull together here that would be effective for him? And then let me try incorporating that strategy. And I think it's also very important too. In my case, we were in the school, but if a teacher knows that one of her kids is getting services, maybe reaching out to another practitioner, like, ‘hey, so and so's mom told me that you're the case manager, you're the BCBA and you're working with him, having some difficulties in the classroom with him. Is there…’ you know, collaborating. That collaboration is so important. And I've always been very grateful to all the teachers that I've worked with because they've always been so open to collaborating.

A lot of the cases, a lot of my kids were very, very tricky to work with. They definitely put some teachers through their paces. But I was always so happy to hop on a Zoom call or go to the school and observe and give my feedback and let them know, ‘hey, this is what we do. But you're in a classroom setting, so give me some time. Let me make an augmented version of this that you can implement in the classroom while you're with your kids.’

And so I always found it very important, that communication aspect, if there's ever a doubt, if there's ever any question, communication is always important. And as a practitioner, I think it's very important to always do with all collaborators, like with everyone, like even a pediatrician, always just making sure that we're all on the same page and all trying to assist each other in whatever way we can. I know it's tricky, but it's definitely, when it comes to teaching these kids the metacognitive strategies, or you know, those self-management skills, it's just very important to look at that member and be like, ‘hey, let me kind of see where they're at. Let me see if I can talk to anybody, collaborate with them,’ and then come together and find what works for them.

Because you try to do it all on your own, you may not get too far. Especially if you're an educator and your classroom is full of like 20 plus kids. It could get very overwhelming, but very quickly. So it takes a village is one of the things I always used to tell a lot of my teachers, like, it takes a village. And I would tell the parents, too, that it takes a village. It's very important for us all to work together if we want him to be the most successful he could possibly be.

I love that I asked the question of how would you suggest that practitioners learn how to teach their students to be more independent, and the answer is don't be independent. Go collaborate. Go get to know different people, get different strategies, and really, like, pool your resources. I think that alone just shows that teaching cognitive and metacognitive strategies is sometimes even just acknowledging when I need to advocate that I cannot be independent on this, and so I can really access my resources as an individual. That's just a fun way to end this conversation. So thank you so much, Alex, for joining me and sharing everything that you have done to help your variety of different individuals that you have worked with really learn those cognitive metacognitive strategies, all toward that independence.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me on.