Project Showcase:
Crisis Behavior De-Escalation
Training Optimization

Context

Physical restraint is used only as a last resort in intensive special education settings when a student’s behavior poses an immediate threat to their safety or others. It is a tool intended to prevent harm, not to punish or control, and its application is guided by strict legal and ethical frameworks. Furthermore, best practices emphasize that proactive strategies should always be planned for and utilized instead of physical intervention to the greatest extent possible. High-profile incidents in recent years involving cell phone footage and social media have accompanied reports of skyrocketing adolescent mental health diagnoses in mainstream news, amplifying risk for students and schools alike.

Problem

I identified a critical need to address escalating safety concerns and improve the capacity of staff to manage high-pressure situations involving students. In response, I gained industry-leading certifications as a trainer in nonviolent crisis intervention training and led an 8-year initiative, training hundreds of staff members in various roles. While the Learning Management System data from this initiative consistently indicated high exit scores, incident reports and experience in the school building showed that a small subset of staff were responding to all of the physical crisis behavior situations.

Research and Problem Solving

Learning Management System Data Review

The nonviolent crisis intervention program’s internal LMS data consistently showed passage rates greater than 95%, but incident report data showed that a small subset (fewer than 10%) of staff were handling the responses to physical crisis behaviors.

Focus Groups and
Surveys

Focus groups and surveys indicated that passing the test in the program was relatively easy, and the skills involved with verbal deescalation were readily employable. However, the task of responding to physical crisis behaviors required a more dynamic set of experiences and knowledge bases not covered the the exit exam tracked by the LMS.

Peer Networking and Industry Thought Leadership

By asking questions about this issue to professional trainers with Crisis Prevention Institute and other special education leaders, it became clear that the trend shown in the data (i.e., a discrepancy between crisis intervention training program exit exam data and actual ability to respond to the most intensive physical behaviors) was seen in many settings.

Solution

A two-tier training plan was developed.

  • All staff would be trained in verbal deescalation techniques.

  • A smaller Crisis Response Team would be trained in both verbal and physical crisis behavior management. The size of this team was thoughtfully planned to ensure optimal coverage at all times.

Advantages of this solution included:

  • Safer outcomes for students provided by a smaller, more highly trained response team.

  • Lower risk for the organization, ensuring that fewer staff members with particular skills were performing the most complex interventions.

  • Reduced training costs for the organization, as physical crisis intervention training is often more expensive than the verbal components.

Takeaways

  • There is a significant difference between learning and development. An employee can learn a task from a course or training. Development is a longer term process involving the combination of training, experience and professional maturity over the course of a career arc. In this case, the work of intervening in the most complex behavioral situations simply required a degree of experience that could not be conveyed via a course.

  • Assessment rigor misalignment is common. In this case, the assessment at the end of the training was not really assessing whether or not someone could intervene in extremely intensive behavioral scenarios, in spite of the assessment containing physical competency demonstrations.

  • An organization’s most valuable and dynamic work may not be easily assessed via rote assessment. With this in mind, Learning and Development teams must partner with business owners and other leaders in the organization to truly understand the underlying goals targeted by any training initiative. Furthermore, everyone involved in the process must engage with a variety of data sources about implementation and embrace agility in order to respond to data in a meaningfully way — regardless of whether or not an original design was effective.