- Once we get passed the initial question about do we really wanna go there and we committed to the topic.
Our next question and my lean is absolutely brilliant of bringing us back to this question of, why does this really matter? And we thought that it mattered to remember reasons.
First of all, our business is the business that helping children to the best of their abilities within an inclusive education context.
And learning can only happen in a safe and secure environments.
So if our children aren't safe, if our staff aren't safe, the adults and the children both in the building, then the learning isn't going to happen.
And then and certainly safety and learning go hand in hand.
But also when we looked at some of what we were seeing in the media, which is not necessarily always the gospel but it's always a good place to start and perception becomes reality in a lot of cases and that's the information that's out there and being received by the public.
And so when we looked at what was being discussed, some of the strategies that were being called "Time- out," may or may not actually be time-out and may or may not be doing what they are intended to do.
May or may not be effective, if they're using a time-out procedure, you know what's that look like and what does the research tell us about time-out and the use of time-out.
So we thought it was important to really dig into the research and try to answer some of the questions that will help us to address these issues.
And these are some of the pieces that I took directly from, some older and some newer but from media across the country.
So this one's in Vancouver, this was from 2009, on the CBC website and they're talking about three elementary schools using safe rooms or time-out rooms for children with severe behavior problems and it kind of snowballed from there and became a very big issue in the media and took several months and a whole lot of problem solving and someone to work through that situation.
This one came from Nova Scotia, and this is from social media, it's from a blog and for those of you who may read blogs at look or in case you are a blog yourself.
You know that they do attract a bit to of attention in some cases and this one certainly did.
This a story, this actually isn't the parent of the child, but its somebody who blogs and who knows about the parent in this situation and was reporting from the parent's perspective.
The story of an 8-year-old boy placed in a time-out room.
And I've taken out the name.
But talking about the fact that the basing the decision on documents and policies that are in place, guidelines adopted by the council of learning ministers of education and training, from any Bronsic document.
So they're citing some of what's out there but not necessarily providing all the information that might be available.
This one is a recent headline from Qispamsis, I'm sure some of you have seen.
From February of this year and this talks about the building of a new school and within the new school there was what they're calling " a padded room," that was included in the actual specs of the school and some of the back clash from family and media related to the inclusion of that room in the school.
Certainly, this was followed up by a discussion with the principal making an attempt to explain the actual purpose and intent of that space within the school but it's pretty hard to counteract some of that attention that gets out there as well.
And then this one is probably the most recent, on March of 2015 and I'm sure some of you have seen this on CBC and a number of places.
This is a family in Ontario suing the Peel District's shool board for $16 million for placing their son who is now I think 15 but over a period of five or six years in what they're calling isolation rooms in a number of different schools in Mississauga and Brampton.
And so is currently before the courts.
So the issue of time- out can take us to a lot of really unpleasant places.
And I think as practitioners and as representatives of our respective schools and districts, I think that the very reason that's really important that we have the information that we can share, what the research does say and that we can demystify and dispel some myths surround time-out because as soon as you say the word time-out in public, emotions get very high very quickly.
Realistically, good intrude of parents, good intrude of teachers, use less intrusive versions of time-out probably on a daily basis and very effectively.
And so there is continual, there's a lot misinformation and misunderstanding so hopefully we can share some of that.
So if you take a look at some of these terms, thinking spot.
Quiet chair.
Cool down area.
If you're a high school person you may be more familiar with in school suspension, ISS.
Again even not used to refer to by a number of different names, detention, the infamous time-out, sensory rooms.
So all of those terms are used to describe a variety of situations.
And that's part of the issue is that there's very little consistency or in some cases intentionality behind the terminology.
So the questions that often arise are, when and why are we using time-out? And you see I put when and why in brackets because I think the bigger question is, are we using time-out? And if we are, how and when and why are we using it.
What behaviors resulting in this consequence? Sometimes probably you've seen that there may be a plan and place where some type of a time-out procedure is being used and it's initially used for particular behavior and then it becomes a very slippery slope and all over a sudden, if you're doing observation, you're seeing procedures happening and you're not even sure what the behavior was, the cause of the procedure to happen.
If a time-out procedure is used where by the student is not staying in the rooms, so a more intrusive type of a timeout procedure, where the student go? Or if the student is staying in the room, is there a spot in the room where the student goes that's consistent? And how is it determined when the student should go there? Sometimes it seems that, the teacher is the one who's directing the procedure or the intervention.
Sometimes it may be an educational assistant or student assistant who seems to be making that decision.
Sometimes it seems to be the child making the decision so, how is it determined, and who determines that? And when the student gets there what happens? Which was extremely important.
And what really is the purpose and then the overarching type of question.
Should time-out be used in schools? So the first thing we wanted to do was to demystify time-out and really break down the term and talk about what time-out really is.
So time-out is actually, as gain like I'm preaching to the choir here but, it is a term that is more appropriately time- out from positive enforcement.
And even though many documents and guidelines that are out there would say that time-out shouldn't be used as a punishment procedure.
In behavior terms time-out, by definition is a punishment procedure.
That doesn't necessarily mean that its the typical concept of punishment.
But a punishment procedure is a procedure whereby a consequence is applied directly after a behavior and there's the impact of that is a reduction in the future frequency of that behavior.
So by definition that's what time-out is intended to do.
But contrary to some common thinking especially among the public.
Time-out doesn't necessarily require the removal of a student from a classroom situation or from the common learning environment whatever that might be.
Instead this actually a continuum of strategies that would be considered time-out procedures.
Are intended to reduce instances of problem or challenging behavior.
So that can be non exclusion or inclusion time-out procedures, and there can also be exclusion time-out procedures.
If we look at the continuum, it looks something like this, moving from quite unintrusive to in some cases requiring some pretty intrusive interventions.
But moving from inclusion time-out whereby the students stay in the area, to exclusion time-out and where the student may have to go to a different area.
So with a non-exclusion time out, the three examples here are a planned ignoring, withdrawal of materials and contingent observation.
And I'm sure that many of you have used the planned ignoring strategy.
And if you probably see teachers using it on a regular basis, what does that look like?
- [Female Voice] Turn away.
- Yeah, exactly.
If a student is engaging in a behavior that you want to see decrease, then you simply turn your attention away for a brief period of time continuing with what might be happening over here with other students.
And then you turn back and continue to work with the other students.
So very brief, just removing of attention for a short period of time.
A second inclusive time-out strategy is withdrawal of materials and again I'm sure many of you have seen in the news that type of a procedure and what would that look like? Exactly.
Perfect example.
I'm not sure if everybody could hear Daniel.
If the child is using something like lego, and starts misusing them, throwing them around or not participating in the activity the way we wanna see.
The lego might be removed for a brief period of time and then everybody carries on.
And contingent observation maybe one that is less familiar.
Has anybody used contingent observation? Oh, you know what it is?
- [Female Voice] That a setting up bench troupes to remove from the activities in classroom.
- Yeah, exactly.
It's exactly as it sounds the student is till able to observe what's happening, but isn't permitted to participate in the activity for a short period of time.
So if you are in a classroom and Sara is pushing the other students, you might have her go sit at the side of the classroom for a short period of time before she can come back and rejoin the activity without engaging in those pushing and shoving types of behaviors.
She can still see what's happening and observe.
And the ideas being that what she's seeing happening is hopefully doing reinforcing or would be reinforcing to her participating if she were participating in it.
So the time-in activity, whatever whatever's happening in the classroom.
Is reinforcing and exciting and she wants to be involved in it so that removing access to that for a short period of time becomes valuable to her when she gets back in.
Exclusion time-out procedures, so the student is removed from the reinforcing activity but is not permitted to participate in or watch the activity.
And these are some of the more challenging types of procedures to apply and certainly not the first go-to types of strategies that we will necessarily be putting in place.
An exclusion time-out, keep in mind again.
Doesn't necessarily work involved having to have the child removed to a different location.
It could still be in the same room, but the students is unable to see the activity of classmates.
So contrary to the contingent observation, there may be situations in the classrooms where there is a space that's around the corner from the group or maybe on the other side of a petition of the classroom divided into sections and the student could be required to go to physical that spaces where he wish he can't see what's happening with the other children.
That can still be an exclusion time- out procedures.
So, they're excluded from the group, not able to see what's happening but not necessarily in a different room or area within the building.
However in many cases the way that classrooms are set up, it's not necessarily feasible to do that.
Within a classroom situation the physical space and set up just don't lend themselves to that.
And then the other probably more commonly considered type of a time-out is maybe in another supervised location within the school.
So a student may be sent to the principal's office.
Maybe sent even outside the room into the hallway, a variety of different locations.
And again like some, this is what We're recommending.
We're just defining what these procedures look like at this point.
So, just as important as understanding what time-out is, is understanding what time-out is not.
And I think that's where a lot of the problems and the discussion tend to crop up.
So on your tables you have some envelopes with students name.
I'm not gonna ask you to go through all of them.
We're just going to do one at at a time.
If somebody at your table would open the envelope, let's start with Danny.
Labeled Danny and just read it with your group and decide is that or is that not an example of time-out.
Okay, time out, yes or no?
- [Students] No.
- No.
First of all he is leaving the area and also he's in a different space within the building but he's not leaving the area contingent on any particular behavior that we want to reduce.
And there's no intervention for staying in place to deal with the challenging behavior or reduce the future frequency of the behavior.
But in same cases, some folks are confusing that type of a situation wants a time-out procedure.
So if someone walks into the school and sees a child working in an area that's separate from the common learning environment, there's sometimes a perception that regardless of what's going on, that might be a time-out procedure.
So just something to keep in mind, and draw to your attention is that, there are situations where folks are perceiving any situation the child being outside the common learning environment as a time-out scenario.
Again, that was amazing one.
We're gonna skip Marco, you can take a look at that one later.
But lets take a look at Paula so it's in your table groups.
Open up Paula's envelope and say what you think.
Whatever is happening for whatever reason is probably not providing reinforcement to her in that moment in the classroom.
And she's using a functional communication, procedure replacement behavior.
For which she's getting positively reinforced.
So you're right, it absolutely doesn't meet the definition.
It's also her leaving the classroom, is also not happening because she's engaging in a problem behavior right.
She's actually engaging in a desirable behavior.
And as a result getting that break that she needs in that moment.
Let's take a look just at a couple more.
I think you have.
What? I think you have Jack in your envelopes.
Take a look at Jack.
Okay, she thinks she's doing time-out or maybe her intention was to use time-out.
It's not necessarily working.
Maybe the way it could have been and why is that.
- [Female Voice] The child is not motivated by positive experiences.
- Yeah, the relationship between the time-in situation and the time-out situation, is of critical importance here.
And right now for some reason for Jack, you know there's something in that situation that's not particularly reinforcing.
And even though it probably was the teacher's intention for this to be a time-out procedure, but the way it is, it not an effective timeout procedure.
It's not reducing Jack's problem behavior.
As a matter of fact, we're actually seeing some things increase here.
And I'm gonna slip, skip, I think I didn't tie my tongue.
Jump ahead.
Hurry up to Bradley.
So the last envelope should be Bradley.
What some of the discussions that you're having at your tables?
- [Female Voice] I think that one of the more common ones that we've been thinking about in terms in full based based up.
Things that they are in fact, helping the situation when they're reinforcing the behavior instead of finally getting rid of the behavior.
And it's really difficult to explain that and getting people to buy into how that really works.
Like this is every day.
We're coming here to report changes and understanding .
- And how is the behavior being reinforced in this situation?
- [Female Voice] Cause they're removing him from a task that he does not want to do.
And every day he realized if I need to write what I need to do and I It may not be a pleasant area, but it's much better than this often seen happening in some other time.
- If the time-out procedure is effective, typically you're gonna see a decrease in that behavior pretty quickly.
So it's not something where you have to spend weeks and weeks necessarily guessing if it's working.
If data are being taken on a regular basis and examined, then if it's true, you're on effective timeout procedure, the change is gonna be filled up at a fairly quickly.
Any other thoughts?
- [Female Voice] Once you established what's going on here, it's very difficult to change.
Depending on who you're dealing with .
- Good point as well.
- [Female Voice] It probably sound like it's effective for a time out procedure is not necessarily .
- Okay, great point as well.
Looking at the level of intrusiveness of the intervention by comparison to the behavior.
There are certainly behaviors and this is kind of comes up at the end.
But there's certainly behaviors that happen within all of our school situations where, it's an emergency due to the level of safety concern at the behavior and emergency procedure might be necessary in that situation.
This is not one of those types of situations as it's described here.
The other situation that we're not gonna go through but just to mention Lise and Elizabeth.
These are pretty common situations as well that you may see.
So with Lise if you were to look at her envelope, you'd see that she's being sent outside the classroom into a hallway when she engages on undesirable behavior of description that's included in there.
Unfortunately what happens when students are in the hallway, what do we see? Hold it a sec there's a whole group of student in the hallway.
Lots of positive reinforcement happening.
Lots of social interaction.
It's a good gig if you can get it, I would to.
And then Elizabeth is being sent to the principal's office.
When she gets into the principal's office.
Can you imagine what's happening? Lots of one-to-one adult attention.
The principal wants to know , oh what happened? What happened this time? Why are you back again? And again its like we see it everyday.
So teachers with the best of intentions in trying to reduce some of these behaviors.
And in some cases with the best of intentions in trying to maintain the learning environment in the classroom.
And in some cases they're exhausted in dealing with this same behavior over and over and over again.
So the intentions are not necessarily misguided.
But the interventions aren't necessarily effective either.
So what is it that the research does tell us about time-out? And that was the one thing in all the information papers we tried to highlight what the research says.
Because we don't want to say this is what we suggest, this is what we recommend.
Wanna say we looked at the research because nobody has time to search at all the research and all of these topics.
So we've taken the opportunity to dig into the research.
And this is what the research is telling us about whatever the topic is.
So in this case what's the research tells us about time-out.
Some of these maps should be a little surprising.
So, one thing that's probably not surprising is that time-out procedures, if they're used correctly, can be an effective way to reduce problem behaviors.
And particularly among younger students.
So one of the research is with individuals below the age of seven and nine.
A lot of it is done with elementary school age children.
But there is also research into using time-out procedures of various levels of intrusiveness whereas individuals, teens and young adults and so on.
So time-out is an intervention to reduce problem behavior.
Particularly when used some of the less intrusive type of time-out can be extremely affective and the research does support that.
And the research is all listed in the references' section at the end of the information papers.
So I encourage you to take a look at that.
Less intrusive time-out strategies may be as effective and in many cases they're actually more effective than some of the more intrusive types of time-out intervention strategies.
So with the more intrusive types of intervention, if you have to physically remove a student from an area, that brings all kind of additional concerns.
In terms of dignity, in terms of your attention that automatically has to accompany that in terms of the physical.
Having to touch the student or place hand on the students.
All of those issues come up with the more intrusive types of interventions and we certainly don't want to be going down that road if there's any other option.
And the function of the behavior matters.
And now again a pushing to inquire here but.
One of the light out moments for me.
I read an article by Greg Henley and he talks about a scenario.
He said, "Imagine this scenario.
Imagine that you've come down with a virus.
And the virus has caused temporary muscle paralysis.
So that you can't talk, you can't write and you have limited mobility but you can move your some, gross motor movement.
And so you're in a hospital bed being treated for this virus.
And they put you on a number of medications.
And pro activate these medications have the effect of, cause like dehydration so your mouth is dry, your eyes are dry.
And so what what you desperately want constantly is water.
You can see the water on the little rolling table that they put in your hospital room but you can't reach it.
And even if you could reach it, you probably wouldn't have the mode of scales to be able to hold onto it and so on.
So, what do you do? You discover that if you bang your arm against the side of your bed wall, someone would come in.
They'll fluff your pillows, they'll raise the head of you bed and sometimes they'll give you some water.
And so you start doing that more and more often.
And then they say, "Oh this is a problem.
She's placing her arm, she's raising hands we gotta do something." So, they wrap your arms and hands in pudding to keep you from injuring yourself.
So, it does reduce the noise, it reduces the annoyance that it causes you to get water less and less often.
So, continuously you are hitting the bed little more often but you're not necessarily getting what you need." So his point is, wouldn't it be so much nicer if somebody just come in and figure it out what it was that you really needed and why you are engaging in this problem behavior.
Self injurious behavior, very destructive behavior.
And either put the water close to your bed.
Come in and give you water every so often and give you a long straw so that you could reach the water from where you are.
And sometimes in some of the situations we see saw an escape motivated behavior.
If we're working with students whose behavior is sensitive to things like escape for example.
Then the time-out procedure is gonna be gonna be exactly the wrong thing to do.
Because what we're doing is actually re-enforcing the behavior.
So the function really does matter.
So, the research also tells us that if you're thinking about implementing any type of a time-out procedure, there are some particular considerations that you wanna keep in mind.
The first one is within that consideration of school-wide positive behavior support.
So you wanna be implementing, instruction if instruction is needed.
As students sometimes doesn't have the skills to be able to engage into behavior we wan to see.
We want to be looking at reinforcing lots of positive behaviors, providing all others of reinforcement.
I probably told the story before but if you're familiar with the Zegarek Model and doctors Ruth, Apy and Barry Grossman.
They, a few years ago the did a workshop in events like and Ruth asked me if so.
She's so sweet and she's has just lovely and melting Southern accent.
And she said, she has diagnosed adults on said reinforcers stinginess.
She said she will enter a classroom.
She goes into classrooms really regularly at least if I pointed.
And she asked the teacher to put a dot on a piece of paper every time any student around the room, some piece of paper on the desk.
Any time a student around the room did anything that she liked and wanted to see more of.
And she said "When the students walked out of the room, there was one dot on one desk." And sometimes in the business of day to day classroom.
Again everybody has the best of intentions.
Everybody wants what's best for these children.
But sometimes we just forget to provide lots of positive reinforcement.
And sometimes little tinny, cues or probes that we can provide for ourselves to remember to do that.
Just the intervention that's needed.
One of the considerations is those type of less restrictive time-out procedures that are being used very effectively.
The very brief pending, knowing types of procedures.
Sometimes contingent withdrawal and materialism and so on.
Can be extremely effective so don't necessarily go from 0 to 60 all in one leap.
The other thing to keep in mind is that within this leap, we're very conscious of the fact that there are different provincial guidelines and policies and documents like this.
So the first thing that you want to be doing is consulting your provincial guidelines or district guidelines and documents.
And also looking at the terminology.
In the paper you see we've tried to use some kind of generic terminology that's not problem specific because we don't want somebody to look at it and say, "No, this doesn't apply to me because they've said, IPP instead of PLP" or whatever it might be.
So we've used interventions, we've used support plan.
We've tried to keep the terminology very fairly general.
But certainly consulting your provincial guidelines and policies and district and board and school guidelines it's important as well.
Some of the to tips.
So, again when we were looking at the big picture of the key elements that were on this.
What are the top tips? This one you're probably gonna find some folks who disagree with you.
Tip number one, don't interact with the student in time-out.
And why would that be?
- [Female Voice] You'll be reinforcing.
- Absolutely.
I mean I hear, I heard it everywhere.
Any interaction with the student has the potential to be a reinforcer.
And so for students whose behavior is sensitive to attention, you can't kind of just blew it.
The other thing is that.
I guess one of the things that I keep coming back to that.
It's maybe helpful to explain to school teams.
Is that students aren't always necessarily intentionally misbehaving to get attention.
So when you say the behavior is maintained by attention, sometimes the school team thinks well.
I guess one of the words that I like to stretch from the English language is manipulative.
The student in some way it kind of fix but in the situation where the student is engaging in a problem behavior.
Sometimes the behavior is just sensitive to attention.
And I think Tin Bloomer explains this so brilliantly.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there is some sort of a scheme that the child is using to get as much attention as possible.
It just means that when they engage in a behavior, and the result is that attention is given.
The behavior itself is just sensitive to that.
That human behavior is sensitive to those environmental contingencies.
And so there is not necessarily an intentional scheming plot to try to gain as much attention.
But if behavior is sensitive to attention then this is really really important.
Sometimes we see situations where adults are talking about the student in front of him or her in the time-out situation.
And I mean probably the ones that are problematic.
Yeah and point number one for sure is again the possibility of reinforcing the behavior.
What else is problematic there? Yeah.
How many of us like to be talked about in front of us or sometimes when people think they're talking about us behind our backs and we can really hear what they're saying.
I mean just in terms of maintaining dignity, nobody really likes that.
And in some situations, it could be reinforcing as well.
So some students might like that and it could be reinforcing.
And then the third one, don't have a conversation on any topic, with anybody while you are supervising the student on a time-out situation.
Problems with, if that happens.
- [Female Voice] The problem on the supervisor issue.
- Okay, it's a supervisor issue.
- [Female Voice] Potential for reinforcement though.
- Potential for reinforcement.
- [Female Voice] Sometimes what happens is that .
- Yeah if you happen to be talking about something that the student happened to see it on the news a day before or it's a topic of student's interest and all of a sudden the student is engaged in the conversation and its a great deal.
But those who thinks again to know intention to reinforcing, know intention to cause the problem.
We see it everyday.
And it's doing the exact opposite of what the intervention was intended to be put in place for.
When it's over it's over.
And the research would say that there's very little point in most cases in having long and lengthy conversations immediately following a time-out procedure about what happened.
About the behavior.
There maybe situations with some children where debriefing the situation after the fact is beneficial and important.
But typically I guess for the most part doing that in a big long drawn out wave right after the timeout procedure has been in place, is probably not the best idea.
And the other thing is what we do wanna do is as soon as the time-out procedure has finished, and there's an opportunity to provide reinforcement for a desirable behavior.
You wanna be taking forward advantage of those situations even sometimes setting up those situations.
Where the student can earn positive reinforcement for a desirable behavior after a time-out situation.
This one is kind of interesting.
Research doesn't actually support or include time-out.
What are our options here as kind of the typical rule for time-out.
- [Female Voice] Probably one minute.
- One minute for each year of age, yeah.
And sometimes it's chronologically and sometimes is cut out of the age depends on who we're talking to.
The research actually says that regardless of age, a time-out length of one to four minutes is generally as effective called off to more effective than a longer time-out.
And they would say there are two different numbers cited on the research in your paper.
One suggests a time-out situation of no more than 15 minutes.
Kind of regardless of the situation once it's no more than 20 minutes.
So one to four minutes, the research support is being effective.
15 to 20 would be an absolute outside and we really shouldn't be looking at anything more than that.
For a lot of reasons which was cited in the paper but one being most of an instructional time and when the students out of the common learning environment, they're not getting instruction but they're are also not getting the opportunity to be reinforced with desirable behavior.
So we'll be moving that opportunity from them.
So if a time-out procedure is being considered, I'm gonna go out through all of these because they're all in the paper but just to highlight a few.
I guess number one if you're looking at not necessarily the least intrusive types of time-out.
If you're using planned ignoring or withdrawal of materials.
That's just good common classroom management in a lot of cases.
But if you're working on any of the more intrusive type of time-out.
Then you're certainly want to involve focus on just the classroom teacher or the classroom teacher and resource teacher in some of those decisions.
Particularly in with students with autism.
Defining the behavior leading to time-out is particularly important because it does become a slippery slope if time-out starts to be effective in reducing behavior like like, let's mild aggression like pushing or something like that.
Then all of sudden you see, oh well, he's starting to.
Yeah he's starting to talk back so I'm gonna use time-out for that now too and I already said nobody knows what behaviors are causing time-out to be used.
And everybody is confused and it just becomes extremely ineffective.
We talked about the function of the behavior.
And we're in the risks there lots of questions if you look back at your appendix of page for evidence based practices paper.
You'll see at the end there is an appendix of questions to ask when you're thinking about various interventions.
And it talks about weighing the risks and the benefits of any intervention though certainly still apply to considering time-out as well.
Again you can take a look at these but one of the big take away is remember that time-out alone can never increase the desired behaviors.
It's not designed to.
By definition, it can't.
And so if you want to see a student engaging in more appropriate desirable behaviors, time-out is not the right intervention because it simply cannot do it.
Sometimes time-out can bind with other interventions, might be where you need to go.
So if you're teaching appropriate behaviors and you're differentially reinforcing alternative behaviors and so on.
But time-out alone is not gonna be the right strategy there.
And again I'll leave this for you to take a look at in the paper.
But the other thing I just want to mention briefly because the discussion of time-out quite often flows into a discussion of seclusion and restraint.
And you'll see in this paper, we said that we'll need a full discussion of seclusion and restraint beyond the scope of this paper, and not what we were intending to do.
But it is mentioned and there are a few things in there that I think are important.
One, and probably first and foremost being the time-out and seclusion are not synonymous.
They are not the same thing.
Did it encrypt? Nope it didn't go to the definition.
So seclusion is the removal of the student or placing the student in an area separate from other students regardless of the purpose for doing it.
It is not necessarily for the purpose of decreasing an undesirable behavior.
If a student is placed in a room where he or she is unable to leave, that's a seclusion type of procedure.
Again there are places where emergency procedures are unnecessarily unimportant, but that does not necessarily mean that they're time-out procedures.
So differentiating and the definitions are in your papers as well but I think it's important to differentiate between time-out as a behavioral procedure versus a seclusion intervention.
There is a chemistry in seclusion I've come up frequently enough and caused enough concern that a number of professional organization have developed guidelines imposing some position statements on the use of physical restraint and seclusion.
The council for Exceptional Children as imposed from 2010.
The Ontario Association for behavior analysis, adopted while it was similar to the association for Behavior Analysis International.
So, 2010 and 2013.
And those are referenced in your paper, they're also available on the website of these organizations.
And just some of the key points about seclusion that are in the paper.
Seclusion, these organizations which support seclusion and the use of that type of a procedure all way in the event of substantial and imminent risk to safety.
Not as a treatment for a problem behavior.
So, they look at seclusion and restraint as emergency procedures not as treatment procedures.
The last resort.
Only as long as necessary for the risk to be reduced so, once there is no longer an imminent risk, then the procedure should be discontinued.
And the big thing is training.
And Dr.
Billy mentioned yesterday if you've been trained in the appropriate procedures, whatever it is, procedures are for the intervention.
If you've been trained, if you're following the procedures as you've been trained.
And it's an approved procedure by your district, or your board or your province, then you've done your due diligence.
You're doing what you've been taught and trained to do.
If you're using a procedure that's outside of what's approved, or if you haven't had the appropriate training, then you're potentially putting yourself in a liable situation.
Again I'll leave those for you to take a look at when you have time.
And then just a few take away messages.
Keep saying time-out doesn't involve a continuum strategies.
Time-out is not one procedure or one strategy.
And when used effectively, it does very efficiently reduce or stop a behavior by removing access to reinforcement.
But even at that low level.
Even at the planned ignoring level.
Even at the withdrawal of materials level.
And following and being a where of guidelines and policies is extremely important as well.
Consent and documentation, and ongoing monitoring as was mentioned in data collection.
And again, through no intent to not do everything possible but just in the business of everything that teachers are being asked to do.
Data collection, ongoing monitoring that sometimes the last thing that we get to.
And in this type of intervention where you're looking at child to make behavior change.
That data collection, ongoing monitoring is absolutely critical.
Finding a way to do it in a way that's doable is equally important because we don't wanna be asking staff to do things that are completely unreasonable.
But finding a way that they can collect data and monitor the intervention and the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness because sometimes changing the interventions is also necessary.
Is really something that's important in these types of situations.
So if you're looking for more information, here is some places that you can go.
You have the paper.
Certainly consult your folks within your provinces for sure.
And if you do want to use any of the information that's been presented, the paper or the pamphlet presentation, you're more than welcome to do that.
Or if you'd like more information, if there's anything else that I can send you that you'd like to share, just let me know.