Full Catalog of Upcoming Events

Audience: All

Age Level: All

Level: All Three tiers

Topic: This was written specifically for HGRESA using information provided by the Georgia Department of Education on Improving School Climate.

Time: Five hours plus implementation time

Using the information from the STAR School Climate Survey Results, we will address:

• Building Relationships Between Staff, Students, Family, and Community
• Addressing Bullying and Fighting
• Safety
• Academic Growth
• Behavioral Growth

This presentation will share evidence-based strategies from around the US. 

Georgia’s Survey on School Climate looks at the following:

• Survey- a measure of student, teacher, and family member perceptions of the school’s climate

• Student discipline- a measure of student discipline using a weighted suspension rate

• Safe and Substance-Free Learning Environment- school discipline incidents and student survey responses on the use of illegal substances and the prevalence of violence, bullying, and unsafe incidents within a school

• Attendance- the average daily attendance of teachers, administrators, and staff members and the percentage of students absent less than 10% of the enrolled days.

Introduction: Before you begin the introduction, please pull your STAR Climate Survey Results and run copies for all staff. You will look at the results after watching the short introduction.

Audience: All Staff and Administrators in General and Special Education

Age Level: Pre-Teen through Teenagers

Level: Tier Three

Topic: Many teachers ask how to handle the situation when a student is having a meltdown in the classroom. How do you handle the audience and how do you handle the student. This presentation is available in two levels – Pre-K through Second Grade and Pre-Teen through Teenagers.

Time: Two Hours

Audience: All Staff and Administrators in General and Special Education

Age Level: Pre-K through Second Grade

Level: Tier Three

Topic: Many teachers ask how to handle the situation when a student is having a meltdown in the classroom. How do you handle the audience and how do you handle the student. This presentation is available in two levels – Pre-K through Second Grade and Pre-Teen through Teenagers.

Time: Two Hours

Audience: All Staff

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Two

Topic: One way to motivate students is to use group contingencies and group reinforcers.  This will give you some different ideas to use for all ages (Preschool through High School).

Time: Two Hours

This presentation focuses on administrative steps to lead your staff through the following:

• Student-to-Student Bullying
• How to deal with the bullies
• How to deal with the victims
• How to train your students to be upstanders and not bystanders
• Developing a mantra for your anti-bullying platform.
• Developing expectations to define your mantra
• Threat Assessments
• Reporting Systems
• Flex Labs for Reteaching
• Professional Learning Communities
• Other Bullying
• teacher to teacher
• administrator to teacher
• parent to teacher
• student to teacher
• teacher to student
• Building Relationships between students, family members, educators, and community members

There is a $50 out of area fee for participants outside the Heart of Georgia RESA systems.

Age Level: All

Level: Universal

Topic: Universal-level Behavioral Interventions Overview for Administrators. This will help administrators set up surveys and information before beginning universal behavior support training with their staff.

Time: 1 hour

Level: Tier Two

Topic: Bullying. This session focuses on the inclusion of bully-proofing within your classroom and your universal level. Several free programs will be discussed.

Time: 12 hours (four hours of video and 8 hours of implementation)

Audience: Admin, All, Ancillary, Counselor, Psychologist, SPED

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Three

Topic: Self-Regulation:  Helping students learn to understand the amygdala and how to self-regulate when the amygdala begins the hijack of the brain. This presentation will share with you different techniques you can use to teach students how to calm themselves and then share the emotion and trigger with their adults and problem-solve.

Time: Six Hours

Audience: SPED and General Education

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Three

Topic: Life Skills: Dr. Riffel lived with an adult with autism, bipolar condition, obsessive compulsive disorder, intellectual disabilities, and mild cerebral palsy.  She also has followed the success of students she housed in her clinic. What we know from these adults with disabilities is that they need a dignified life. A dignified life is one where the person has a home they feel safe in, a job that is meaningful, friends that are true, and leisure activities they enjoy.  This presentation will share with you what can be done throughout their school career to help them have these things after they graduate.

Time: Five Hours

Audience: Ancillary Staff

Age Level: All

Level: Universal

Topic: Relationships/ Climate: This is for staff members who only see students for a short time (specials, counselors, psychologists, etc.) and need to build relationships with those students. This presentation focuses on what you can do in a short amount of time to help build relationships with those students.

Time: Three Hours

Audience: All

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Two

Topic: Classroom Management. When attending university at the pre-service level, most of the training focuses on teaching the specific academic topics we will be teaching; however, very few courses focused on the actual techniques needed to gain attention and garner enthusiasm from students in actually learning those topics.  This course focuses on techniques that are evidence-based and highly effective.

Time: 9 hours

Audience: Administrators, All General and Special Education Teachers, Ancillary Staff, Counselors, and Psychologists

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Two and Tier Three

Topic: Interventions based on Dr. Simonson’s work on what qualifies as an evidence-based intervention with real classroom applications and videos to show how to implement some of the strategies.

Time: 7 hours

Audience: Family Members

Age Level: Primary and Elementary

Level: All three tiers

Topic: This is specifically designed for a school to purchase and use as a family night training possibly broken into two sessions. It will help family members use the same language as the school when working to give children the words they need to convey their emotions and learn to solve their own problems.

Time: Four hours

Audience: Administrators and All Staff in General and Special Education

Age Level: Pre-K through First Grade

Level: Universal

Topic: Many students who are currently in Pre-K through First Grade missed social skills during the Covid lockdown. This presentation focuses on what social skills they need and how to teach them.

Time: Six Hours

This is a focus on anxiety, self-regulation, essential skills, and reinforcing appropriate behavior. This workshop will focus on teaching explicit steps to building an amygdala recalibration station for children 4-7. We will cover anxiety, essential skills, and we will focus on how to reinforce appropriate replacement behaviors through behavior specific praise as a teaching tool.

There will be an out of the HGRESA area fee of $50.

Upon successful completion of this course, the learners of a school will have developed the following:

1. 3-5 positively stated expectations based on the replacement behaviors of those currently showing up in the office for office discipline referrals (ODR)
2. A matrix which shows 3-4 examples of each expectation in all the non-classroom areas of the school.
3. A lesson plan for kicking off each replacement behavior and for all the booster shots that will be required as data indicate the need.
4. A reinforcement system of replacement behaviors including gotchas and non-tangible reinforcements.
5. A consistency and fidelity plan for office managed versus classroom managed behaviors.
6. A data system that includes the six key elements for making data-based decisions.
7. A plan for including families and communities in the implementation of their universal behavior support plan.

Audience: Everyone

Age Level: All

Level: Universal

Topic: Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports for your entire school.  This is approximately 15 hours of preparation work time to get this developed for your school.

Time: Fifteen Hours of Planning Time

There will be an out of the HGRESA area fee of $50.

 HGRESA District Members Only.

• Riffel and her husband lived with a friend who had autism, bipolar condition, intellectual disabilities, obsessive compulsive disorder, and mild cerebral palsy. He taught them through a decade of living together what it took to build a dignified life. She will share what he taught them. 
• Riffel will also share success stories of children who were temporarily in her day clinic with severe behaviors and how through remediation they were able to be educated with the moderate students in the school (despite being labeled as having an IQ less than 50). The students have now graduated and are participating members in a dignified life with jobs, leisure activities, friends, and a positive living arrangement.

• For years, Dr. Riffel taught students with autism, trained educators how to work with students with autism, and ran a day clinic for students with autism with severe behaviors. She and her family had the opportunity to live with an adult with autism as his friend and this is where she learned the most information. She learned how to view the world from the brain of someone with autism and despite limited communication skills she was able to determine what was causing meltdowns and how to proactively divert those tantrums. She will share techniques she learned through the years with you in this seminar.
• She will first describe what a dignified life consists of and how that should be our goal even when the student is in kindergarten. She will share ideas for:
  • Sensory integration issues
    • Auditory
    • Tactile
    • Visual
  • Potty training
    • Many students are in high school and still not potty trained- she will share how she potty trained a 16-year-old in two weeks
  • Video modeling, video self-modeling, and PowerPoint relationship narratives
    • For teaching appropriate behaviors
    • For introducing changes in the environment
  • How to help a non-verbal child communicate with a verbal peer
  • How to teach self-regulation to a student with limited abilities
  • How to help family members have a dignified life as well
• Riffel will also share what Autism is like by sharing excerpts from learners with autism. Seeing the world as they see it is important to helping them navigate the world.

Audience: Special Education and Inclusion Staff and Administrators

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Three

Topic: How do you develop a dignified life for learners with autism? This presentation focuses on real stories from the field for the development of a quality life.

Time: Seven Hours

 HGRESA District Members Only.

• This presentation will show what data need to be collected to do an effective intervention plan using a competing pathway model. This uses a real preschool student and 10 days of data. Dr. Riffel will show how she takes the information from the functional behavior assessment (FBA) and turns it into a data-based intervention plan.

• Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) is an open-ended term because there is not a legal definition of what an FBA should entail. Therefore, some schools feel answering 20 questions about a student, an observer sitting in the back of the room for 30 minutes, or anecdotal notes is sufficient to determine the real function of the behavior.  To have a good FBA, we need to know the triggers and the impacts of the targeted behavior in conjunction with each other. The consensus among researchers is that we need ten incidents to develop an effective intervention plan. Dr. Riffel prefers 10 days of data collected by the classroom teacher looking for behavioral chains. Knowing how difficult this was, she spent years simplifying a data collection tool.
• This is a free tool that graphs antecedent, behavior, and consequence data and helps the educational behavior support team determine the true function of the behavior.
• Riffel will show you how to use the tool to enter data, analyze the data, and write an effective competing pathway plan for remediating the behavior using a preschool example.

Audience: All Staff and Administrators in General and Special Education

Age Level: Preschool

Level: Tier Two and Tier Three

Topic: Data can be daunting. We simplified data collection into a form that makes it super simple to collect and then that data gives you a print out that helps you make data-based decisions. 

Time: Two Hours

 HGRESA District Members Only.

• This presentation will show what data need to be collected to do an effective intervention plan using a competing pathway model. This uses a real elementary student and 10 days of data. Dr. Riffel will show how she takes the information from the functional behavior assessment (FBA) and turns it into a data-based intervention plan.

• Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) is an open-ended term because there is not a legal definition of what an FBA should entail. Therefore, some schools feel answering 20 questions about a student, an observer sitting in the back of the room for 30 minutes, or anecdotal notes is sufficient to determine the real function of the behavior.  To have a good FBA, we need to know the triggers and the impacts of the targeted behavior in conjunction with each other. The consensus among researchers is that we need ten incidents to develop an effective intervention plan. Dr. Riffel prefers 10 days of data collected by the classroom teacher looking for behavioral chains. Knowing how difficult this was, she spent years simplifying a data collection tool.
• This is a free tool that graphs antecedent, behavior, and consequence data and helps the educational behavior support team determine the true function of the behavior.
• Riffel will show you how to use the tool to enter data, analyze the data, and write an effective competing pathway plan for remediating the behavior using an elementary example.

Audience: All Staff and Administrators in General and Special Education

Age Level: Elementary

Level: Tier Two and Tier Three

Topic: Data can be daunting. We simplified data collection into a form that makes it super simple to collect and then that data gives you a print out that helps you make data-based decisions. 

Time: Two Hours

 HGRESA District Members Only.

• This presentation will show what data need to be collected to do an effective intervention plan using a competing pathway model. This uses a real secondary student and 10 days of data. Dr. Riffel will show how she takes the information from the functional behavior assessment (FBA) and turns it into a data-based intervention plan.

• Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) is an open-ended term because there is not a legal definition of what an FBA should entail. Therefore, some schools feel answering 20 questions about a student, an observer sitting in the back of the room for 30 minutes, or anecdotal notes is sufficient to determine the real function of the behavior.  To have a good FBA, we need to know the triggers and the impacts of the targeted behavior in conjunction with each other. The consensus among researchers is that we need ten incidents to develop an effective intervention plan. Dr. Riffel prefers 10 days of data collected by the classroom teacher looking for behavioral chains. Knowing how difficult this was, she spent years simplifying a data collection tool.
• This is a free tool that graphs antecedent, behavior, and consequence data and helps the educational behavior support team determine the true function of the behavior.
• Riffel will show you how to use the tool to enter data, analyze the data, and write an effective competing pathway plan for remediating the behavior using a secondary example.

Audience: All Staff and Administrators in General and Special Education

Age Level: Secondary

Level: Tier Two and Tier Three

Topic: Data can be daunting. We simplified data collection into a form that makes it super simple to collect and then that data gives you a print out that helps you make data-based decisions. 

Time: Two Hours

 HGRESA District Members Only.

• • The difference between a reward and reinforcement. The two terms are inappropriate interchanged in dialogue and this has caused a lot of confusion on how we change behavior. A reward is something given for the sake of giving. A reinforcer is something that encourages or discourages a behavior. For instance, I do not speed because the thought of losing money through a ticket is not something I want to do. Despite knowing the consequences, there are some people who do not care about the ticket because they know they will get away with the speeding 9 times out of 10. How do we reinforce students who seemingly do not care what will happen?
  • Riffel has been conducting research on reinforcement since 2004. She began this because she walked into a school that was giving away bicycles to students who were caught being good. Dr. Riffel does not believe in tangible reinforcers for students. Her research found that these are not the things students will work for anyway.

   

  • In 2004, Dr. Riffel walked into a middle school that was doing a monthly drawing from students who had been caught being good and one student would win a bicycle. There were over 1000 students in the building and this meant the odds of winning a bicycle were slim to none. After several months, students quit trying. There were so many things wrong with this scenario. The first being that a once-a-month reinforcement would work for all students and that the opportunity to earn something tangible would be reinforcing for all students. This was their only level of reinforcement.
  • We immediately went out and bought spiral notebooks and started walking in schools and asking students during class changing period at the secondary level and recess at the elementary level, “What would mean the world to you? What could an adult give you that would let you know you had done a good job, but it can’t cost any money?” In all the years since then only one student has broken the code and named something tangible.  It was a fifth grader in Wyoming who said, “Food would be nice.” (You know what we found out when we inquired).  We found that students do not want tangibles. 
  • We later broke their answers down into categories after reading Chapman and White’s 2012 research on “Appreciation in the Workplace”. We found a set of categories that all the answers fit into from Pre-K through 12^th
  • Riffel will share rationale behind reinforcement and schedules of reinforcement. She will also share a resource with over 70 pages of reinforcers based on research gathered from real students since 2004.

Audience: All

Age Level: All

Level: Universal

Topic: We have to teach and then reinforce the replacement behaviors we want to see.  This presentation focuses on how to reinforce and teach those replacement behaviors.

Time: Two Hours

This presentation is meant to give an overview of internalizing behaviors and how we can address them at the schoolwide, classroom, and individual levels.

In Universal Behavior Support, we typically use office discipline referrals to determine our expectations and our focus. We use it because it is basically what we have available. Unfortunately, office discipline referrals are based on externalizing behaviors. While these are the most disruptive, there are other behaviors we need to be concerned with in the classroom as they can lead to anxiety, depression, phobias, and more. These internalizing behaviors can also become the trigger for externalized behaviors.

If we can learn to put some proactive strategies in place, we can mitigate the effects of internalized behaviors for most children. The Surgeon General (2022) reports a 50% increase in anxiety and depression since 2020. This training will point out what we can look for and what we can implement at all three levels.

Some of the areas Dr. Riffel addresses include students with low self esteem and making positive connections with all students.

Audience: All administrators and staff in general and special education

Age Level: Secondary

Level: Tier Two

Topic: This focuses on internalizing behaviors and how to implement appropriate interventions for those internalizing behaviors. We have this available for elementary and secondary.

Time: Eight Hours

There is a $50 out of area fee for participants from outside the Heart of Georgia RESA systems.

Audience: All staff members and administrators in general and special education

Age Level: Kindergarten through Second Grade

Topic: In 2022 the surgeon general indicated a 50% increase in anxiety and depression in the 3–17-year-old students since 2016. This presentation focuses on what we can do proactively to help our younger students be successful in dealing with anxiety.

Time: Six Hours

There is a $50 out of area fee for participants from outside the Heart of Georgia RESA systems.

There is an Out of Area Fee for this course.

This tier-two course has strategies to help Pre-K through 12th grade educators
alleviate behaviors that appear to be cropping up post-COVID.

We will first explore the current students' age when Covid hit, and what skills they
missed due to that absence.
We will discuss the surgeon general's findings and then go through step-by-step
what we can do to teach all the curriculum required and still cover the skill deficits
missing in today's students.
This is a working seminar, meaning the video will stop, and you will have time to
discuss with cohorts the strategies and how you could implement them in your
classrooms.
Participants will learn:
1. How to identify anxiety and depression in students
2. Ways to revise the environment to set students up for success.
3. Ways to build relationships with students.
4. Ways to teach replacement behaviors.
5. How to use a simplified competing pathway chart
6. Ways to reframe our response so we are feeding the replacement behavior
and extinguishing the target.

Audience: All Staff and Administrators in General and Special Education

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Two

Topic: The pandemic brought some new behaviors to the forefront including: disruptions, peer to peer interactions, peer to adult interactions, resilience, and so much more.  This presentation focuses on what caused this and what we can do about it to help our students be successful.

Time: Six Hours

Audience: Children

Age Level: Pre-K through First Grade

Level: Universal

Topic: Helping students understand the difference between tattling and reporting.

Time: Two Hours