Iy_#467406

I ncredible Years Teacher Training Program

(http://www.incredibleyears.com/program/teacher.asp)

Incredible Years is a research-based, “classroom management” teacher training program that can be incorporated into existing Head Start programming to strengthen teacher classroom management strategies, promote children's pro-social behavior and school readiness, and increase social competence.

The Incredible Years program trains teachers to implement classroom-wide positive management and discipline strategies, and to promote social competence in the classroom. The approach is systematic, and includes attention to positive behavioral support, classroom organization (rules and routines), clear commands and consistent limit-setting, positive reward structures, and providing positive teacher attention. The program includes the use of incentives and proactive approaches to reducing problem behavior, and builds these strategies on a foundation of positive relationships with students.

Incredible Years encourages teachers to be sensitive to developmental differences in children, such as variations in attention span, activity levels, and interest in novel situations, and teaches them how to respond to these differences in positive, accepting, and consistent ways. Additionally, teachers learn how to prevent peer rejection by teaching aggressive children appropriate problem-solving strategies and helping the children’s peers to respond appropriately to aggression. Collectively, these changes in teachers’ skills in managing children’s behavior affect the quality of the classroom environment (the emotional and behavioral management in the classroom, as well as the quality of instruction).

In addition to altering the context of the classroom, it is expected that changes in teachers’ behavior will lead to children’s more effective self-regulatory skills. Teachers who maintain more emotionally positive and behaviorally well-organized classrooms are more likely to provide key regulatory support to children having behavioral difficulty as well as to those children demonstrating greater self-regulatory competence. This is expected to lead to greater behavioral self-regulation on the part of children, contributing both to the quality of the classroom environment, as well as their executive function skills, and, in turn, their social and learning behaviors. It is expected that, by reducing disruptive behavior and increasing positive emotional climates in classrooms, children will show greater emotional and behavioral gains over the course of their Head Start year.

The Incredible Years Teacher Training Program includes the following components:

Teacher Program 1 - The Importance of Teacher Attention, Encouragement, and Praise

• E.g., building self-esteem & self-confidence by teaching children how to praise themselves

Teacher Program 2 - Motivating Children through Incentives

• E.g., using incentives in a way that fosters the child’s internal motivation and focuses on the process of learning rather than the end product

Teacher Program 3 - Preventing Behavior Problems—the Proactive Teacher

• E.g., engaging children’s attention

Teacher Program 4 - Decreasing Students' Inappropriate Behaviors

• E.g., knowing how and when to ignore inappropriate responses from children

Teacher Program 5 - Building Positive Relationships with Students, Problem Solving

• E.g., fostering “feeling talk” between children

Number of lessons: 46

Frequency of lessons: 2-3 times per week