Leadership and Special Education: The Intersection

The week three HERS training was focused on writing performance reviews. As I sat in this meeting, I thought about all the social-emotional learning progress reports, and noted documentation of behavioral concerns I had to keep as a special education teacher. The goal in sharing performance concerns in writing is to understand the root of poor performance, just like the goal of understanding behavior is understanding “why” (the root) it is happening. All behavior is communication, and since performance can be seen as a behavior—this, too, is communication.
 I learned last week that there are four reasons that performance can be weak. They are:

1. I don’t know how to…
2. I don’t have the skills/resources...
3. I don’t want to…
4. I am unwell…

As I learned about each of these reasons, I found myself thinking there are also four reasons behaviors occur and tried to find the correlation. The reasons behaviors occur are: escape/avoidance, wanting to gain something tangible, attention, and sensory needs.
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In special education, we often see escape/avoidance activity when a ‘task’ is too hard for a student or at their frustration level. The idea of avoidance couples with the first reason for poor performance (“I don’t know how to…”). When people don’t know how to do a task or a task is too complicated, it makes sense that they avoid it, just like students who reach frustration levels with tasks want to avoid them.

When students want access to a particular toy or electronic and are either denied this or told to wait, sometimes we see externalizing behaviors as the student seeks access to this item. This could couple with the second reason an employee’s performance could be weak (not having access to resources or being trained to develop a particular skill). If resources are limited, and it is causing someone not to be able to do their job, then my job as a leader is to provide the resources or training, and if this can’t be done, perhaps the job description needs to change.

In my head, I am correlating the “I don’t want to” behavior with attention seeking. Attention-seeking behavior happens when a student is not engaged in their work. This could be because the work is not interesting, or it could be because there is too much going on in someone’s life outside of school that they can not attend to the “ask” in front of them. Regarding how this relates to leading employees, I will not be able to change job descriptions but may be able to leverage individuals’ talents so they feel more interested in their job. As a leader, I will not be able to shape someone’s attitude or do more than be sensitive to someone’s life outside of work.

The last reason someone may not perform is health-related. I cannot decide if someone can or cannot do their job because of health and need to rely on human resources and the medical profession for this. I linked this with behavior that is sensory-seeking or avoiding because individuals that display behaviors for sensory reasons also often have medical documentation supporting this. (This could be a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, sensory processing disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, malnutrition, etc.)

This HERS training had me think of some skills I used as a special educator and how these “new” leadership skills and decisions I am learning about relate to concepts/constructs I already have. I focused solely on how the “roots of poor performance” link to my knowledge of “all behavior is a form of communication”, but last week’s topic related in other ways too: how progress report writing and performance evaluation writing are similar, how to respond to negative feedback from stakeholders about evaluation write-ups (whether from a student or parent in schools, or an employee in the workforce), and how to document problems so there are records of infractions and lack of performance. Data helps make decisions in individualized educational program (IEP) meetings, and data needs to be used to make decisions about an employee’s performance.