Pyramid training of elementary school teachers to use a classroom management "skill package".
Have your best-trained teachers each train one colleague—behavior and academics improve with 75% less supervisor time.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team taught one group of elementary teachers a classroom management "skill package."
Each trained teacher then trained one colleague.
Researchers tracked student disruption and math work in both tiers of classrooms.
What they found
Disruptive behavior dropped and math output rose in every room.
Supervisor time fell by three-quarters because teachers, not experts, did the coaching.
How this fits with other research
Jones et al. (1975) tried the same skill package but used role-play training led by researchers.
Both cut disruption and lifted math scores, yet the 1977 method needs far less expert time.
Conklin et al. (2019) later copied the pyramid idea with parents.
One expert trained a few caregivers, then they trained the rest, hitting 96% fidelity on DRA.
Together the papers show: train a small first wave to mastery and they can spread the skill without quality loss.
Why it matters
You can clone good classroom management across a school without burning out your BCBA hours.
Pick two confident teachers, bring them to mastery with the skill package, then have each coach one peer.
Track disruption and work completion for two weeks; you should see the same gains and free up 75% of your travel time for other cases.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three regular elementary teachers were trained in the use of a classroom management "skill package". Subsequently, each of these three teachers (tier 1 of training) trained three more teachers to use the same skill package (tier 2 of training). Direct behavioral measures of student disruptiveness were taken in the three tier-1 classrooms and four tier-2 classrooms, and permanent product measures of student productivity in arithmetic were taken in the three tier-1 classrooms. Results indicated that student disruptiveness decreased at least as much in the tier-2 classrooms as in the tier-1 classrooms. Data also indicated that serving as trainers benefited two of the tier-1 teachers who profited least from the original training by producing further reductions in disruptiveness in their respective classrooms. Productivity data suggested that use of the "skill package" increased classroom academic output, especially for those students below the median in productivity during baseline. The investigators' time investment in training a tier-2 teacher was one-fourth that of training a tier-1 teacher.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1977 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1977.10-239