Enhancing School Safety Officers' Effectiveness Through Online Professional and Job Embedded Coaching

Overview

The University of Florida's (UF) Lastinger Center for Learning, in partnership with the UF Psychology Department, have been funded by the National Institute of Justice to advance the skills of School Resource Officers (SROs) currently working in the Miami-Dade Schools Police Department through an innovative, scalable, online and in-person professional development system. The goal will be realized through a 36-month pilot project allowing for the development, testing, and refinement of the system conducted in partnership with the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, and includes an evaluation component to assess for efficacy and scalability.

The University of Florida Lastinger Center for Learning and the Psychology Department aim to pilot-test a system of job-embedded professional development that will train Miami-Dade County SROs in research-based, best-practice techniques for addressing the unique needs of the school environment. Using a combination of both online and in-person supports this innovative approach to SRO professional development will provide programming that is highly impactful, easily accessible, and cost-effective to implement and eventually scale up nationally. This goal will be realized through a 36-month pilot project allowing for the development, testing, and refinement of the system conducted in partnership with the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. Additionally, it includes an evaluation component to assess for efficacy and scalability. Trainings will be comprised of online modules and expert coaching in the following four areas: 1. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL): to build student capacity using the Consortium of Academic \& Social Emotional Learning's (CASEL) core competencies, including self- awareness, self-management, social awareness, responsible decision-making, and relationship skills; Many schools are implementing SEL program to manage disruptive behavior, reduce aggression, bullying, and other forms of school violence, and to promote positive interactions among all school members. SROs can play a critical role in reinforcing the skills taught in classrooms by modeling empathy, perspective-taking, positive coping strategies, adaptive problem-solving, emotional regulation, listening skills, problem-solving, and respectful behaviors when interacting with youth and other adults in the school building. 2. Trauma-Informed Care: to help officers understand and mitigate the neurological, biological, and psychological impact of trauma on affected children and adolescents' behavior; a trauma-informed approach acknowledges the centrality of trauma and its profound impact on students' perception of emotional and physical safety and relationships. 3. Cultural Competence/Implicit Bias/Intersectionality: to help SROs navigate the personal and structural racial and cultural barriers that students face as well as those specifically faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) children and youth. More broadly, a lack of competence in working with LGBTQ and youth of color can lead to or exacerbate school violence and erode school climate. 4. Restorative Practices/Problem-Solving: to develop a school culture grounded in community problem-solving and productive restitution, as an alternative to punitive or retributive-based discipline. There are many practices that fall under the umbrella of Restorative Justice. Schools in the US have implemented a variety of restorative practices to address truancy, bullying, disciplinary issues, and interpersonal conflict. Restorative practices in schools can vary widely (i.e., conferencing, circles, mediation) but typically offer a dialogue between those who have harmed and those who have been harmed. The dialogue is intended to assist in working out restitution, holding individuals accountable, repairing the harm and their relationship, and reintegrating the person causing the harm back into the school community. Procedure: The research design for this project will be an experimental time-series design where 70 SROs are randomly assigned to participate in the program (Cohort 1), and a control group of 70 SROs is placed on a waiting list to participate in the program starting six months after the first group completes the program (Cohort 2). The design includes a short time-series with treatment and control SROs measured simultaneously at three waves. The three measurements will occur before treatment assignment, after the treatment group completes the program, and six months after participation. After these three measurements are taken, the control group will receive the program. According to sample size guidelines from CrimeSolutions.org, for a time-series design, a sample size of at least 51 is expected to allow detection of a medium effect (0.50). However, some SRO attrition from the program is expected, and the selected sample size of 70 per group will protect against excessive loss of power due to attrition. In this program, attrition will be minimized due to the individual work that each SRO will perform with a coach. Also, participants will receive multiple reminders of each content e-clinic, and participants that miss a live e-clinic will be contacted by their coaches to encourage viewing of the recorded version. The assignment of SROs for the groups will be at the school level, where all SROs within a school will be placed in either the treatment or control groups. The rationale of a school-level assignment is to avoid spill-over effects between treated and control SROs in the same schools. The population of schools for this study will include middle and high schools, and the treatment and control groups will have SROs in middle and high schools at proportions similar to the population. Recruitment into the professional development and evaluation study will be coordinated among the project partners, the University of Florida and the Miami Dade Schools Police Department. Information will be sent out via email and presentations will be made at appropriate meetings to recruit potential participants.' Professional Development Program Components: 1. E-Content Clinics- Content Clinics are offered online using digital video technology. The Clinics have two components - First, research-based content and practice relevant to the given subject or challenge; Second, actionable strategies for using this information to immediately improve instruction. The Clinics will be linked to coaching development with SRO sergeants so they can reinforce the lessons learned by their officers. Clinics will provide two-hour intensive opportunities for professional development four times a year. Each clinic will be offered online "live" and will also be recorded for later streaming to ensure maximum access. The Clinics will emphasize the current research on a topic as well as actionable strategies and techniques to use in schools. Clinics will also have short online quizzes to check learning. 2. Coaching- Coaching develops strong cadres of leaders that have profound expertise and substantial success in advancing teaching and learning outcomes. This approach uses existing personnel to reinforce and deepen learning through online professional development by embedding it in day-to-day activities. The UF Lastinger Center Coaching approach is built upon a set of foundational skills that will be applied to this project. In this model, SRO sergeants will be trained as coaches to help them bridge the content in the professional development sessions to the officers' daily work while also generally building their capacity to develop their direct reports. Coaching will provide: a) deeper understanding of the professional development content and how it will affect school safety; b) application of adult learning principles to support and enhance SRO practice; c) knowledge to plan and lead job-embedded professional development; d) the ability to use structured dialogue to support dynamic, fluid learning and strategy implementation to improve school safety. The energized pursuit of inquiry with SROs is to generate meaningful data to guide improvement. Upon completing the Coaching program, leaders/ supervisors of SROs will receive a certification from the Lastinger Center. They will also be able to schedule live video coaching sessions where they will work one-on-one with a Lastinger Center Master Coach to address a pressing issue, answer a question, or generally build the effectiveness of their practice. This will allow sergeants to participate in an evidence-based, collaborative coaching process and a supportive e-learning community regardless of their schedule. 3. Online Community of Practice- This scalable online platform allows users to create virtual communities of practice designed to strengthen the learning and collaboration network. A community of practice provides an online mentoring and professional development system to boost retention and accelerate the professional growth of SROs while simultaneously building the collaboration capacity and expertise of their coaches.