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In-School Suspension: Scenario for use

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Ripple Effects' social learning software makes it easier for your In-School Suspension (ISS) program to provide students effective guidance, support, planning for change, and skill building, without overloading an already burdened staff. Early research on the program shows dramatic, positive behavior change even from students using the program independently.

The software is a broad and flexible multimedia tool. With it, ISS facilitators can quickly customize a learning plan based on each student’s behavior problems. Like pieces of a Lego™ set, the hundreds of topics can be combined in different ways to meet individual needs and constraints.

For each topic, everything the student needs is right there, no matter how a student prefers to learn, or their level of reading skill (everything is read aloud). Students can see an example of someone else dealing with the problem; get information; get step-by-step behavior training; hear a true story video; see the desired behavior modeled in videos; apply it to themselves through an electronic journal; apply what they’re learning with friends/family and in sports settings, analyze it in the media, and do role-plays; find out more about themselves by completing profiles; and, play interactive games, which are actually assessments to measure whether they got the main points. The program tracks completion of assessment exercises, and students can print their record at the end of each day.

The built-in, printable student profiles and progress tracking feature make it easy to share results with parents, teachers, and counselors, to get them involved in the behavior change process.

How It Works: Individualized, Systematic Intervention

The ISS facilitator finds out why the student has been assigned to ISS, and based on their offense, assigns them a set of topics in Ripple Effects for Teens. For instance, a student who has been skipping school might be assigned any or all of the following topics: skipping school, predicting consequences, accepting responsibility, bored, identifying the problem, brainstorming solutions, grades, dealing with authority, suspended, and learning style.

For a more extensive program, say for a student who has skipped school, gotten in a fight, repeatedly bullied another student, and disrupted his/her class, they could be required to complete the topics fighting, bullying-you do it, talking back, dealing with authority, and skipping school, as well as the skill building parts, controlling impulses (2 topics), managing feelings (5 topics), group skills (7 topics), and empathy training (7 topics), for a total of 26 topics over a longer ISS period.

On their own time, students can be encouraged to look up topics of interest to them (there are 320 in the program). This often prompts disclosure about problems that are at the root of their misbehavior. For goal setting, students can use the program to learn to set goals, and complete profiles to find out more about themselves--how they learn, their temperament, sports type, resiliency, etc., then come up with a plan for building the skills they feel they need.

The Result: Behavior Change

At the conclusion of the In-School Suspension period, the student has had the chance to get support, build skills, learn about themselves through printable self-profiles, and demonstrate all this via printed reports they can take back to their teachers and parents. With so much material built-in, Ripple Effects software enables schools to make ISS a learning experience that changes behavior, not wasted time in an empty room.