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All MCPS schools have an Educational Management Team
(EMT). The purpose of the EMT is to help teachers solve
specific instructional, behavioral or motivational problems.
Each school maintains their own EMT schedule. The usual
practice is for EMT to meet once each week. Members
on the EMT vary and are based on the problem being discussed.
In most schools, regular EMT membership includes a school
administrator, classroom teacher, resource teacher,
and the school counselor. School psychologists, pupil
personnel workers, speech language pathologists, the
student and parents/guardians participate frequently.
Students suspected of an educational disability and
seeking accommodative services as provided by section
504 of the vocational amendments began this determination
at the EMT level. (Section 504 is a civil rights law.
Section 504 prohibits discrimination against individuals
with disabilities. Section 504 ensures that the child
with a disability has equal access to an education.
The child may receive accommodations and modifications.)
In an effort to enhance the problem solving supports
available to schools the Collaborative Action
Process (CAP) format was developed. CAP begins
with specific strategic analyses that support school
improvement planning and focuses a four-step problem
solving process directly on helping staff consider the
multiple "factors" that inhibit appropriate behavior
and diminish learning and how to improve classroom behavior
and enrich learning. At this time, CAP is being implemented
in schools on a voluntary basis with approximately 30
schools participating.
The four problem solving steps are:
- Problem Identification (during which the
following are considered):
- What does the student know?
- What do we expect the student to know/do?
- When, where, and how are problems occurring?
- What is the student's history of learning and
behaving?
- Why Problem Analysis (during which the following
are considered):
- Why is this problem occurring?
- Is it related to student factors?
- Is it related to curricular/instructional
factors?
- Is it related to teacher, classroom or
peer factors?
- What is the contribution of the home and
community?
- What is maintaining the problem?
- Intervention Planning (during which the
following are considered):
- What is the expected behavioral or academic
performance level?
- What strategies will address the reasons we
found for the problem?
- What changes and supports need to be designed
in what setting? By whom?
- What skills, knowledge and resources do we need
to make the changes occur?
- What will we look for as criteria for success?
- Monitoring and Evaluation (during which
the following are considered):
- Is the plan being implemented as designed? Why?
Why not?
- What are the challenges?
- Are we moving toward the criteria for success
and seeing evidence of learning?
- What are our next steps? Do we have the correct
problem identified? Did we find the most important
reasons?
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