Study finds teachers continue using effective behavior support program CW-FIT years after training ends

LAWRENCE—Teachers can spend hours each month managing disruptive behavior in the classroom. This takes time away from student learning and adds to the burden of an already demanding profession.

New research suggests CW-FIT (Class-Wide FIT), a classroom management system developed by KU researchers, continues to be used by educators one to two years after being trained. The initial findings from this study suggest that the core practices of the intervention can become part of everyday teaching even without ongoing coaching and support. The research team will continue to measure sustained used across school districts before submitting the findings for publication.

Gretchen Scheibel, assistant research professor at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project, a part of the KU Life Span Institute, led the study. Teachers need effective tools to manage classroom disruptions, she said.

She noted that an earlier study she led in Maine looked at the impact of classroom behavior challenges. The study found 77% of educators had to manage low-level disruptive behavior daily, and 92% reported needing to do so weekly. Each disruptive episode took an average of 10-12 minutes to manage.

"Almost 7 and a half hours a month are being spent by general education teachers managing that type of behavior during instructional time," Scheibel said.

Higher levels of behavior challenges, while less common, took longer to manage. Managing student behavior in Maine costs between $6,674 and $15,366 per educator each year, depending on the professional role.

Educators experiencing challenging behavior in the study reported experiencing greater stress, lower coping, and occasional physical injuries. They also reported that student behavior negatively impacted relationships between staff and students, staff absences and vacancies, and greatly disrupted the learning environment. Workforce studies have indicated educators managing behavior were more likely to leave the profession due to burnout, and schools with high rates of challenging behavior report lower academic achievement.

Scheibel said that the negative impact of challenging behavior in schools means that there is a high need for behavior supports that can quickly and efficiently address challenging behavior and be used consistently over time. The best way to do that is to address challenging behavior as quickly as possible.

“If you have low-level behaviors, like disruptive behavior, and it doesn't get addressed, then the behavior is likely to intensify and it is harder to address,” Scheibel said. “Behavior supports for more intensive forms of behavior are harder to implement and require more educator time and resources.”

CW-FIT is a behavior support intervention designed to change disruptive behaviors at lower levels before they escalate. It was developed by a team of researchers led by Howard Wills, KU senior scientist and professor of educational psychology, through support from the U.S. Department of Education.

“Ideally, CW-FIT will reduce challenging behavior before more intensive intervention is needed,” Wills said. “This makes CW-FIT a high value intervention for teachers who manage student behavior and for school administrators working to improve student engagement and to put behavior supports in place.”

While CW-FIT has been proven effective, Scheibel and her team wanted to know if educators continued to use the intervention after training was complete.

To find out, they tracked a group of teachers at a Kansas school district that had been trained in CW-FIT one to two years earlier, along with teachers who hadn’t. None of the teachers had ongoing instructions in CW-FIT, Scheibel said.

“The teachers had not received a refresher course or a reminder to continue using the intervention,” she said. “They had learned about CW-FIT one or two years ago, and we checked in to see if they were still using it.”

Teachers in the district, who were anonymously tracked, reported that they continued to use the core components of the CW-FIT system, even without continued training or coaching support.

"That's pretty good,” Scheibel said. "Those core components are the most effective parts of CW-FIT.”

Scheibel suggested that teachers may have been selectively using the pieces they liked or found useful, rather than using CW-FIT as prescribed. However, their reported levels of use stayed consistent throughout the school year, demonstrating that they valued the techniques they continued to use more so than the ones they didn't maintain. This suggests that the core components of CW-FIT are  high-value  and can help educators address low-level behaviors in the classroom before they intensify, she said.

“Our findings show that when educators value an intervention, especially one like CW-FIT that addresses a pressing issue in their classroom, they are likely to continue using it.”