Tele-health training of teachers to teach a mindfulness-based procedure for self-management of aggressive behavior to students with intellectual and developmental disabilities

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of using Tele-health technology to teach three teachers in a rural school district the basics of a mindfulness-based procedure, measure the fidelity of the teachers teaching the procedure to a student in their class, and to assess the effectiveness of the students’ use of the procedure, in terms of their physical and verbal aggression.

Methods: A multiple-baseline design across participants was used, with a 12-month follow-up. Tele-health technology was used to teach teachers meditation on the Soles of the Feet (SoF) procedure. The students were able to use the procedure to downregulate their emotions associated with the earliest precursors to verbal and physical aggression. We measured the fidelity of the teachers’ and the students’ SoF training, as well as behavioral outcomes for the students in terms of frequency of physical and verbal aggression.

Results: The Tele-health technology was used successfully to teach the teachers how to personally use and then teach the SoF procedure to their students in a face-to-face school setting. The fidelity of teacher and student training in the SoF procedure was high. The students were able to learn how to downregulate their emotional reactions to rising anger and aggression, thereby reducing physical aggression to near-zero levels and verbal aggression to close to zero levels in the follow-up period.

Conclusions: Tele-health may be an effective approach to providing training and therapy to caregivers in remote locations that cannot readily access specialist services.

Keywords:

• Tele-health
• mindfulness-based procedure
• Soles of the Feet, teachers, students with IDD, physical aggression, verbal aggression

Acknowledgments

We thank the school principal, teachers, the three students, and their parents for enabling this study. We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions that helped us to strengthen the presentation of our research.