Bill Eyman Behavior Support Specialist Bill Eyman worked for over a decade as a Behavior Specialist in the Office of Special Populations at the Rhode Island Department of Education. For the last four years, Bill worked with the Rhode Island Technical Assistance Project and the Character Education Partnership. Charged with helping to manage students who exhibit challenging behavior, Bill stresses that, for any meaningful behavior change to occur, you must start by developing relationships and community in the school.

While Bill has the skills associated with classic behavioral models, his focus is on creating more lasting behavior change by teaching adults and students in the schools how to establish connections between often alienated people. His goal is to create an atmosphere of trust and friendliness among all parties.

Bill’s ideal is to create safe, healthy, and nurturing schools for all students while employing early intervention for some students with significant risk factors and intensive intervention for a few students who need comprehensive and sustained support. Bill is too realistic to believe that a script is what is needed. One size does not fit all. He believes that social emotional learning has a very clear core of principles and competencies, but that its richness comes from the infinite variations created by real teachers in real classrooms. There is no magic formula to follow in facilitating exercises and activities such as the ones profiled in this guide. There are, however, some general and specific guidelines that are extremely helpful.

“Bill’s ideal is to create safe, healthy, and nurturing schools for all students while employing early intervention for some students with significant risk factors and intensive intervention for a few students who need comprehensive and sustained support.”

Modeling respect and respectful boundaries is an important guideline. Bill takes the time to learn what respect looks like, sounds like, and feels like to the students in his audience. It is not always the same. He then tries to manifest that version of respect in his behavior. If he does not get it right, he apologizes. An apology to a student builds bridges of understanding and trust. He also gives students the opportunity to provide feedback about how he is doing and how he might do better. He is careful not to ask students to take on an adult role but to share some of the responsibility for strengthening their learning community. He finds that students almost always respond positively to these approaches.

Bill realizes that community is not always a priority in schools. However, history and current research is on the side of community as the foundation for academic achievement. Belonging to a community, having ownership in that community, and learning to participate in the community are the keys to getting students to behave in ways that honor themselves and others.

“Belonging to a community, having ownership in that community, and learning to participate in the community are the keys to getting students to behave in ways that honor themselves and others.”