Training Youth with Disruptive Behaviors as School-Based Peer Coaches
In California schools, disruptive behavior (e.g., fighting, defiance) is the primary reason for disciplinary referrals, including school suspensions and expulsions. Persistent discipline problems in school contexts have serious consequences across the life span, including academic disengagement, substance abuse, and criminal offending. Although many school-based interventions (e.g., restorative justice) for reducing disruptive behavior are promising, they are limited in that they position struggling youth as intervention recipients, while overlooking the motivational potential of helping others. Evidence across diverse disciplines suggests that helping others has positive effects on the motivation, academic performance, and prosocial behaviors of help-givers.
Stanley Huey, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Southern California, and Katherine Galbraith, doctoral graduate student at University of Southern California, using an MRI grant, took a counterintuitive approach to remediating disruptive behaviors that deemphasizes the youth’s existing problems and focuses instead on training youth to help others. They developed a peer coach training model (PCT) which involves teaching positive skills to youth and encouraging them to influence their peers. The goal is to facilitate the development of new “helper” identities by having target youth serve as coaches for other youth. They built on the work of prior researchers that showed the benefits of “peer therapist training” for delinquent girls. That study found that training girls as “peer therapists” was more effective than alternative approaches at reducing recidivism.
Dr Huey developed a manualized version of PCT adapted for school contexts, with the model retaining three core features of earlier studies. First, instead of directly “treating” youth, PCT trains youth in behavior change strategies, which youth subsequently use to effect change in their peers. Second, youth serve as “coaches” by using their newly acquired skills to influence their close peers in a prosocial direction. Finally, PCT adopts a strengths-based, de-pathologizing approach that eschews punishment or criticism. Instead, the focus is on reinforcing youth competencies, prosocial skills, and personal strengths. They argue that encouraging youth to coach their peers and treating youth as prosocial advocates should lead to stronger prosocial identification, which in turn should lead to more prosocial behavior and less disruptive behavior.
This initial version of PCT included five weekly, group-based sessions. The first three sessions focused on teaching skills of positive reinforcement, critical feedback, and active listening. The final two sessions then integrated these skills in the role of a “peer coach.” To optimize youth engagement, didactics were minimized, and interactive role play maximized, with youth directing and video recording each other practicing coaching skills via brief skits. Peer coaching enactment outside of group was encouraged by assigning between-group coaching assignments, and providing group level contingencies (e.g., movie tickets) when the majority of group members completed assignments. Group facilitators verified coaching behavior by reviewing completed assignments and discussing participants’ experiences in using their coaching skills.
The model was first tested in 2019 with a sample of high-risk middle-school youth, where they found significant reductions in conduct problems and aggressive behavior, and high participant satisfaction. However, the original group-based, in-person model made it difficult to accommodate missed sessions and school transfers, or to implement PCT during the COVID pandemic. Thus, in this second pilot study funded by the Mental Research Institute (MRI), they modified PCT from group to individual format, adopted a hybrid model to accommodate in-person and online sessions, trained novice facilitators to administer the intervention, and developed a monitoring and supervisory protocol to maximize fidelity to PCT. They then tested the adapted intervention with discipline-referred youth at a different middle school in Los Angeles County.
Specific research aims were:
To conduct an evaluation that assesses the feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of PCT with urban, middle school youth referred for disruptive behavior. PCT was implemented with Latinx and African American middle school students. They expected that youth who receive PCT will show declines in problem behaviors over time.
To assess perceptions of PCT and make additional changes to PCT. Focus groups and interviews were conducted to assess perceptions of PCT’s acceptability, utility, and barriers.
Participants were ten 7th and 8th grade students from a public middle school located in a low- income, urban setting in Los Angeles County.
Youth and teachers were asked to complete a post-treatment assessment approximately one week after PCT training session ended. During the final session, youth were instructed to practice the peer coaching skills they had learned over the previous weeks on their friends, write about their experience on a worksheet, and turn in this worksheet to one of the group facilitators approximately one week post intervention.
Youth rated their own behavior problems and teachers rated youth behavior problems. Each measure produced syndrome scales, which assessed attention problems, rule-breaking behavior, aggressive behavior, anxious/depressed behavior, withdrawn/depressed behavior, somatic complaints, social problems, and thought problems. The DSM-5 oriented scales included attention-deficit/hyperactivity problems, oppositional defiant problems, and conduct problems. Broadband internalizing and externalizing problems were also assessed. Assessments were completed at baseline, posttreatment, and three-month follow-up.
They found no significant reductions in any domain of problem behavior over time. However, they did find a marginally-significant reduction (p < .10) in youth reported internalizing problems from baseline to follow-up.
Although no significant reductions in behavior were found with the small sample, the outcomes mostly trended in the right direction, with small to medium effects in several outcome domains. In addition, qualitative interview data showed that, overall, youth have positive perceptions of the intervention.