Having Someone to Walk Down the Road With: A Conversation With Jeffrey Sprague

How did you get into the field of education of children with behavioral and academic challenges?

That’s an interesting story. I grew up on the Oregon coast and everybody in my family was involved in some way with logging, the lumber industry. When I was in high school, my father came to me and literally took me to the hilltop and said, “Some day, son, logging won’t be here anymore. Maybe you should consider another career besides that.” Later when I was a college freshman, I took a Psych 101 class and thought, “This stuff is pretty cool.” I was particularly interested in behavioral psychology, but being a working-class kid, I thought, “Well, my folks are going to make these kinds of sacrifices to support me in school, I better have a job when I’m done.” So, I started looking into teaching. At the University of Oregon at the time, they had a program where you could get college credit for volunteering. They said, “Oh, if you want to get into teacher education, you should have some experience in that regard.” I went down to the registration table and there was a nice-looking woman looking for volunteers for a group home for what they called severely and profoundly retarded adults. I thought that that sounded like the strangest thing that I’d ever heard of and ended up visiting the group home that night for dinner.

These were some of the strangest people that I’d ever seen and there was lots of behavior going on. It turns out that it was the first group home of its type in the state of Oregon, really the beginning of de-institutionalization. One of the people that worked there was a woman named Pat Lloyd, who’s married to John Lloyd, at the University of Virginia. Pat was kind to me and for a while I actually babysat John and Pat’s daughter, who is now a grown adult with children.

Two things occurred during that time. One of my early jobs was to drive adults with developmental disabilities in a van to this workshop called the Specialized Training Program, where a smart young doctoral student named Rob Horner was actually running the workshop with Tom Bellamy, one of Rob’s main mentors. Then the second thing occurred: John Lloyd told me I should meet this guy, Zig Englemann, and learn about direct instruction. My first experience was learning how to be an elementary teacher with Zig Englemann and Doug Carnine at the same time I was working with this very challenging group of individuals at a group home and getting to know Rob and all those people. So that was kind of the beginning.

That’s quite a start. Moving from there, would you take us through your career in the field so far?

I did the early teacher training and I got an elementary teacher license, but my heart always went back to working with more challenging individuals. I chuckle about it now, but I got my teaching license with a bachelor’s degree and I really didn’t think I was ready to be a teacher. You can probably see why I chuckle about that now. My first job was with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, CETA. My job was to supervise about 50 young people with disabilities working with income-eligible high school students who served as what we now call job coaches. My job was to develop that program for Lane County in Eugene. Right about that time, there were some changes in the CETA funding, which cut all new positions, so the job that they hired me to create went away.

I went back to school and got my master’s degree, met Barbara Wilcox and Tom Bellamy, and became involved in teaching kids with significant disabilities. That was kind of the beginning of integration as we then called it; nobody said inclusion at that time; and I was doing a practicum in a high school self-contained classroom for kids with significant developmental disabilities with my colleague and friend, John McDonald. We got a federal grant to make the classroom a model classroom. John went on back to school to get his PhD and I was hired as the classroom teacher, probably with the plan to stay there 3 years and go on to get a PhD. I really loved it, so I stayed 8-and-a-half years. Then for about a year and a half, I was a behavior consultant for my education service district and that’s when I first had significant professional contact with kids with emotional and behavioral disabilities.

During that time, I also started the doc program at the University of Oregon, working with Rob Horner primarily and many other people. When I finished my PhD in 1990, I took a job at Indiana University, again focusing on kids with developmental disabilities but kind of keeping my fingers in a lot of different things, which has kind of been a theme for my career all along. We loved Indiana and the work there, but my wife and I are both Oregonians, so we got tired of seeing the grandparents’ pictures [only] on the refrigerator. Rob came out to see me and said, “Hey, I think we’re going to develop some schoolwide discipline work. We don’t know what we’re going to call it yet.” And then Hill [Walker] called me and said, “I’m going to start this institute focused on school safety,” and they both kind of said, “Can you come back?” They created a position and I brought some of my grants back to Oregon in 1994. I’ve been at Oregon ever since, doing lots of stuff.

You mentioned people who have had the most influence on your professional life. We always run a risk of leaving someone out, but is there someone that had that influence that you hadn’t previously mentioned?

I think the idea and the reality of mentorship is really important to me in terms of the gifts that those people have given to me in many, many ways. People like Hill Walker and Rob Horner or Tom Bellamy or Barbara Wilcox or Doug Carnine at different times have been some of my greatest professional mentors in terms of skill building. I often look to others that I’ve worked with in my careers, like school district superintendents who really gave voice to the values aspect of our work in the field. A man I still keep in touch with, Frank Terrell, was the superintendent in Torrance School District in California, basically a part of L.A. He was one of the people who is both in a school leadership position and is so willing to wear his values on his sleeve while trying to get his teachers to do the right things for kids. He remains a real inspiration for me.

What events, policies, or innovations have had an influence on your career?

One of the most profound events was the day and the days following the shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield [in 1998]. I actually student taught there in 1980. At the time, there really wasn’t a field of school safety and you could probably argue that there’s not now. Hill and I were working on how to frame the issue, because we knew it was coming. Nobody predicted these mass school shootings but we predicted more school violence, so that day placed an intensity on our work that hadn’t been there before. Part of it was that the media was all over it. I learned a lot about the media over those couple weeks and literally had to shut our institute down because sometimes they were just lined up at the door. One of the things that I learned is that when a journalist asks you a question, you can kind of sniff out if they’re essentially telling you the answer that they want, and that’s the question that you don’t answer. I once did an interview for Bryant Gumbel’s news show. There was actually a guy with a TV team at my house on Memorial Day, which was a few days after the Thurston shooting, and the guy kept trying to get me to say that Kip Kinkel’s parents were crazy or bad or it was their fault. For 2 hours I kept saying that these were well-respected educators in our community. I’m not qualified to say that, I don’t know the facts. Part of what happened with the shooting is that it made it more than palpably real that this kind of violence can occur in schools. Probably for Hill and I both (I finally noticed it in a conversation with him about 2 years later), we’ve been busting our butts here trying to save the whole world and maybe that has something to do with the trauma we had over that event. For me, that’s one more reminder that the work that we do is important, but our values really have to come front and center.

I think of a few other landmark things. One was in the early days, and I trace it back to Ted Carr. He wrote about individuals with autism and self-injury, musing that maybe they’re just not whacking their heads because they whack their heads, but there’s a reason behind it. They might be doing it for attention or to get away from something, and there is the issue of self-stimulation.

Then Brian Iwata and his group published the study of the first functional analysis protocol, the so-called analog functional analysis protocol. I think that was really a watershed series of events that brought us to the work of emotional/behavioral assessment. All the behavioral analysts in our field were talking about it and wanting to do something about it. Rob O’Neill, Rob Horner, Steve Newton, Keith Story, and I were part of a big movement in that regard.

What followed at about that time was that Gary Lavigna and Ann Donnellan wrote Alternatives to Punishment: Solving Behavior Problem with Non-aversive Strategies. That never really rolled off the tongue very well, as I understood it, so we started doing word games and the “positive behavior support” language started to emerge. I think that also was a watershed point in the history. As we better articulated that, it actually became language in the special education law. I always attribute a lot of influence to Rud Turnbull in that regard. Then suddenly we were on to something with the schoolwide work that we developed that’s now had a real positive impact.

What do you think has had a negative impact on the field?

I find it harder to come up with that one. I can’t clearly identify any kind of development that’s come out of our work or the work of the field that’s really been negative. A few things come to mind. One is back when we were doing more intensive work in severe disabilities, this practice came along called “facilitated communication.” It seemed like a great thing, but to me it also illustrated someone who is so committed, not only to an idea, and probably excited about it, but also a group of people who promoted it sort of blindly. I don’t know if it had a negative impact broadly because it involved a small population.

One other thing comes to mind particularly in the area of autism and what people now call ABA [applied behavior analysis]. I like to be a student of history as well. I know about Koegel and some of his on-the-ground stories about the famous Lovaas. Bob Koegel and Laura Schreibman were doc students of Lovaas. One regret that I have is that what’s come to be called applied behavior analysis has become what I call a cottage industry. Again, this is not necessarily criticism of this group, but I think for some families and some practitioners, that you need 40 hours and it has to look this way, has been a disservice. I’ve always viewed this as kind of an unfortunate artifact of promoting what is some of the absolutely greatest work ever done—what Bob and Laura ended up calling “pivotal response training” and some of the variations that are nice nuances in ways to integrate the original stuff. I always get concerned when people in our field get too proprietary or too exclusive of another person’s approach, because we’re all trying to get to the same place.

What do you see as the future of the field for children with behavioral and emotional and academic challenges?

Particularly in the area of emotional and behavioral challenges, I’d prefer to say “disability.” I think the notion of disorders certainly has the kind of established history in the psychological enterprise, but I’m concerned about teachers focusing too much on “disorder.” What is disorder? I think we saw that with what came to be called RTI [response to intervention] and the special education law around providing broader scope in how we identify—or not—students with learning disabilities. It’s probably a personal hope, but I also believe it will come to fruition for a number of reasons, that the emotional disability (ED) label will one way or another go the way of the learning disability (LD) label. Politically it’s unlikely that the definition will change, but I think that could open up what we can do in terms of identification, particularly in areas like universal screening and behavioral assessment. I think that’s one piece that may turn pretty quickly, but with the economics the way they are, I’m not sure. What I do understand is that for what’s sometimes called a shame-based disability, there’s a move towards calling kids “other health-impaired.” That clearly represents some confusion in the field, in both techniques and practice about what’s going to happen, so I think that plate has got to move somewhere else pretty soon.

Another thing I think about is some of the work that you and your colleagues are doing in the area we’ve come to call teacher well-being and the focus on bringing the adults along to adopt and implement evidence-based practices. In my view, we know plenty about what to do. The elephant in the room is that we don’t know how to get everybody to want to do it. I think hearing from colleagues is a part of that, but it’s also necessary that leaders in the school know how to use that. It’s really intervention in that way.

My final prediction for the future is that we’ve entered an era that some people call implementation science. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is focusing on it, the Department of Education is focusing on it a little bit, but I think designing ways to market and integrate multicomponent interventions to the field is where we’re going to move next.

So there’s still work to do.

There is!

Speaking of that, what advice would you offer people entering the field?

I get to do that a lot in my role, but I think a couple things are important. One is be prepared not to do what you’re doing today. Even in my own career, what I started off to do is dramatically different than what I’m doing [now]. We see that advice a lot in writings about career development in general: learn skills that you can adapt and use in other areas.

As I think I mentioned previously, learn to take care of yourself in healthy ways. I think we’ll be learning more about that. Also make your university people be accountable not just for interesting classes but for making sure that they’re giving you what’ll actually help you cope. Then, when you interview for a position, ask questions like “Am I going to get access to training? Am I going to get access to a coach? Who’s going to support me when I have trouble?” They’re much more than fringe benefits, and it’s back to that survival thing again. Finally, a big part of the well-being aspect is some of what you were sharing today. Collegial support is underrated and underspoken about, but it’s clearly a huge thing. If you have someone to walk down the road with, that’s a big thing.

My final piece of advice is that a lot of educators see parents and families as the enemy or the problem. A lot of families struggle, and I don’t think we give teachers enough support on how to cope with the thoughts and feelings that they have about families. Learn to love families even if they aren’t the kind of families that you’d like them to be.