Idealistic goals meet the drag of corporate reality - Recensione dipendente - Clinician presso Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes

The training, though paid, is confusing and tedious. It’s confusing because of the company’s insistence on using branded language and on training things in a specific order rather than by similarity. Also, for an education-based company, the pedagogy in the staff training is really poor. Experienced teachers, it will set your teeth on edge. It’s tedious because the hours are terrible. The west coast has to arrive at 7 a.m. for two weeks straight while the east coast needs to stay until 7 p.m. for two weeks and wait until 2 p.m. for lunch breaks. What should be really fast information given by the trainer turns into tedious 5-10 minute q&A sessions. I honestly thought some of the questions were rhetorical until the various video conference participants started chiming in. You have to watch a lot of videos that promote how wonderful the company is. While heartwarming, it’s just too much to sit through after a long day. We all started calling them “propaganda.” The positive reinforcement behavior management strategy works for most children most of the time. It does not work for the very avoidant and unsafe children. While we are told in training that we are not ABA therapists, those children remain enrolled in the program, and we are asked to continue to find ways to keep them safe and to help them get the most from session. In my time working at the center I knew of two children who were counseled out for behavior and told that they could return at a later date. Other children whose behaviors appeared just as severe — similarly unsafe, distracting to others, and limiting to their academic progress — were permitted to remain. I couldn’t find any rhyme or reason to it. I don’t think anyone in my center reads the purple behavior notes in the student file. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only clinician putting them into files even when every clinician I talk to who has worked with a particular child tells me that the child did no work that day. While clinicians are supposed to be unfailingly positive with the children, model empathy, and use positive reinforcement, it does not feel like management extends that same courtesy to clinicians. I routinely had some of the most difficult children in my center placed on my schedule. I once saw a manager use an all-staff meeting to criticize the way one student's session was handled. While she did not mention clinician's by name, she mentioned actions and days on which they occurred, so most people knew who had this student on their schedule. I also saw a lot of managers simply fail to intervene when clinicians were exhausted by repeated behavioral problems. The schedule is relentless. There is no other teaching or counseling job where you would work with eight students in one day. While the separation of job duties does help you to get more done, it just takes a lot of mental and emotional energy to work with that many children. Even the Visualizing and Verbalizing trainer recalled how exhausting being a clinician was during our staff training. As you will be instructed during the dry-as-toast HR video training, you can’t work during your two 15 minute breaks or when you are clocked out for lunch. Therefore, there are only four five-minute breaks during the day when you can do any work that isn’t directly related to working with a student. However, you will need those breaks for cleaning up your work station, restocking supplies, getting water, and logging in and out of computers. If someone comes to evaluate your work through a “session analysis,” it will be almost impossible for you to stay on time for your next session and get everything done. Management will ask you to voluntarily take on extra duties — supervise the children’s break, clean up the children’s bathroom, empty the dishwasher. Ideally, everyone should have a spirit of pitching in and helping out. But, HR tells you not to work on your breaks and lunch, and there’s no time in the five minute transition periods between students to do this stuff. It seems like they’re just frustrated about being stretched thin, so they’re asking for help and making it seem like the office manager’s duties belong to everyone. Also, you’re not supposed to clock in early or clock out late. All of the clinicians hate online learning “OLI,” and so do parents. The biggest issue is that it’s glitchy. If IT could make a trouble-shooting sheet and share it with clinicians and families, that would go a long way. Better programming and equipment would also be great. Centers need to do a lot more to support clinicians and students using OLI. Clinicians get one training session on the equipment before they are expected to teach with it. We should be doing mock sessions with each other before we ever teach students. In fact, there should be a certification process in order to graduate to working with the children on OLU. Also, management needs to help us organize. When the Face Sheets aren’t in place and the equipment hasn’t been checked, it’s unfair to make the clinicians run around to find and fix everything in the aforementioned five minute transition. As well, we need to gather all of the materials for that session in just five minutes, even though we are frequently coming late from our previous session. Most students aren’t mature enough to manage online learning either. It’s an unacceptably poor way to cover clinician absences from centers. Kids who are totally unfamiliar with the equipment get shoved in corners with no technical assistance. Better to hire “floaters” for excess coverage in the summer and leave your consultants and management available to cover a few sessions. Pay is low. I could be an administrative office temp, lifeguard, or camp counselor for what I made per hour at Lindamood-Bell. Next summer I might do exactly that. It’s an easier day, and I can spend some of it filing my nails and surfing the internet. Because the pay is low, your coworkers will be flaky. I thought it was insane that they put “clean up after yourself” in the job description for clinicians until I saw how many people couldn’t handle that task. The job attracts people in transitional periods in their lives. They are recent graduates working while looking for salaried jobs, people heading back to school, retirees, and folks who needed an easy-to-get job after a period of unemployment. While the employment screening eliminates the bad spellers and the people who can’t think critically, nothing guarantees maturity and reliability. And, honestly, when you pay college-educated adults at a rate that is 42 percent of the city’s median income, that doesn’t exactly make you their top priority when competing needs arise. The people working at LMB for extra income seem to tolerate it just fine. Anyone who needs the money is stressed. There are many ways that Lindamood-Bell seems to show disrespect or lack of care toward its staff. The pay is the biggest. The lack of adult space in the office is another. My learning center had a tiny break room where ten or more people would crowd in during some transition periods to use the time clock, lockers, fridge, microwave, coffee maker, sink, water cooler, and schedule kiosk. There is no safe space to keep a handbag as there are an insufficient number of lockers, but it’s certainly not safe to leave it in a car, and transit riders can’t just leave items at home. There is no room for jackets or umbrellas. If you want to eat lunch in the office, you get to sit alone at a grubby student desk while staring at a cubicle wall. The staff recognition gifts also feel hollow. No one wants a $3 branded Lindamood-Bell cup or notepad; it feels like getting leftovers. Just give cash or gift cards. Last, the parents can be aggressive. They are paying A LOT of money. Summer clients at my learning center are paying as much as sleep-away camp for half days of instruction and for many more weeks. When things do not go as expected, they are not always gentle and polite in the way they approach the staff. While it is not supposed to be clinicians’ job to handle parents, the parents will take out their anger on a clinician if that’s the first person they see. Besides, I hardly understand my office org chart. I don’t expect that the families know who’s in what position.