Student Spotlight: Translating behavioral health principles for classroom specialists

Tell us about your work at The Bradley School.

Before I decided to do my practicum at The Bradley School, I worked there as a classroom behavior specialist. That position was really interesting because I got to work alongside clinicians, teachers, nurses and other specialists.

The experience gave me an opportunity to look at public health from the ground level. As a classroom behavior specialist, you’re one of the people who works most closely with students throughout the day. No matter what the students are going through, the behavior specialists are consistently there with them.

I felt that this position really showed me the connectivity of education, direct support and behavioral health. After I’d been there for a few months, I started thinking about the practical resources and systems that could better support the people doing that frontline work.

The role involves working as part of an interdisciplinary school team — and I’m now in the interdisciplinary concentration here at Brown. So, there are a lot of interdisciplinary connections! The work itself involves supporting students throughout the school day, both in the educational environment and through behavioral health services.

Connecting that experience back to public health, I saw how many different people and systems need to work together effectively to support students. It gave me a better understanding of how communication, consistency and organizational processes can shape the environments where care and education are delivered.

How does your handbook and visual guide support staff at The Bradley School?

One of the biggest challenges that classroom behavior staff — and really all staff — encounter when working with students, is navigating behavioral and psychological situations. Every student is different, and there are so many factors that can affect how they feel and function from day to day.

The handbook and visual guide are designed to help staff navigate these situations. The visual guide provides a concise reference for key processes and sources of support, while the handbook offers more detailed information on communication, role expectations and navigating challenging situations. These resources are especially helpful when a behavioral or psychological situation affects a student’s ability to learn, complete a task or simply get through the day.

They help staff understand how to de-escalate situations, provide the support a student needs and create an environment where the student feels supported.

What’s your biggest takeaway from your MPH practicum experience?

The practicum itself broadened my understanding of how much a person’s health and well-being depend on the environment and systems around them. 

I also realized how important implementation is. You can have strong policies in place, great programs and evidence-based approaches, but people need to be able to use them in a real-world working environment.

Working in a setting like the Bradley School really made me think about the people who are actually responsible for carrying out interventions and how we can design systems and resources around what they truly need.

It also made public health feel a lot more tangible to me. Rather than just thinking about how interventions might be carried out, I was actually in that environment, working as one of the specialists responding to situations in real time. That hands-on experience gave me a much clearer understanding of what it takes to put interventions into practice.

Before this experience, I primarily thought about health through the lens of research, data and clinical outcomes. But at the Bradley School, I saw how much communication, consistency, staff support and interdisciplinary teamwork can shape a person’s day-to-day experience of care. I had thought about these factors before, but this experience helped me see their importance much more clearly in a real-world setting. 

You’re in the second year of your MPH. What are your future plans?

I want to continue exploring clinically relevant questions focused on health equity, but with a stronger understanding that improving outcomes also means thinking about how research is implemented, the systems people navigate and the needs of the professionals and families who support them.

I would like to build a career that really integrates research, public health and patient-centered impact. I am specifically interested in health disparities and using data to better understand and improve health outcomes.