From Exhaustion to Empowerment: Bringing Strengths-Based Behavior "Management" to Mainstream
Research-based knowledge on supporting positive behavior is often siloed in SPED departments, but it can and should be shared more broadly to increase student engagement and time in class. This poster will demonstrate an evidence-based process for generating strengths-based insights to understand, prevent, and address challenging behavior - with dignity.
Too often, children with disabilities are overlooked, over-referred, or over-disciplined due to behavior that is perceived as challenging. At the same time, many studies have shown that discipline referrals decrease and academic achievement increases when school-wide positive behavior interventions and supports (SWPBIS) are in place (Lee & Gage, 2020).
Despite the large body of evidence, general educators and administrators receive little preparation in supporting behavior and often focus on “solving” surface-level challenging behaviors. Schools need evidence-based, accessible processes to implement SWPBIS, in particular to gain deeper understanding of challenging behaviors to create more effective interventions.
The goals of this presentation are to share a simplified framework of behavior analysis to guide administrators and other practitioners in making educated hypotheses about the meaning of challenging behavior before the impact of the behavior becomes severe. Below the surface, all behavior has meaning – often to obtain, avoid, or communicate something. Once we understand the meaning, we can help children find more safe, responsible, or kind ways of meeting their needs. By analyzing meaning through functional and strengths-based lenses, professionals will be better equipped to identify preventative and responsive solutions that will actually teach prosocial behavior.
Practitioners can immediately
begin exploring previously hidden aspects of challenging behavior, such as identifying evidence of possible functions and underlying strengths.
use that information to identify appropriate pre-intervention and proactive strategies that maintain dignity, repair harm, and promote independence.
Administrators will gain skills in leading teachers through the above process as individuals or in collaboration.
Participants will learn a research-based approach to understanding behavior, with the goal of preventing students from being excluded from class time or learning environments and therefore experiencing more social and academic success. These strategies can be applied by SPED as well as non-SPED practitioners and supported by administrators, ideally in collaboration.
Participants will be able to 1. create more observable and measurable descriptions of challenging behavior, 2. hypothesize functions of behavior, 3. identify hidden strengths present in challenging behavior as well as ground their student observations in strengths, and 4. generate strategies that are more likely to be effective in teaching prosocial behavior based on these observations and understandings. These strategies may include specific examples of engineering the environment, using more developmentally appropriate practices, teaching alternative behaviors to replace the challenging behavior, and others that are unique to the individual child and school environment. Our goal is to deliver a process that practitioners can utilize across various scenarios.
Administrators, leaders, and experienced SPED practitioners will acquire a framework and specific exercises that can be used to lead teaching staff through a process of exploring children’s behavior.
This presentation guides participants through exploring one, specific challenging behavior. This provides an immediate impact for the participant (better understanding of and ideas for responding to a real behavior) and acts as a case study for building understanding of the process. The poster will include the following sections, and the presenter will be available to guide participants through each section:
Purpose
Background and Defining terms: “behavior”, “strengths-”based”
Describing a focus child’s challenging behavior in observable, measurable terms
Identifying hopes and dreams for the focus child
Identifying strengths of the focus child, and of the challenging behavior
Hypothesizing function, or meaning of the behavior
Implementing proactive, preventative strategies to reduce the challenging behavior, including replacement behaviors, skills instruction, and engineering the environment
Schoolwide application (for site and district leaders)
Implications for teacher training and supervision
This poster presents practitioner evidence on an approach to SWPBIS that can be implemented at the individual or classroom level even before schoolwide systems are in place. The process is meant to be an accessible entry point to the highly effective full scale Multi-Tiered Systems of Support approach to SWPBIS. A 2020 meta-analysis found statistically significant increases in academic achievement in settings with SWPBIS (Lee & Gage, 2020). The rationale for addressing behavior well before it rises to school exclusion (such as suspensions) or functional behavior analysis and possible change of placement is based on data demonstrating enduring disparities in discipline referrals, school exclusion, and other outcomes related to behavior for children with disabilities (Cruz et al., 2021).
These findings are even more alarming for children of color, in particular boys (Losen, D. J., & Martinez, P. (2020). Despite decades of research on the effectiveness of PBIS and a rapid increase in school-wide adoption, general educators and administrators typically receive little to no training beyond basic classroom management (Flower et al., 2016).
Based on this extant research and our own program evaluation data, we argue that a) basic understanding of positive behavior supports and behavior analysis should be part of every teachers’ training and b) this is an irreplaceable set of tools for administrators who are leading schools or other youth serving organizations.
