Behavior Support

Linda M. Bambara, Rachel Janney, Martha E. Snell

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781598579437
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Gestion du comportement

The revised and expanded edition of a popular book trusted in classrooms across the country, Behavior Support is your guide to implementing effective positive behavior support (PBS)— both in the classroom and across an entire school. You'll get explicit, research-based strategies for implementing the three tiers of PBS:

• universal, school-wide interventions;
• selected interventions with students exhibiting risk behaviors; and
• specialized interventions with students who need intensive, individualized help.
• 
  Packed with updated strategies on hot topics, redesigned forms, and the newest research on multitiered systems of support, this new edition will help you support positive changes in your students' behavior—so you can keep the focus on learning. (Ideal for both in-service teacher training and college and university courses!)
  

RESEARCH-BASED STRATEGIES FOR HELPING STUDENTS:

• Stop challenging behavior before it starts
• Improve communication, social, and self-control skills
• Form positive, respectful relationships with classmates, teachers, and other community members
• Take a more active part in their school, classroom, and community

WHAT'S NEW: More research and strategies on key topics, including bullying prevention, safe and responsive school climates, functional assessment, and individual student interventions. You'll also get more explicit step-by-step instructions, new case examples, tips on sustaining PBS in your school, redesigned forms that are practical and easy to use, and focusing questions for each chapter that highlight key takeaways.

This revised and expanded edition is your guide to implementing effective positive behavior support. Includes more on bullying prevention, safe and responsive school climates, and functional behavior analysis.

1

Positive Behavior Support

FOCUSING QUESTIONS

• What are the core features and principles of positive behavior support (PBS) that distinguish it from traditional behavior management approaches?

• What is the research base for PBS?

• What are the three tiers of support that make up a schoolwide positive behavior support (SWPBS) network?

• What teaming structures are used to implement school-based PBS?

This book is primarily designed for use by teachers and other members of educational teams who are working together to educate students with learning and behavior problems and their peers in inclusive classrooms and schools. Before the 1970s, many of these children were removed from their families, local schools, and communities and placed in special schools or in institutions. In contrast, inclusive schools welcome all students and provide special education supports and services from a base within general education classrooms. Teaching students who sometimes behave in ways that can be difficult for educators, classmates, parents, and siblings to cope with and understand is one of the challenges of inclusive education (Baker, Blacher, Crnic, & Edelbrock, 2002). Some students are disruptive, noncompliant, and aggressive and appear unable to control their feelings and behavior, whereas other students are disengaged, are withdrawn, or may even hurt themselves.

In addition to the serious behavior problems that some individual students may display, educators, parents, and other citizens are concerned about the existing and potential lack of safety and discipline in schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2006). In 2011–2012, about 38% of teachers agreed or strongly agreed that student misbehavior interfered with their teaching, and 35% reported that student tardiness and class cutting interfered with their teaching (Robers, Kemp, Rathbun, & Morgan, 2014). As more is learned about programs and strategies that improve schoolwide discipline, it has become evident that both individual students with behavior problems and the student body as a whole benefit most from proactive, positive, instructionally based approaches (Didden, Korsilius, Van Oorsouw, & Sturmey, 2006). Students need effective instruction and supportive and well-managed schools and classrooms to learn academics; the same holds true for learning social interaction skills and self-control. Furthermore, everyone—students without behavior problems, students with behavior problems, teachers, parents, and administrators—benefits when time that might have been spent responding to disruptive, antisocial, or destructive behavior is spent instead in productive teaching and learning activities.

This book describes and illustrates processes and strategies that teachers can use along with parents, administrators, and other educators and school staff to provide schoolwide, group, and individual supports. The framework includes supports to improve the overall social climate in schools as well as supports to address the needs of students with existing or potential behavior problems. The approach is most effective when classroom educators, administrators, school staff, and parents work collaboratively and in concert to create integrated systems for social and academic support that extend along a continuum from less to more specialized. The types of intervention applied will differ depending on the students addressed and the degree of specialization required, but schoolwide, classwide, and student-specific approaches to improving school discipline and student conduct are based on similar conceptions of behavior problems and behavior change and similar perspectives on the roles and responsibilities of teachers and schools in addressing them. The interventions and supports employed should not only be confirmed as effective by sound research and practice but also should be suitable for the students, teachers, and classrooms involved. In addition, any practice adopted should be consistent with the values on which inclusive education and PBS are based.

This book helps faculty and educational teams become better collaborative problem solvers; it is not meant to provide a cookbook approach to behavior intervention. Although the principles and many of the practices described are useful in many educational settings, the examples and case studies provided come from our work in inclusive schools.

THREE-TIERED MODEL OF SCHOOLWIDE SYSTEMS FOR STUDENT SUPPORT

This book’s organization and content reflect a three-tiered framework for categorizing the systems of behavior intervention used in schools that implement PBS (see Figure 1.1). The framework—originally based on the three-tiered model of prevention in public health—provides a way to classify the three tiers of intervention strategies required to provide a full continuum of behavior supports in schools (Sugai, Sprague, Horner, & Walker, 2000; Walker et al., 1996). The three tiers of interventions—primary, secondary, and tertiary—are based on their intended prevention outcomes.

Figure 1.1. Framework for a three-tiered system of school-based positive behavior support. (Source: Walker, Ramsey, & Gresham, 2004.) Alternate View.

Primary prevention (Tier 1) utilizes universal supports that are part of a broad, schoolwide system of well-defined, consistent discipline policies, effective academic instruction, and social skill development. Universal interventions that are applied to all students in a school are effective in inhibiting the development of problem behavior in an estimated 80%–90% of the student population. Secondary prevention (Tier 2) focuses on students (estimated at 5%–15% of students) who exhibit risk behaviors such as poor school performance, affiliation with violent peer groups, and poor social skills. The selected interventions (e.g., adult mentors, self-management support, social skills training) designed for these students often are delivered to small groups of students with similar emerging behavior problems in order to prevent those problems from worsening or becoming chronic. The goal of tertiary prevention measures (Tier 3) is to reduce the harm inflicted and experienced by the 1%–7% of students who display chronic, severe problem behavior. These students require specialized interventions that are more individualized and intensive; they benefit from comprehensive PBS at school but will often need out-of-school services as well (Walker, Ramsey, & Gresham, 2004).

Chapter 1 focuses on the basic principles underlying PBS and its use in schools. Chapter 2 examines a schoolwide systems approach to discipline and universal behavior supports that help create and sustain an environment in which behavior problems are prevented or more effectively ameliorated. Chapter 3 describes classroomwide practices to enhance academic and social-behavioral outcomes and also addresses ways to provide selected supports for students whose behavior problems are not adequately improved through schoolwide interventions or who experience risk factors for developing more serious problem behavior.

Chapters 4 and 5 address the more specialized, individualized level of PBS required for students who exhibit the most serious problem behaviors. Chapter 4 outlines the process of gathering and analyzing functional behavior assessment (FBA) information to develop individualized behavior support plans. Chapter 5 details intervention strategies and other supports that compose a behavior support plan and ways to monitor and evaluate the plan’s effectiveness. Some of the chapters include Student Snapshots or case studies to illustrate how the chapter’s topic has been used in schools. When worksheets or other planning tools are described, examples of completed worksheets are included within the chapter. Blank, photocopiable worksheets are provided in Appendix A and are available as a forms download.

This book, like others in the Teachers’ Guides to Inclusive Practices series, is designed to be practical and user friendly and provide information about research-based practices that have been effectively applied in typical schools by typical teachers and other members of school teams. The primary intent is to provide teachers, along with the administrators, other educators, support staff, and parents with whom they work, with the foundational and applied knowledge needed to fill their vital role in planning, implementing, and evaluating PBS for the students in their schools and classrooms. Teachers should feel confident that they understand the purposes and general methods being used, even when the guidance and assistance of outside experts is needed, such as when conducting FBAs (see Chapter 4). And, teachers need to know how to advocate for the leadership, resources, and backing needed to empower them to effectively fill their own roles when administrative support is required to put positive behavior approaches into practice.

USING POSITIVE BEHAVIOR SUPPORT IN SCHOOLS

Anyone who has been a teacher knows that there are always some students who have difficulty following the rules, getting along with others, controlling their emotions, or staying focused on the task at hand. Some students seem to get into trouble on purpose or seem to do things that make it difficult for others to want to spend time with them. Some even hurt themselves or others or become involved in gangs and other subcultures that encourage destructive and violent behavior. Why do some children and youth behave in ways that can be so difficult to understand and so damaging to a school’s atmosphere?

There are many different theories, models, and approaches to addressing behavior problems. This book describes a PBS approach to helping students with behavior problems. This approach evolved in the 1980s as a movement away from traditional, mechanistic, and even aversive behavior management practices that were being applied to individuals with disabilities and toward behavior intervention grounded in person-centered values and socially valued outcomes (e.g., Donnellan, LaVigna, Negri-Shoultz, & Fassbender, 1988; Evans & Meyer, 1985; Horner et al., 1990; Lovett, 1985). The movement sought to use the principles of behavior change that had been demonstrated through applied behavioral analysis in contrived, isolated laboratories or segregated schools within effective yet practical interventions that could be implemented by educators in regular school settings (Carr et al., 2002). The movement also insisted that behavior-change practices for people with disabilities must be respectful and individualized and result in quality-of-life improvements, instead of only focusing on reducing targeted behavior problems (Evans & Meyer, 1985; Horner et al., 1990).

Contemporary applications of PBS in schools incorporate integrated, schoolwide efforts to prevent problems and improve all students’ behavior and learning. “Schoolwide PBS (SWPBS) is a set of intervention practices and organizational systems for establishing the social culture and intensive individual behavior supports needed to achieve academic and social success for all students” (Horner, Sugai, & Anderson, 2010, p. 4). Although many features of SWPBS are not novel (e.g., applying behavioral and social learning principles, using direct instruction to teach approved behavior), it is unique in its focus on the whole school as the unit of analysis and the systematic use of the three-tiered approach to improving learning and behavior (Sugai & Horner, 2002). SWPBS emphasizes using collaborative teaming and problem-solving processes to create supports, programs, and other interventions that stress prevention and remediation of problem behaviors by providing effective educational programming and creating a supportive environment. As previously noted, support practices are implemented at three levels of intensity so that the intensity of the supports provided matches the student’s level of need.

Although PBS is a complex, multifaceted approach to behavior intervention and therefore challenging to study scientifically, the research base has grown dramatically since the mid-1990s. Implementing SWPBS entails not only an array of evidence-based intervention practices but also a system of procedures and processes (Horner et al., 2010). Evaluating the effectiveness of SWPBS requires examining the three tiers of support practices as well as the systems used to design, deliver, evaluate, and sustain the network of interventions and supports (see Figure 1.2). The use of PBS also has been incorporated into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) of 2004 (PL 108-446), strengthening the support for practices such as conducting FBAs and developing individualized PBS plans based on FBAs (see Figure 1.3).

What the Research Says

Effectiveness of Positive Behavior Support and Future Research Needs

Schoolwide positive behavior support (SWPBS) has been effectively implemented in a wide range of contexts—urban, rural, and suburban settings; elementary and middle schools; and both public and alternative settings (Goh & Bambara, 2012; Horner, Carr, Strain, Todd, & Reed, 2002; Snell, Voorhees, & Chen, 2005). Given training and technical assistance, typical intervention agents, including teachers, administrators, and school psychologists, have demonstrated accurate implementation of research-based intervention practices, along with the organizational systems required to sustain them. Literature reviews and individual studies supported the following findings about the effect...