Excerpt
Excerpted from Chapter 7 of
Challenging Behaviors in Early Childhood Settings: Creating a Place for All Children By Susan Hart Bell, Ph.D., Victoria Carr, Ed.D., Dawn Denno, M.Ed., Lawrence J. Johnson, Ph.D., and Louise R. Phillips, M.Ed.
©2004. Brookes Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Implementing Individualized Behavior Plans
An early childhood teacher attempts to provide an orderly, engaging classroom environment for a group of children with diverse temperaments, skills, and experiences. Some children rush into the classroom with tales of weekend activities, excitedly sharing their stories with peers and teachers. Others trail in sadly, scolded by parents who are late for work, seeking the comfort of a warm lap and a good book. Still others experience cyclical changes in their moods and behavior and may be forced to adapt to the fluctuating expectations and daily schedules of divorced parents with joint custody. In turn, the classroom climate changes daily, mirroring the moods and activities of the children. As suggested previously, the early childhood teacher routinely assesses the goodness-of-fit among the classroom schedule, the physical arrangement, the curricular offerings, and the needs of the children, making changes as problems arise. These changes, although usually discussed with assistant teachers and staff, are informal and subject to revision. The teacher uses "gut feeling" in determining how the modifications contribute to the smoothness of the classroom routines.
As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, an experienced classroom teacher follows this same process when addressing behavior that results in a marked disruption of classroom activities. The teacher begins to step up her involvement with the child, closely scrutinizing the child's behavior and providing more support during tough times of the day. The educator looks for patterns in the child's behavior, which serve as warning signs, and begins to group the child with different children or to modify his or her daily schedule. These strategies are followed intuitively but informally—almost on an experimental basis. When the teacher finds a strategy (or combination of strategies) that seems to resolve the problem, he or she can turn to other concerns.
However, when the teacher is faced with a child whose behavior 1) is resistant to these informal strategies, 2) appears to escalate or become more frequent despite accommodations and increased support, and/or 3) occurs apparently without warning, the time spent attending to the daily management of the child's behavior justifies further investment in the development of an individualized and formal intervention plan. Jackson and Panyan (2002) described behavioral intervention as a deliberate rearrangement of environmental conditions. This plan is based on a general understanding of the factors influencing the behavior to promote the child's growth and learning. The eventual goal of any behavioral intervention is to enhance the comfort of the child and those around him or her. This chapter highlights the factors that the classroom teacher should examine in planning for behavioral intervention: strategies for deciding when formal intervention is necessary, methods for convening an intervention team, techniques for gathering information related to the problem situation, and components of a successful intervention plan.
WHEN IS FORMAL INTERVENTION NECESSARY?
The following subsections examine possible indicators of the need for a formal intervention plan.
Factors Beyond the Teacher's Control
As part of initial intervention planning, the classroom teacher should determine whether the challenging behaviors stem from medical conditions or characteristics of the home environment that are difficult to address with classroom interventions (Barnett, Bell, & Carey, 1999). If health conditions are present, then the appropriate response is to refer the