The plan lacks collaboration with all staff involved: 9 out of 10 times when a behavior plan doesn't work it is not the result of the plan itself, but the lack of fidelity of implementation of the plan. Lack of implementation often is a result of team members not understanding or knowing their role in the behavior plan. So how do you improve the collaboration? Just as much as we want to create behavior plans with kids, we also want to create behavior plans with all staff involved who implement the behavior plan. Often times, it is more important for people to not necessarily know the whole behavior plan, but know what is their specific role in implementing the plan. If part of my role in the plan is to intervene when the child needs a break, then I may know my part of the process is giving them a nonverbal cue to leave the classroom, walking them to the sensory room and doing their occupational therapy created sensory break. Here are ways to increase collaboration with all staff involved in the behavior plan:
Host a staffing with everyone so they can have meaningful collaboration and input into the plan. However, be mindful staffings can go wrong if you are not prepared to drive the conversation around identifying behaviors and interventions. Staffings go best when there is an agenda or template to drive conversation. You can get this staffing template seen below and learn more about how to implement a successful staffing around challenging student behavior in my '50 Strategies on De-escalation and Regulation Manual' https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/50-Strategies-on-De-escalation-and-Regulation-Manual-and-Workbook-8418923
Have certain multi-disciplinary members create resources or processes for parts of the plan. For example: have the occupational therapist create a sensory break schedule, have the speech therapist create a communication board to use whenever the student shuts down, have the behavioral therapist create a social story to support the behavior plan.
Create a visual for staff members to reference when they are reviewing the plan for implementation. This could be a cheat sheet or something the teacher hangs on their lanyard that cues them of the steps they need to follow to intervene.
You created the behavior plan FOR the student not WITH the student: It is so important that when we are creating behavior plans we are not creating them for kids, but rather with kids. Students need to have buy in on their goals and objectives they are working on. They should be having a say in the skills they need to work through and process that leads to achieving those goals. They should be able to decide their reinforcement and what is meaningful to them. So how can we intentionally allow students a process in making their behavior plans?
Complete reinforcement surveys or questionnaires with them.
Ask them what skills they want to get better at or what they feel they need help with
Have them map out the most challenging parts of school
Ask them what things help them to regulate their bodies
Figure out how they want staff to respond when they are dysregulated
You can find various reinforcement surveys and student questionnaires here:
It is important that we ask students these questions when they are in an open and regulatory state of mind. If students are giving us strategies and insight into their behaviors, we need to honor and use those strategies. Along with them helping to create the behavior plan, proactively talking about the behavior plan on a regulatory basis with the student to build muscle memory around more positive responses and coping strategies can improve positive implementation.
Meaningful touch points and data analysis: When we view writing behavior plans as a check off our task list, another addition to the IEP, or something we visit once a year, we lose sight of how intricate behavior plan implementation is and how it goes beyond just writing it into the IEP. Ensuring you have planned touch points with the collaborative team and are taking meaningful data on the goals decided on. One of the biggest struggles in working collaboratively with a team is when we allow our feelings to drive behavior intervention. It is so easy when working with a team to sit in a room and communicate how we personally feel about the student's behavior. When we take meaningful data and allow data to drive our conversations, we can start to move away from "I'm so frustrated that they are still continuing to not complete their work, this behavior plan isn't working" to "They have already improved work engagement from 33% to 56% weekly in 4 weeks. I know they still aren't doing all of their work, but they have shown huge improvements." Here are a few ways to ensure meaningful touch points and analysis of the data:
After initial implementation of the plan, schedule a follow up in 4-6 weeks to check in on how fidelity of the implementation and allow the time to trouble shoot barriers to the plan
Deciding on what data to take on the student will save you those 'feelings based' conversations around behavior later on. It is hard to argue with the data. My editable behavior charts allow for easy, daily data collection that are goal-driven. You can purchase them here: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Editable-Behavior-Charts-5125540
After trouble shooting barriers to the plan, continue to meet with the teacher or collaborative team to review data collected and if the student is trending positively towards their goals every 6-8 weeks. This allows you to continue to monitor data as well as notice trends in data that may require you to make plan adjustments.
Do you notice a trend around 'collaboration' in this blog post? Creating behavior plans with kids and school teams, collaboratively, can often be the ultimate key to behavior plan success!