Behavior and Breaks: What Every Special Educator Should Know

You are probably reading the title of this blog and saying, ‘yea, Sam, I know kids need breaks. Tell me something new’. You are wondering at what part of this blog are you going to be able to read the revolutionary, ‘life-changing’ strategy to make all those challenging behaviors go away. As we unpack each strategy, I really want you to unpack what you think you know about the strategy and come into it with a fresh lens and perspective. The strategy about breaks isn’t just about scheduling student breaks. It goes deeper than that.

·      When is the optimal time for the student to engage in a regulatory break?

·      How can we be proactive as opposed to reactive with the break?

·      How does the break schedule align to the data we have on the student?

·      What is their best structure of a break?

·      How long should they engage in a break?

·      How are we going to teach students the break routine?

·      What if they don’t transition back afterwards?

·      But they are missing out on their work, they can’t have this many breaks!

So yea, breaks are more complicated than just ‘let’s schedule a break’ in the middle of the day for the student. So let’s unpack the big components of what we should think about as we consider breaks as a strategy for students. Here is the one thing I think about as I set up a break routine for a student:

1.)   What does my data tell me about how often or when they need a break?

For many of our students with regulation deficits, it is important that we are proactive in providing breaks and time away from the environment, social interactions or demands that may be overstimulating. Many of our students will often use negative or maladaptive behavior to remove themselves from the environment. Providing proactive breaks that students don't need to earn can help them to find a balance of needing less stimulation from the environment and not having to engage in the negative behaviors to get out of the environment. You can use this google data sheet to help you determine where negative or maladpative behavior is happening the most to plan for intervention:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Scatterplot-Behavior-Data-Tracker-Google-Sheets-13843295

Many people will say, ‘if we give students breaks, then they will just learn to manipulate them to get out of the classroom and escape the work or environment?’ Here’s the thing, I agree with you. You are right. But here’s the other thing, kids are already using negative, maladaptive and sometimes dangerous behaviors to get out of the classroom. If we want to teach kids how to escape or take a break from the demands of the environment, we need to teach them the positive ways to get out of the environment as a means of advocacy for their own regulation needs. As the student begins to build consistency and engages in the positive behaviors more frequently, then we can start to shape the behavior. Often times what happens when students are successful at break skills, they will start to naturally want to engage and stay in the academic environment because they feel confident and regulated knowing they have the skills to be able to take a break from the environment and will be reinforced and encouraged to do so by the supportive adults around them.

We all use the break strategy in our own lives and we have learned how to do so appropriately. Have you ever been out with your friends in a social setting, hanging around in a small group chatting. Catching up on each other’s lives, getting the latest updates and sharing stories with each other. One person in the friend group begins a story, a story you have heard before. You get up, excuse yourself to go check your phone or get a change of scenery. That is an appropriate way to engage in a regulating break for yourself that removes yourself out of the environment, temporarily. Or you are at a work conference, and you are listening to a speaker that isn’t quite interesting or engaging for you. You leave the session to go to the bathroom and grab a small coffee from the snack bar. THIS is regulation in adults, however it starts with teaching this same regulation for our students and not viewing the behavior as manipulative. This is why I feel so passionate that giving a student a break goes deeper when thinking about the strategy. It is such a crucial skill that we use as adults each and every day to keep ourselves regulated within the environment. Now, let’s jump in and talk about how we can use this strategy in a more intentional way to circumvent challenging student behavior.

What does my data tell me about how often or when they need a break?

Data drives intervention, so let’s take some data! It is important to take the right data to be able to interpret and determine how often you need to schedule breaks in for students.

Here are things I would want my data to answer for me:

·      Frequency of breaks: how often does the student engage in dysregulation during the day? Think through frequency or number of incidents.

·      Time of day of breaks: at what times of the day or subjects does the behavior happen the most often?

Frequency of breaks: I would start with taking ten days’ worth of data tallying the frequency of how often the student engages in dysregulation and find the average per day. For example, if the student engages in the following incidents of dysregulation for ten days, respectively: 4, 3, 2, 5, 2, 5, 3, 3, 1, 0. The average for all of those numbers equals 2.8. This means, the student engages in dysregulation on average of 2.8 incidents a day. In this situation, I would round up to 3 and build in 3 times a day for the student to have a planned break. Taking this data can help to align the intervention up in a way that meets the student where they are at and hopefully replaces the negative, maladaptive behavior with a positive, regulatory break at the same or comparable frequency. Simple math, right? Well, let’s take it a step further.

Time of day of breaks: In addition to the frequency data, I would look at what times of day, subject or academic content areas the behaviors happen the most in. It’s not enough for us to just determine a student needs three breaks a day and schedule one morning, midday and afternoon. Interventions need to be intentional, to be proactive and preventative of challenging student behavior. If you are able to find a pattern in a subject or time of day, I would think about planning for a break slightly prior to what the data tells us the behavior is most likely to happen.

Utilizing data that looks at frequency and time of day allows us to dive deeper into making breaks that are intentional for the learner and is impactful and reducing challenging behavior.

How will I know the break routine is decreasing challenging student behavior?

We used data to drive how to build a break routine, created resources and used instructional strategies to teach students how to engage in the break routine. So, how will we know if the break routine is working and decreasing challenging behavior and increasing regulation? This is where this strategy comes back around full circle.

As you begin to engage in this process, the very same data you collect to determine the break routine needs to be the very same data you continue to collect throughout the process to determine the effectiveness of the intervention. With a few minor tweaks.

What we know about ‘good behavioring’ is that for every maladaptive behavior that a student engages in, that is just the surface level signal or flag for us that tells us something is deeper. All behavior, regardless of positive or negative perception, serves a purpose for the person engaging in it. Our jobs as the regulated adults, is to determine the unmet need or purpose and create positive pathways to get students to engage in a behavior that meets their need appropriate for the setting. All of this to say, that as we continue to take data on the number of incidents of dysregulation or challenging student behavior, what we also want to take data on is the number of incidents of engaging in the positive replacement behaviors. The hope is that over time, we will see the data trend in the direction of engaging in more of the breaks and less of the dysregulation.

Four to six weeks is my magic number. As we introduce and teach a new positive behavior, we should be checking back in with the data every four to six weeks to see how the data is trending. If the data is trending in a positive direction, stay the course. If the data is not trending how we envisioned, that is a natural time to think about what minor tweaks or changes do we need to make to the plan. Do we adjust the times of the break? Do we need to add one more break in after science class? Do we need to change out their break options every 6 weeks to continue to create novel experiences for the student? The most important part of trying interventions is to ensure you are engaging in a circular process of engaging in the intervention and revisiting the effectiveness of it. The process should be natural and timely as we work as a team to determine appropriate interventions to meet students needs.

Intervention --> 4-6 weeks of data --> Consider changes to the intervention based on effectiveness --> 4-6 weeks of data --> repeat