Positive Behavior Support Podcast by David Poeschl


Hello, my name is David Poeschl and I'm a parent advisor with Matrix Parents. This is another in our series of monthly podcasts for the year 2024.

This podcast is about positive behavior support and behavior intervention plans. Positive behavior support can be shortened to PBS and behavior intervention plans can be shortened to BIPs.

If you are interested in getting more information about the topic of this program or of any of our programs, please see the resource lists and the written form of the presentation and you can access additional information for signing up for one of our trainings, viewing a prerecorded training on our YouTube channel or speaking 1 to 1 with an experienced parent advisors to start the discussion of PBS.

Let me tell you a short story about my experience when I was a new teacher, I got a job teaching students with emotional disturbances in a county run program. The students enrolled there were among the most difficult that districts had in their in their districts and would be placed in a residential setting if not for our school. The kids were among the most challenging in our county.

My first year at the school was chaotic and actually pretty violent. There were 32 students at the school and 40 staff members, including teachers, mental health staff, social workers, support staff and a psychiatrist or medication management. Even with all these professionals, we had a very difficult time with behaviors which are often violent and could last up to several hours.

We were physically restraining kids several times per week. At the end of the school year, we were assigned a new principal. He was supportive of change and supported our receiving additional training and crisis management and PBS. We received the training we needed and started to implement a comprehensive PBS program at our school. It took some time, but by the time I left the school five years later, we had done one restraint.

In the past year and a half, walking down the hallways, you could get a sense of the calm and learning that was taking place. Since then, I have written or overseen the implementation of hundreds of PBS plans. If a bippy is well written and implemented correctly, there is a very good chance that the problem behaviors addressed in the plan will improve significantly or disappear altogether more convincingly.

Literally hundreds of academic studies have been conducted to gather data on the effectiveness of interventions such as those we will discuss here. Overwhelmingly, they have confirmed that the use of positive response methods is effective in changing problematic behaviors. In fact, these methods are the only ones that consistently work to change behaviors. Let's talk briefly about the history of PBS.

O. Ivar Lovaas, was a psychology professor at UCLA, where he founded the Young Autism Project, which he started in the 1960s. Lobos developed what today is called Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA, to teach children with autism using prompts, modeling and positive reinforcement.

Starting in the 1980s, the ideas and methods used in ABA started to be applied to other disabilities and implemented and modified to be implemented in schools rather than clinical environments. Around the turn of the century, PBS started to break away from baby as a separate discipline. Today, PBS is a related but standalone field that encompasses not only individual interventions but is now part of school, district and even statewide programs.

By 2019, over 27,000 schools had implemented school wide PBS programs, and the momentum has only been growing since. Now let's get more into details about PBS. I'm not going to provide a short and concise definition. I have never found one that is accurate enough to adequately explain PBS, but luckily it can be described. An example may help envision that third grade student.

Let's call him John, the one or two or three children in his classroom, which was constantly in motion, has trouble concentrating for age appropriate length of time who just doesn't look comfortable in his own skin. John may be disruptive, have trouble concentrating, misses lots of instruction, or sometimes he may be the class clown. He can't seem to help himself.

What is going on with John? Is he just a quote, brat or spoiled or just plain bad? Does he have a need to get a good fill in the blank? That'll teach him the answers to all those options is a resounding no. Research shows that behaviors don't occur in a vacuum. They reflect a deep seated and legitimate need.

And John is expressing that need in the only way he knows his behaviors are the external visible manifestations of that need. Some children learn how to behave in socially acceptable ways by observing what others around them are doing. However, children with certain neurological differences, such as kids with autism or ADHD, often don't have the ability to learn by observing.

They need to be taught. These children need explicit teaching, not a label or a good You know what? The job of the PBS trained professionals at John School is to figure out what that need is. What is it to John expressing that need and then follow a set of research and time proven steps that will result in a plan to help John behave in a more positive way but still get his needs met.

The need John feels and report response to stimuli in this environment leads to his acting in a particular way. The point of the behavior is to get the need met That could be described as akin to a psychological itch. Think what this means at the idea that the need John feels can be compared to a physical which you know the ones when you have the need not just the desire but the intense need to scratch.

It can be incredibly frustrating, as we all know, knowing that the itch will get worse if we do scratch it is often enough to avoid doing so. It gets to be too much to avoid. This is something like what John is feeling. He is not in control of how he reacts to his itch. He just reacts to this very strong stimulus.

Let's talk about punishment as a response to John's behavior and keep the ditch analogy going for a minute. If someone punished you for scratching the itch, would that be enough to stop doing it? Maybe for a while. And if the punishment were severe enough, maybe even for a long while. But the itch does not go away because of the threat of punishment.

It's still there. That's why punishment doesn't work. It doesn't address the underlying need at all. It just forces a behavior based on the Punisher's need for compliance, not the needs of the person being punished. In fact, punishment often makes problem behaviors worse because the punishment is inadvertently reinforcing the very behavior they are trying to control. Think of Jon again and maybe he gets yelled out by a staff member if his underlying need is attention that getting yelled at is just about as good as getting complimented.

Both serve the need for attention. I previously mentioned the set of research and time proven steps that school professionals take when responding to problematic and persistent problem behaviors. The following eight steps are the standard for providing effective behavior interventions. These steps are the practical basis of PBS. They define what we do to implement a BIP. Let's look at the steps.

First, we need to describe the behavior so we know what we are looking for. Specifically. Second, we need to describe accurately the reason for the behavior. What's the itch? Third, we need to identify a replacement behavior that meets the same need as scratches the itch, but in a way that won't get Jon in constant trouble. One that would be typical for a student of his age in grade level.

Fourth, we must plan how to teach Jon how to use the new behavior. Fifth, we need to plan how to reinforce its use. Six We plan how to ignore or minimize the old behavior. Seventh, we must have a plan what to do if the old behaviors pop up, which it will. And finally, eight we need to take accurate data on how it's all working.

There's one additional piece to this that is critical to a VIP being successful. That is the environment in which Jon is operating, meaning his classroom, the playground, the lunch area and so on. Adults at the school can modify these areas to help Jon. We won't go into detail here and knowing exactly what to change would need an analysis of Jon's behaviors when and where they occur, under what circumstances, and other pieces of information.

What we try to do when modifying the environment is to minimize what are called setting events or antecedents. These are the things that can make Jon's problem behaviors more likely to occur. A couple of brief examples of modifying the environment could include reducing noise levels by allowing Jon to wear noise, minimizing earphones while doing independent work, or prompting him to take a break outside of the classroom.

When the teacher sees him starting to get escalated or asking Jon to hand out papers to give him a chance to move. Let's return now to the eight steps. The first step is the need to describe the behavior so we know what we are looking at. Specifically, what does it look like? What about the reasons for Jon's behavior?

That is the second step. PBS posits. There are four or five reasons why almost all behaviors occur. They are attention, escape, sensory issues, a need for something tangible and sometimes power and control. Remember, Jon's need doesn't go away when the teacher tells them to be quiet and behave. When the principal tells him or his parents, it certainly appears that John is doing what he is doing to get attention.

We'll go on to will go with that assumption for our purposes. Just a note of warning here. Determining the reason or reasons for a behavior is often not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of factors that go into a behavior, and it often takes careful data analysis to get it right. Now, the third step consists of deciding on a replacement behavior that will meet the same need as the problem behavior.

The new behavior will have the benefit of getting attention in a way that will be appreciated by all, including Jon. The PBS thing to do after we have decided on the replacement behavior is to now to teach Jon how and when to use the behaviors. This is the fourth step, but not all teaching is the same. I mentioned that explicit teaching is critical without explicit teaching of the behaviors we want to see.

There will be no change. A child needs to feel what the new behavior is and feel it at a deep, psychological and even physical level. This will allow Jon to integrate the new behavior into his repertoire of responses. Part of the ability to field behaviors at a deep level is to provide consistent reinforcement to the child when behaviors occur.

This is our fifth step. Reinforcement is often misunderstood and mistaken for bribery. Many people that think giving a child something for behaving is bribing them into performing the behavior. And without the bribe, the child wouldn't, quote, perform. The difference between reinforcement and bribery depends on the timing. Reinforcement is a planned response to a specific behavior with a specific response.

For example, when John raises his hand to ask a question instead of calling out. He earns 5 minutes of free computer time that he can access at a predetermined time. In addition, reinforcement shapes the behavior you want to see by focusing on it when it occurs. We celebrate success, even partial success. Behavior occurs in the middle of a behavior incident.

The importance of this distinction is that by the time a bribe is offered, is it often too late to help the child de-escalate? Consequently, the child may not have the emotional bandwidth left to comply, even if they wanted to. Picture yourself on the freeway and a car just dangerously cut you off and you'll start to get the idea of where the child may be emotionally.

Reinforcement can look like a lot of things. The more naturally it fits into the existing environment, the better.

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