About 14.4% of American students require special planning for behavioral and educational success. As a special education director, school counselor, or behavior interventionist, working with these students is a critical but challenging part of your job. However, when you engage in the top applied behavioral analysis strategies, it also can be extremely rewarding.
Here, we’re going to talk about how you can create a behavior intervention plan for students requiring ABA therapy. Read on to ensure that you can help every student succeed regardless of their unique needs.
Behavior Analysis and Understanding
BIPs act as blueprints for positively altering the behavior of a student. They guide actions, encourage treatment, and ensure that behaviors are regularly reinforced with consistent responses.
Interventions are chosen based on the function of the student’s behaviors. They emphasize reducing troublesome behaviors while encouraging good ones with positive reinforcement.
Every learner is different, which means that assessing each student individually is a critical first step toward success. This begins with talking to the parents and discovering what behaviors the child is struggling with. Doing so provides initial insights into what must take place.
However, this is not a substitute for observing and recording data about behaviors in the natural classroom setting. Via interviews, direct observations, and documentation from past educational institutions, you will need to record:
- Antecedents, behaviors, and consequences
- Target behaviors (vs current behaviors)
- Operational definitions
- Environmental variables such as antecedents and consequences
- Interests and things that could provide positive reinforcement
- Strengths to build on
- Cultural variables to consider
- Mental illness diagnoses, especially co-occurring ones
- Family history of psychological disabilities and behavioral challenges
Once you have this relevant information, you can begin to develop a data-driven plan.
Determine Function of Behavior
After preliminary steps, you will need to identify the functions of behavior within the child you are working with. There are four relevant behavior functions:
- Sensory stimulation
- Escape
- Access to attention
- Access to items and other tangibles
Consider which of these four goals the learner is trying to attain with their behaviors. This will help you to teach children how to meet their needs more positively. This will ultimately help you to prevent the negative behaviors that you are trying to eliminate.
Behavior online tools can enable remote collaboration between social workers and teachers. This common interface leads to more accurate research about each student.
You will better be able to create practical and compliant behavior intervention plans to implement quickly and efficiently. You also will be able to get consistent real-time data and implement research-backed strategies to manage classroom behavior.
Research Appropriate Intervention Strategies
After obtaining research-backed insights, you must generate data-driven strategies to help students succeed at reducing problematic behaviors. Invest in an online platform that provides you with multiple research-backed ABA strategies that work for each student.
It is crucial to look into multiple types of intervention strategies:
- Proactive strategies that anticipate problematic behavior and prevent them
- Replacement strategies that reinforce positive behaviors
- Reactive strategies to provide positive reinforcement after exhibiting good behavior
When conducting your research, you will also need to consider the ages of the children that you are working with. There may be many differences in what behavioral intervention looks like across different age groups, but intervention alignment applies to all ages since they simply address the four functions of behavior.
Once you learn appropriate and legally-backed strategies for your specific student, you can begin to formulate a plan based on these strategies.
Create an Applied Behavior Analysis Framework
Once you have gathered the necessary data, you can create a framework for your BIP. Not that there isn’t a single correct framework for BIPs, but it’s challenging to constantly switch between multiple plans for different learners. Find a plan that works for most students within virtual classroom environments and keep to it.
Antecedent frameworks are the top choices among many social workers and educators. This framework requires you to identify the antecedent (events that occur before a behavior) and react according to those events. You may need to use different strategies for different antecedents.
Another option is to write plans for specific response classes. These individual plans target multiple behaviors within each, as though they are the same. You can create an extremely comprehensive plan this way, but you would need multiple plans to address different behaviors in multiple response classes.
Assess all options before determining the best approach for your learner(s).
Review the Plan With Necessary Individuals
After formulating your plan, you must review it with all involved parties. This always means obtaining a signature from the learner’s parent or guardian. You also must share it with teachers, aids, and other educators who work directly with the student for approval.
Track and Report Behaviors
Finally, when training staff to implement your plan, you will also need to train them to track and report behaviors. In turn, you can then report these behaviors to parents and guardians. Monitoring and recording behavior allows you to empirically assess which strategies are successful and which are not.
You can do this with professional reporting and easy-to-understand dashboards. This observation lets you monitor student progress and share it with educators with a single glance. Insights to Behavior’s dashboard also lets teachers track data while being logged directly into the student’s behavior intervention plan.
Create an ABA Behavior Intervention Plan Today
While creating an ABA intervention plan is a multi-step process, it becomes much easier when you have all of the required information for appropriate planning. Now that you know how to create a plan designed for classroom or virtual learning, it’s time to get started on your own.
Our experts are committed to helping you track, manage, and modify student behaviors from kindergarten through 12th grade. If you are a special education director or similar professional, we offer research-backed strategies to help you work with parents and students requiring ABA strategies. Schedule a 30-minute online personal demo of our software application that helps create legally-defensible behavior intervention plans in under an hour.
