Do you have a student wit disruptive behavior?Keep reading

Antecedent based Intervention is used to decrease a behavior by changing or modifying the environment. School has not yet started for me here in Texas but I already know a few of my returning friends my want to wander around the room or new friends will have aversion or anxieties being in a unfamiliar place and with new staff this is an intervention I will need right away. This intervention actually comes from ABA but before I lose you, let me just say you don't have to be a therapist to provided this intervention and it does not have to be in a 1 on 1 setting. 

We all have had a student who frequently engages in disruptive outburst, and can derail the most well planned lesson, which interferes with learning, this is when you can use ABI. The first step in ABI is to identify the events that take place immediately before and after the interfering behavior to figure out what triggered the student's behavior.  I like to use an ABC chart (Antecedent Behavior Consequence) to record data on the behavior. 

Once I determine what the antecedent or the event that occurred before the behavior, then I can modify the environment to see if it prevents the behavior. An example I dealt with before was I had a student that road the bus then when he got to school would shirk really loud, like pierce your ear drum loud all the way down the hallway to the room. Well I could not figure out why and because he was non verbal he could not articulate to me what was wrong and would be too upset to use the pictures on my lanyard. So after about three days of screaming outburst and troubleshooting the school and bus environment I called his mother to see if there was something happening at home and she explained that he refused to eat breakfast at home. Our schedule was the students get off the bus, go to the room, do morning work, and eat breakfast during announcements which led me too the conclusion that he might have an anxiety over the uncertainty of how long it would take before he ate breakfast. My students food was brought into the classroom by a paraprofessional but this kids needed to know that he was going to eat soon. So I arranged to have him be the breakfast helper once he got off the bus his job was to go to the cafeteria with the paraprofessional get the class breakfast and deliver the food to the room then follow the schedule. This worked once no more shirking the hearing of others was saved and most importantly his anxiety of feeling like he was not going to eat was eased. That my friends is ABI, simple, easy, effective.