I’m 100% done writing FBA/BIPs for non-compliance.
If I have to write another plan for non-compliance, I will tear my hair out. They may have to write an FBA for me for throwing a chair at someone. Last year, I completely stop writing FBAs based on non compliance. As far as I’m concerned, I will never write another one in my career.
ABA and I have a love/hate relationship.
I got my first master’s degree in Applied Behavioral Analysis. I loved the field and studying behavior. The functions of behavior were my bread and butter. When used ethically and correctly, it can be a great way of teaching skills in a systematic and unified way.
But there’s a dark side to ABA.
When used in unethical ways and incorrectly, it can cause harm to students. It can be abusive and ableist. It can force people with disabilities to “appear normal” and mask their symptoms. I worked with people who used these strategies to manipulative others.
The field needs to have a level of accountability, regulation, and more oversight.
The field is shifting towards a more holistic approach to behavior change.
ABA has always taken a deficits approach. It focused on fixing things that neurotypical people find “problematic.” Goals should promote independence, leverage student strengths, ensure safety and happiness. More importantly, they need to be neuro-affirming and culturally inclusive.
1. Focusing on compliance stripes independence, autonomy, and self-advocacy away from students.
Following instructions and rules are important for success and safety. “Blind compliance” is not.
Unfortunately, schools are designed under the model of teaching compliance. Our students in special education struggle with discerning people with good intentions. They can be rigid at times and impulsive. Telling students to comply all adult instructions puts them in harms way. Unfortunately, not all adults have good intentions.
It’s easier to teach about setting boundaries, cooperating with others, and flexible thinking. It’s hard to undo the damage of blind compliance.
It’s hard to teach “blind compliance” with exception. There are an infinite number of scenarios student’s need to consider. That’s a lot of mental load. It’s easier to teach about context than hard and fast rules.
There situations where we want students to be compliant, like safety, and in that context, yes, I agree. We don’t want a student being compliant only 80% of the time when they run in a parking lot. That’s why context matters. We don’t want students following the instructions of every single adult. A mom asking their child to get into a car is vastly different than a stranger asking the same thing.
If you try to account for every situation, you’ll end up just playing a game of compliance Whack-A-Mole.
Teaching safety, self advocacy skills, boundaries, cooperation, and flexible thinking are important. Students that have high levels of support need a way of advocating for themselves. Even if it’s just a simple picture card system saying ‘yes’ and ‘no”. Teaching students to say “yes’ and “no” was one of the first skills I teach students. Not only is it easy, but it can include those higher level skills.
#2: Teachers are set up for failure when they focus on compliance over cooperation.
Students are naturally going to test boundaries. We’re pitting teachers and students against each other when we focus on compliance.
Teachers end up in unnecessary power struggles, because they are focused on compliance. Students don’t want to be nagged over and over again to do something that they don’t want to do. It’s easier to find out the reason why a student may be acting out and respond with natural consequences. Focusing on compliance only leads to an argument that undercuts the teacher’s authority.
Take this scenario. Johnny Sunshine doesn’t want to complete his classwork. His teacher tells him to complete his classwork and he says “No.” Now a power struggle ensues. Johnny and his teacher go back and forth as he continues to escalate. Johnny escalates to the point where the teacher removes him from the class. Now he has to sit in the office for the rest of the class period
Guess what Johnny’s going to do the next time he doesn’t want to complete his classwork? Guess what his classmates are going to do when they don’t want to complete their classwork either?
That teacher is going to have a full on mutiny on her hands.
The teacher can give a warning or two and let the natural consequences happen. If Johnny doesn’t want to do his classwork, the teacher disengages. She might check in on Johnny, then go about her business. Now Johnny has to do his homework during fun P.E. time because he chose to not do it in class.
Johnny may be absolutely livid and throw a fit. Try that approach one or two times and I bet you Johnny will start doing his classwork.
What if teachers push back against the consequences? Yes, it will take more time to call parents and enforce consequences. They will have to deal with the fallout from those consequences. If a teacher pushes back, I would ask them how they would rather spend their time. Would they rather put in a few hours to reach out to parents and provide consequences? Or would they rather deal with behavior problems for the rest of the school year?
#3: Students are being singled out instead of addressing poor classroom management.
Yes, I went there. I was tired of classrooms where the only one listening to the teacher was our student. Sure, they might have been staring out the window the whole time. They weren’t screaming and cussing out their teachers and classmates like everyone else. I could never understand why they were being singled out when the whole classroom was a hot mess.
Nobody wants to address the elephant in the room.
Nobody wants to tell the 30 year veteran teacher that her classroom management skills didn’t even work in the Jurassic era.
It’s hard to get people to break out of their habits when they’ve always done things the same way. Especially when those techniques worked for them. That’s why there’s confusion when Johnny Sunshine who throws a chair during seat work. Or little Mary Raincloud is in lala-land for most of the classroom instruction. This is why you hear “I’ve never had a student act like this in my 20K years of teaching.”
This comes down to a lack of Tier I support.
Students weren’t set up for success from the begnning. Teachers didn’t build rapport with their students. That’s why restorative practices often times don’t work. Teachers don’t bake relationship building into their classroom management techniques. When I was a student, I didn’t listen to someone who screamed and hollered at me.
We don’t have to tolerate that behavior as adults. Why should kids have to tolerate the same thing?
Why would would a kid give respect to someone who wasn’t treating them with respect?
Most of the classes I observed had no sense of structure or boundaries. There was no sense of equity in discipline. Unfortunately, our marginalized students taking the brunt of the teacher’s frustration.
Students aren’t reinforced enough. This isn’t about coddling them or false praise. Kids can see that from a mile away and react in kind. If a student isn’t being reinforced, what’s the incentive for them to keep working? We often forget that not all kids are intrinsically motivated and that is a skill that also needs to be built.
Would you go to work if you weren’t getting paid? I doubt it. So if that’s the case for you, why would it be any different for a child?
#4: School psych can leverage your time by focusing on Tier II interventions.
Our time is better used on prevention than doing individualized FBA/BIPs.
When I was a regular member of our schools MTSS team, I only had 3 or 4 FBAs to complete during the school year. Our director stopped the school psychs from participating in the MTSS meetings process.
Things fell apart faster that a Jenga tower standing on one block.
It went to show just how important the school psych’s expertise is at the Tier II level.
This is also how you get around Mrs. 30 year I know everything teacher. You don’t single her out, you address it at the systems level. 90% of the time, it’s a systems issue. She’s working in a broken system, that’s why her strategies are no longer working.
Being a part of a team gives us a leverage position to address behavioral problems in a meaningful way. I’d rather go to an MTSS meeting to discuss wider topics around classroom management techniques. It’s harder to write plans for 8 different students that have at least 3 different teachers.
That’s a lot of time spent running around in circles trying to put a wildfire with a eye dropper.
Students act out in a variety reasons in a variety of different ways.
When I worked in the middle school, I had a student who was constantly getting in trouble during lunch time. We had several manifestations and so I updated his FBA to include the rec area as yet another setting. When I went out to observe him, it was obvious to see what the problem was.
It was a free for all. Sending the kids to the Hunger Games would have been less stressful.
There was no supervision, no boundaries, and no correction of problem behavior. There were no boundaries on where the games were being played. Kids that played one game clashed with others because there were no set spaces for each activity.
My target student spent the whole lunch pacing back and forth. Yes, he was trash talking his peers, but he was hardly the only one. He also wasn’t the worse kid on the blacktop.
When rec was over, there were 50+ students running into an equally chaotic cafeteria. No wonder a kid with ADHD and trauma was getting overstimulated and “aggressive”.
Did I really need an FBA to tell me that?
The larger solution was to change the process of how students played during rec. My admins response was infuriating because there were still larger problems to address. The next best solution for the student was to have him go through another door at lunch.
Sometimes the solution for that one student is really that easy.
Conclusion:
It’s always been said that we as adults need to shift our behavior to address behaviors in the classroom. That’s a hard pill to swallow for teachers at times. When it comes to get in a power struggle with a student, staff always lose, even when they win. There’s always some sort of cost to engaging in power struggles. If large groups of students are having behavioral problems,it’s a systems issue. No amount of FBA/BIPs are going to address larger concerns.
Focusing on building skills and contexts will make your FBA and BIPS easier to write and implement.