Decoding Challenging Classroom Behaviors: What Every Teacher and Paraeducator Should Know!

Challenging behaviors and poor student performance are often attributed to many of society's ills. As a result of the presence of such factors in some students' lives, changing these students' behavior in the classroom is seen as futile unless one can change their nonschool environment. To facilitate the reader's capability to develop intervention strategies that make functional sense, this text provides sufficient background in understanding why this behavior occurs. In order to design and implement effective intervention strategies, the ability to decode the function of challenging behavior is a requisite. The first two chapters provide the basic conceptual knowledge for decoding student classroom behavior. A number of hypothetical examples are used to illustrate that challenging problem behavior does make sense when observed from a functional perspective. Six behavioral functions are delineated and many examples are used to demonstrate how behavior can serve such a purpose. Three common factors within classroom environments are offered and examples are portrayed. Chapters 3 and 4 present basic principles of behavior that undergird the content in Chapters 1 and 2. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the methods of collecting information and data, which are essential skills for classroom personnel in their efforts to decode student behavior. Chapter 7 addresses how to intervene with challenging behavior problems by providing an intervention that enables an appropriate behavior to effectively and efficiently produce the identified function. The final chapter involves a discussion of challenging behaviors that occur in classroom contexts which are not socially mediated. There are two sets of objective measures when reading and studying each chapter: fill-in-the-blank (see Appendix A) and true/false test items follow chapter summaries. The answers to these measures are provided in files on the attached CD-ROM. Appendix B provides performance tasks for several of the chapters. Four decades of history of using applied research concerning behavioral interventions in homes and classrooms successfully supports the efforts that behavior change occurred as a result of what teachers did in the classroom. This book will be an invaluable resource for teachers, special educators, student teachers, school administrators, and anyone who is associated with schools.