What Is Behavior Coaching?
Major Points for Behavior Coaching
1.Inappropriate behaviors need to be assessed as learned behaviors substituting for skills or as an indicator of intolerance for typical social and instructional demand.
2.Stress is a part of life. Inappropriate behavior must be seen as an opportunity to teach, not as something to prevent by making a child’s world smaller or by reducing social expectations for the child.
3.Behavior management and behavior coaching are different concepts.
a.Behavior management buffers the child from stress through accommodations and adaptations to the environment. It also motivates the child to comply with expectations through reinforcement and punishment.
b.Behavior coaching inoculates the child to stress by teaching tolerance and new skills. It broadens the child’s world by introducing new activities and demands. Behavior coaching is also a means to create effective behavior management strategies that can be generalized to the child’s day.
4.Effective behavior management is not enough to insure that a child will be able to experience a wide range of environments and learning situations as he ages and grows bigger.
5.Ineffective behavior management may be a result of expecting more than the child can tolerate or misinterpreting the cause or intent of the behavior.
6.Increasing a child’s tolerance for stress and broadening his social/communicative skills can be done as the need arises or it can be done through direct instruction by deliberately creating motivating situations and gradually embedding typical stressors and triggers that generate inappropriate behavior and gradually shaping and increasing the child’s ability to tolerate and cope in an appropriate manner.
7.In order to approach a child in this manner, skills. motivators and tolerances must be assessed within typical daily settings.
8.Skills and tolerances should build upon each other. A child will make minimal progress in a setting where demands are too far above or below the child’s skill and tolerance level.
9.A good day is a day when stress has been identified, addressed and the child has learned to deal with something or someone new in his life.
10.A good day may not always look pretty.
11.Initial success is temporary and limited. Stress must be addressed in many ways and in many situations before skills are thoroughly learned and tolerances are well developed.
Skills/Tolerances Needed
To Support Appropriate Social Interaction
Goal: Independently calm, communicate and negotiate across settings and conditions
1.Communicate needs in an appropriate and self-initiated manner
a.Develop or utilize a variety of communicative modes
b.Communicate proximally – next to another person
c.Communicate distally – away from or out of sight of another person
d.Persist with appropriate communication
e.Initiate interaction through appropriate communication
f.Sustain activity through appropriate communication
2.Tolerate social and play interaction
a.With a facilitative adult
b.Within reciprocal (back and forth) activity
c.With another child
3.Tolerate contingencies
a.Understand cause-effect
b.Understand connection between behavior and consequences
c.Tolerate “first this then that” contingency
d.Earn tokens to gain preferred items
4.Delay gratification and tolerate “no”
a.Wait to get needs met
i.Short wait
ii.Longer wait
b.Tolerate brief interruption of preferred activity
c.Tolerate redirection to alternate activity
i.Preferred alternate activities
ii.Non-preferred alternate activities
d.Tolerate “no” and cessation of preferred activity
5.Accept adult direction in a variety of settings
a.Within imposed social structures and activities
i.Classroom
ii.Store
iii.Dinner table
b.Within loosely structured social settings and activities
i.Bedroom/Play room
ii.Park
iii.Playground
