One of my most stressful moments of teaching is when a student is involved in a behavioral episode. I feel helpless, alone, frustrated, and often ready to throw in the towel. I understand how frustrating it could feel when it seems you have done all you could just for the child to continue acting out. Instructive strategies, or teaching strategies, are interventions to teach the child/student age-appropriate ways to get their needs met and provide coping skills for difficult situations. My goal is to provide you with techniques and opportunities for you to implement during those stressful times and to hopefully make your jobs and lives easier.
Welcome Back! This is the fourth post of six in this Behavioral Teacher series. Check back to continue gaining knowledge and resources to add to your behavioral management skills. In this blog, we begin to identify some strategies to implement during a behavioral episode!
Where we last left off in our behavioral series was just introducing strategies and interventions to put into place prior to behavior occurring. Hopefully, you were able to add some strategies discovered in 30 Preventive Strategies to do Prior to a Behavior to your behavioral plan. Remember, those were all strategies to attempt to put into place prior to the behavior occurring. We are about to move on to the next category in our behavior plan: Instructive Strategies.
As we discussed in What’s the Function of Behavior? students typically engage in challenging behavior because they learned that those types of behavior are more effective than other means. By teaching alternative skills or instructive strategies can help students to achieve their goals or needs met and often cope with difficult situations as they arise. There are three main types of instructive skills: 1) Teaching Strategies, 2) Coping and Tolerance, and 3) General Adaptive Skills.
