Anyway, I wrote up ten goals that I wanted to make sure were addressed in the BIP. Primarily, I wanted my son to have a positive behavior support plan that provides him an environment where he can achieve.
When I met with the general ed teachers and special ed teachers yesterday, one of them stated how much she really liked what I scoped out and printed it out for use for all her students' BIP planning. I know few of my regular readers have any need for this, but I thought I'd share it for those of you out on the Interwebs who need similar guidance.
The goals of the Behavior Intervention Plan are that it:
1. is proactive rather than reactive
2. addresses and outlines the root causes of the student's behavior, focusing on the interpersonal and environmental triggers (attention seeking, avoidance, anxiety provoking, difficult tasks)
3. minimizes the above triggers
4. identifies adaptive skills for each type of trigger - how to coach student on how to behave differently with concrete examples; breaking problem tasks down into smaller, more manageable "chunks"
5. teaches adaptive skills so when student does encounter a trigger he knows what to do
6. reinforces the adaptive skills throughout the day before he encounters a trigger
7. looks at the effectiveness of consequences imposed - do they meet the goals laid out above? does it review the event and how he could have behaved differently?
8. instills trust in adults at school and provides a safe environment for him and others
9. provides a system for earning points as motivator for appropriate behavior / making good choices and one that also rewards for changing "unexpected" behavior to "expected" behavior
10. provides a streamlined method of communication of points earned to parents for extrinsic reward
I'll be back to regular posting here once things settle down on the homefront.
7 comments:
It looks pretty good. Although its much the same thing my mother asked for every year for my brother and I but never got. I hope the schools in your area are actually committed to working with "different" kids. Actually I hope schools across the country start to/continue to improve how they work with "special needs" kids and their families. I dread having a kid like myself just cause I know how hard the system is to work with. And I don't want to have to move, which is exactly what one of my husbands coworkers had to do. The schools here in Hawaii just can't accomadate an autistic child at this point.
Anyways I hope you and your son have good luck with your school this year. I really do hope you've found a school that is really willing to work with your son. School should be fun and interesting, not something a child comes to dread.
I hope it works, gives consistent approach and allows your boy to achieve. I like your list a lot. I might be tempted to add some thing alongside interpersonal and environmental such as "intra personal" for inner things like child is tired, hungry, thirsty or known to be dealing with a defined added stressor eg death of a pet.
Thanks for sharing this plan! It is clear and proactive and child centered. I think it is fabulous that one of the sped teachers will be adopting your plan. I hope it helps.
Peace!
While I'm sure you would not have chosen to be the mother of a special-needs child, you have stepped up with grace, stamina, and determination. Your son is SO blessed to have a loving advocate! Good for you for doing all you can to help him succeed - and for making sure that "success" is defined in useful and appropriate ways for him.
There may be "few" of your readers that need this, but we sure do appreciate it! I'd like to share something I read recently that was a real Aha! moment for me.
"Tired" in autistic does not necessarily mean from lack of sleep; sometimes it is from overstimulation or from concentrating on acting 'normal' for too long; trying to be something he is not, trying to appear as though he perceives the world as others do when in fact he does not.
This is a quote from a book I read about understanding autistic kids, I can't remember the book title but the author's first name is Florica.
"'Tired' in autistic does not necessarily mean from lack of sleep; sometimes it is from overstimulation or from concentrating on acting 'normal' for too long; trying to be something he is not, trying to appear as though he perceives the world as others do when in fact he does not."
This is so, so important. People just don't seem to understand how exhausting it is when you can't run all these social processes on autopilot like they seem to. I'm an adult with a lot more years of practice and it still applies -- I can have had twelve hours of sleep the night before and still be barely able to hold myself together by the end of the day, if that day has included too many unfamiliar situations, a lot of "camera on" socializing time where I have to be constantly consciously working on it for long periods, or if I'm in a sensory-hostile environment that disrupts my concentration. The difference between my being able to recover from this and it having a negative effect for days or weeks depends a lot on how the people around me react to it.
I try to explain it to NTs this way: if a person is running a long distance, his ability to do so is affected by lots of things...his experience/stamina, the terrain, the duration of the run, and how fast he's trying to go. On a normal day, what I am trying to do is like trying to "run" over familiar ground at a pace I have adapted to and prepared for. But if you make me run farther than I am trained for, or if you make me run on rocky or unfamiliar ground, or run for hours longer than usual, or drive me on at extreme speeds, why would you be surprised if I trip and fall, or if I collapse from exhaustion? I don't just fall for no reason. There is a cause and effect, even if from your vantage point you can't see the gravel I tripped on or tell that my muscles are aching.
And if I am lying on the ground, and your reaction is to stand over me and yell at me for my failure, a couple of things are going to happen. The first is that I'm not going to get back up. The second is that anything else you say loses credibility, because from my vantage point, if you can't understand the relationship between that gravel I tripped on and me falling, you don't have a clue and are therefore not qualified to tell me what to do.
I understand, now, after many years, that just because I know about the gravel doesn't mean you know about the gravel. Sometimes I have to explain. But you can't expect a kid to have learned that yet, so maybe you have to assume that it's there and look a little harder until you see it. It sounds like you understand this...but trying to make other people understand it is really tough.
Good luck -- I hope things get better soon.
Hi,
as a special educator it really makes me happy to see how involved you are in trying to help your son get the best education and help in managing a public school setting. Keep up the good work and take many many deep breathes because you are doing the right thing and being a great parent.
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