(Using Discretionary Break Contingencies to Disrupt Escalation Cycles)
Problem: Student acts out due to frustration
What to Do: Develop a communication system by which students can request breaks from frustrating classroom stimuli. The communication system can take the form of “Catch my Breath” passes, “Take Five” tickets, or another version of a card system. After determining how students can request a break, specific procedures should be developed, taught, and rehearsed with regard to how breaks are taken. Some things to consider:
(1) When can breaks be requested and what tasks are allowed to be postponed by breaks? Careful consideration of baseline data should be helpful in trying to determine what reasonable use of breaks will look like for each individual student. Behavior intervention should never set goals that are regressive—determine at what level the student is presently performing and set a goal within the zone of proximal development for the acquisition of the skill.
(2) Where can the breaks take place—in the student’s normal workspace, in a designated recovery space in the classroom, in an area outside of the classroom? With low-intensity acting-out behaviors, a student may be able to use her usual workspace for breaks. However, as the behaviors become more intense, it becomes necessary to establish break spaces that more substantially separate the student from the source of the frustration.
(3) What activities are allowed during the breaks? Specific sensory activities should be provided that will aid the student in claming herself. Examples of activities include stress balls, breathing exercises, soothing music, drawing, etc.
(4) How long should breaks be? Again, baseline data is crucial for setting these limits. Making allowance for a 15 minute break would be overreaction if a student’s acting out behavior never exceeds 10 minutes without this intervention. On the other hand, a room clear almost always requires more than 15 minutes of everyone’s time, so an individual break of 15 minutes might make sense in the case of a student with high-intensity acting-out behaviors that usually have a long duration.
Why It Works: The initial contact provides a preventive dose of attention for the student. Subsequent contacts tie social interaction to task completion (desired behavior). A key component of pulling this off successfully is resisting the often intuitive behavior of lecturing him about failing to make progress with the assignment. Usually we, as teachers, tend to move about the room with a quick “Good job” when students are doing well and we stop and take more time with students who are off-task or are having problems. While this works for most students, we want to try to invert this for students who engage in disruptive behaviors in order to get adult attention. If these behaviors are truly motivated by a need for adult attention, then this proactive attention should minimize the triggering of the problem behaviors. Also, the goal-setting effectively divides the task completion into manageable chunks (a version of task analysis). The social interaction at progressively spread intervals provides both prompting of appropriate behavior and reinforcement of desired behavior.
