(Overcoming Effort Threshold and Neutralizing Attention-seeking with Supportive Social Interaction)
Problem: Student engages in disruptive behaviors when given independent assignments
What to Do: When students are given independent practice, begin your rotation around the classroom with the student with the chronic disruptive behaviors. As he completes the first steps of the assignment with your assistance, set a short-term goal and circulate to other students as normal. Return to the student in periodic, but progressively spread intervals. For example, get the target student started, then assist two peers, return to the target student, and then assist four peers, etc. As you return to the student, check on his progress toward the short-term goal. If he has made good progress, take the opportunity to engage him in conversation about his efforts and set a new short-term goal. If he has not, simply redirect him to the assignment and provide very limited attention.
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.
