What would you do if you were the teacher? What would you do if you were the school psychologist?

Posted by teacher on May 24, 2011

Of course, in reality, I would collect information from the kid’s cumulative folder to see if this behavior is historical or new, observe him in other classes, interview his teacher to get a sense of the frequency, intensity, and duration of these types of incidents, and obtain information from the family if there are any recent stressors in the student’s life or ongoing disabilities that may be triggering his reaction. For the purpose of this post, let’s assume this is a brand new problem that only occurs with this teacher and there are no other external factors causing the behavior. It’s never that simple, but let’s pretend. It’s fun.

Now here’s what I observed. My framework is a Functional Behavior Analysis—basically that every student’s behavior serves some function. If you look at the reason a student may be acting out, it’s usually to get something or escape something. The way you figure out the function is to observe the sequence of events—the Antecedent (what happens before), the Behavior (what the student does) and the Consequence (what happens? What does the student get or get out of?). It’s often called the A-B-C model among school psychologists.