Replacement Behavior

You know all those behaviors that drive you crazy? Running away, shouting out, whining, hitting, etc.? Replacement behaviors are what we wish our students would do instead...and they should serve the same function as the original behavior.  So instead of running away to get your attention, we would want our students to ask us to play a game with them.  Or instead of whining every time they want the iPad, we may teach the replacement behavior of having a student request in a non whiny tone "Can I have the iPad please?"

The key factor with this is being able to identify the challenging behavior as well as the function it serves (attention, escape, sensory, or access tangibles) and then the appropriate replacement behavior.

The tricky part is figuring out what the function of the behavior is...so many behaviors can look the same, but serve a different function for each person doing them.  For instance, let's look at an example of a student who runs away.

How to Teach Students to Solve Conflicts with Peers

So many of our students with ASD have some sort of goal around learning social skills.  One social skill many of my students struggled to deal with was conflicts with their peers.  And trying to put on my teacher mediator hat and teach them how to deal with it in the moment wasn't enough.  They needed pre-teaching of the skills prior to being able to utilize them in real life scenarios.  Which brings me to today's post on a couple, simple teaching tools that are differentiated to individual student levels to help them learn how to identify what bothers them and how to problem solve with a peer.