Child-Specific Interventions

These are the most time-intensive interventions and should be used when you are addressing a challenging behavior with a specific child that has not resolved itself after implementing environmental and instructional/interactional interventions. When talking about children's behavior, we must remember that all behavior is communication. The child is trying to tell us something. In order to help us do this, we can use a functional behavior assessment (FBA). In order to design an effective intervention, we need to know the function or the "why" for the behavior. We can conduct informal FBAs in our own classrooms. To do this, we need to ask ourselves a few questions:

First, what does the challenging behavior look like? How would we describe it?

Second, when does the behavior occur and when does it not occur? Is it related to other events happening in or out of the classroom? 

Third, why is this behavior occurring? What is being communicated? What is the child getting as a result of this communication?

Once we have determined the function, we can design an intervention based on the gathered information.

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