5 Ways to Use Visuals for Challenging Behaviors

Visuals are an extremely effective and evidence-based way to help students with challenging behavior. I'm Sasha Long. I'm a former special education teacher and board-certified behavior analyst, and I'm going to share 5 essential ways that you should be using visuals related to challenging behavior. We're going to talk about not only how to prevent challenging behaviors from happening and supporting those students, but also supporting students after challenging behaviors do happen. The first way you can use visuals to support students with behavior challenges is using visuals to clarify expectations and give instructions. So sometimes challenging behaviors happen because of a misunderstanding. There wasn't a clear way for that student to understand what they should be doing. So we want to be really clear with our expectations and account for receptive language challenges with our students. Receptive language processing is how we process verbal language, and some students need more support when processing all the verbal language they get in their your day. So here are a lot of cool ways that you can use visuals to clarify expectations and give instructions in your classroom. You can use things like mini schedules that show simple common routines that, hey, these are the rules and the expectations that I have for you when you go to the bathroom. Rubrics are also another cool way to do this because you can also give— use these to give feedback as well. Hey, when we are transitioning between centers, we check our schedule, we go to the next location, we do the activity, we clean up. So then this tool embeds data, and then we can give feedback at the end as well. Mini schedules are nice for showing the individual routines of the day, what we're doing at art class, what we're doing in our centers. Your daily visual schedules will also clarify those expectations. The more we can be communicating in an accessible and understandable way what students need to do, the better off we're going to be, and the more successful we will be on preventing problem behaviors. I love mini visuals on rings to help give directions as well. Whether we are saying like a praise statement, "Good job," or, you know, we are giving some type of supportive statement like, "Hey, it's okay to make mistakes," or we want to just give the direction of everyone should be raising their hand. Again, that verbal language of raising your hand may be harder for some students to understand, but that visual cue may be helpful. So having these available with you in and out of the classroom, you can put these on your lanyard. These are great for safety issues. These are great for common routines like throwing away your trash after you eat lunch. These are gonna be really helpful to clarify what you mean to your students. Number 2: Use visuals to clarify classroom rules and expectations. So this goes right along with number 1. Number 1, we were using visuals to communicate routines. Here we're communicating our expectations and our rules. There are expectations in every classroom and really every setting that we go to, and we want to make sure that our students understand those rules and expectations and so we need to communicate them in a way that is understandable. Our verbal language may be too much, so use visuals to support that. Again, rubrics may be a great fit. We can communicate how to stay safe, how to complete our work, the expectations we have there. Social stories or social narratives are great to explain and show some of the challenges that might happen and what we do when those challenges happen. Simple visuals like the steps for waiting or time to wait, You may notice there's a lot of text on these. Text is a visual. Just having your written out rules for your classroom is important no matter what grade or type of classroom you are in. Writing it out and having that text there is a visual cue. So writing out the classroom expectations, and then if students need more visual support, maybe something like a behavior contingency map that shows the options that you have and how our consequences change. Behavior maps are cool. They summarize basically your whole behavior plan on one sheet of paper. So show your classroom rules and expectations using pictures and text as visuals. Number 3, use visuals to give choices. Oh my gosh, if I could give you one takeaway strategy from this video today, it's choices. Choices are such an effective intervention for preventing problem behavior. Give that student some control, give them some autonomy, give them choices in different areas of their day, and then use visuals to communicate those choices. So I have a lot of great examples here. We have a sensory choice board for different sensory activities. This would be a great thing to collaborate with your OT on. For calming strategies, if your student is angry or upset, what coping strategy do they wanna use? If your student needs a break, here's a cue on when we should ask for a break and then some options of things we wanna do in a break. Or how about what we do when we wait? You and I don't just sit and wait with doing nothing, right? We play on our phone. So, give your students choices of what they're doing when they're waiting. In as many areas of your day as possible, whether it's what materials the student is using, where they're sitting, what coping strategies they use, give them choices. Number 4: Use visuals to show when reinforcement is coming. Lean into visuals here. We want to be very, very clear when the awesome things that our kids want are coming to them. Now there's a lot of background within the discussion of reinforcement. We have to know what a reinforcer is, we have to know when we are giving that reinforcement, and that last piece is really clearly communicating to that student when the reinforcer is coming. So lots of different ways you can do that. You can use a choice board so students can be picking what they want to work for, and this is all potential reinforcers on here. And then things like tokens, like these little check marks to show how close we're getting to that reinforcer. So here we have a 10 chart one, a 10 check mark. Student will pick, "I'm working for a computer." Once they get their 10 check marks, then they get computer time. You can also show when reinforcement is coming through a countdown schedule or a stoplight schedule that, "Hey, we're almost there and then we're gonna be ready to go." So how close are we to that reinforcer time? Same idea here, we're gonna go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then we will get to that reinforcer. So I'll add these as we get closer and closer. One of my favorite creative ways to make a token board, especially for your younger students or students with limited language, is by creating a puzzle. So take a picture of their primary reinforcer and then give a piece of that puzzle as a token. It is so clear when reinforcement is coming and when they are getting access to whatever they are working for or waiting for. So we're, we're now, we're at Thomas time, right? When we're at 1 gone, we're not at Thomas time yet. Same thing with the wiggles. So take a picture of that primary reinforcer, add those puzzle pieces, we're getting closer and closer to that primary reinforcer time. Number 5: Use visuals for your replacement behaviors. Replacement behaviors are communicative, pro-social ways that students are asking for what they want and need, and these will ideally replace our negative behaviors. Obviously there's a lot of background in that, like in FBA, but basically replacement behaviors will help our students communicate what they want. So for students that struggle with verbal language, having a visual is really, really helpful here. Whether they want to ask to be left alone, whether they want a break, whether they want help or a drink of water. All of these are ways that your kids could be communicating what they need. So instead of maybe engaging in an attention-seeking behavior, they can use this to ask for friend time. Instead of running to the break area or play area or eloping, we can use a visual to ask for a break or ask to be left alone, right? So visuals are a great way to work towards those replacement behaviors. As we said, visuals are an evidence-based way to support students with challenging behaviors. I hope you found these 5 tips helpful. I am Sasha Long from The Autism Helpers. Please subscribe to our channel for more behavior tips for your classroom.