Sasha from The Autism Helper explains how to handle attention-maintained behaviors after an FBA. Attention includes praise and reprimands alike. When a student runs away, retrieve them with minimal eye contact and no commentary; during meltdowns, limit adults present and avoid extra verbal reprimands.
Hi, I'm Sasha from The Autism Helper, and in this episode of the mini video training series, we're going to talk about what doesn't work for attention behaviors. So if you've done an FBA and you've decided that this could be an attention behavior, so a behavior that is functioning to get attention, First of all, you're definitely going to be teaching a replacement behavior. That's always my caveat and every time I talk about behavior, we have to teach replacement behavior. We have to teach our students a positive communicative way to get attention or to get that same need. So that's first off, but then let's look at what things we shouldn't be doing to ensure that we're not making those behaviors even worse. So we want— what we want to ensure with attention behaviors is that those problem behaviors are not followed by any unnecessary attention. So I'm gonna define both of those things right there because it seems simple, but it's not, and I see actually this mistake happen a lot. So first off, what does attention mean? A common misconception is that attention is just positive attention. So, "Hey, good job!" Praising a student. But really, attention can be positive or negative attention. The lectures, the reprimands, the prompts. Can actually be attention and be reinforcing that behavior. So look at other things like eye contact, proximity to the student, physical prompts or reprimands. Look at talking about the student in front of them. That's attention as well. Our students can hear you when you say like, "Oh yeah, that's what Johnny just did," and blah blah blah to another staff member. They can hear that, and that's providing attention for the behavior as well. So that's one. That's what the attention component is. And then let's look at what unnecessary attention means. So we want to be removing as much attention as we can. Now we all know there are situations where we just can't remove all attention. If a student is running out of the classroom or the school building, if the student's getting aggressive with another student, you're not going to be like, "Oh well, can't provide attention. I guess I'll let you guys beat each other up." Absolutely not! Safety is our first priority, so there will are times when of course you will have to intervene, but you can do so by providing minimal attention. If you have a runner and your child runs down the hallway, you can go get them, safely bring them back without eye contact, without a lecture, without the dramatic re-entrance into the classroom of huffing and puffing, talking about how out of shape you are, telling all the staff members how far he got and how tired you are. I see this all the time. Remove the hoopla. We don't need all the extra stuff. Just bring the student right back to where they were, right back to the work task. No one even talks about it. If a child is in a big meltdown, really look at how many staff members need to be there in order to ensure safety. A lot of times I'll see walking up to a behavior incident or kind of a bigger meltdown or challenging issue, and there's 8 adults there. Do we need 8 adults there? Do we need that many cooks in the kitchen giving their input, giving their, you know, verbal reprimands or redirections? That's a lot of attention. So really only engage in as much attention as you need to keep that child safe and then remove all other unnecessary attention. Of course, like I said, you're doing this while teaching and reinforcing that replacement behavior. So our child is learning a new and positive way to get attention. So if you've done an FBA and you think you have an attention behavior on your hands, be sure to avoid that unnecessary attention and really teach this to your team and your school so everyone's on the same page. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the mini video training series. If you'd like to check out more, please head over to YouTube to my channel, The Autism Helper, or theautismhelper.com.
