Starve It & Replace It Framework: The Positive Behavior Change Bootcamp Episode 2

In our last video, we talked about mindset. If you got to this series late and you're thinking about skipping that video, go back. Your mindset and the way you think are essential to this behavior change process because behavior change starts with you. You are the first item on that checklist, so make sure you don't forget it. Now, I wanna start off by telling you guys a little story about a former student of mine. I was starting one of those years where I felt like I really had it together. My classroom was set up beautifully, Most of my students I have had for previous years, so routines were established and major behaviors were gone. I had a plan. Then I found out a student, let's call him Chris, was going to be placed in my classroom. Chris came to me with a big bad reputation, and within the first 2 weeks of school, I saw the whole range of his big bad behaviors: scratching, kicking, spitting, running, you name it. These were dangerous, disruptive, and were impeding everyone's learning, including Chris's. His behaviors were affecting the whole class. Activities were disruptive, new behaviors in other students popped up. Overall, it was a mess. Now let's fast forward. His transformation was nothing short of amazing. When he left my class 3 years later, he was reading, He had friends. He had no behavior plan. When I ran into his high school teachers years later, I mentioned these behaviors and they looked legitimately confused. So how did we get there? How did we go from an ongoing crisis situation to a high school— high schooler making academic gains with zero levels of aggression? It all starts with the Starve It and Replace It framework. Once Chris had reliable ways to communicate, problem behaviors were no longer necessary for him. Both big and small challenging behaviors can affect all areas of our job. If you are working with students with extreme behaviors, that ongoing safety risk may leave you perpetually on edge. Maybe you're working with behaviors that aren't dangerous but are extremely disruptive. Your academic instruction is constantly put on pause, and lesson plans are derailed. Whatever type of negative behaviors are going on in your classroom, the Starve It and Replace It framework will point you in the right direction because this framework is going to help you identify the missing skill that your students need, and that's what you're going to teach. This proactive, evidence-based approach is rooted in the principles of applied behavior analysis. Today in this video, I'm going to share my short and sweet summary of the Starve It and Replace It framework. This extremely valuable tool will help you and your students achieve that transformation that you have been working for. So first, we're going to starve the negative behavior. That means remove or decrease access to whatever is causing the negative behavior to continue. Because there's always a reason a behavior is happening. How do I know? Because the behavior continues to occur. If an individual isn't getting anything out of a behavior, they stop. This isn't just with our students, this is with all of us. If I say a joke and no one laughs at it, you better believe I'm not saying that joke again. So when a behavior continues to happen, I know that individual is getting something out of that behavior. There's always a payoff. Now here's where it gets tricky. The reason they are getting— and or what they're getting out of that behavior may not be what we expect, or it may not be something that we think is good. Before you can start the Starve It and Replace It model, you need to figure out what you're starving it from. You need to do some detective work, observe and reflect on these behaviors, take data. In that next video, we are going to talk so so much about data, and I'll be sharing my tried and true methods. Once you have your best guess on what is causing the negative behavior to continue, change your behavior so that negative behavior either doesn't work or it doesn't work as well. I find that typically the key is in that minimizing mode. So yeah, you may not be able to completely remove attention, but you can minimize it. You may not be able to completely take away, away a break, but you can make the break not as awesome. So what does this look like for Chris? We saw that a lot of his behaviors were attention-seeking. He had one behavior I know you all know and love— running. He sprinted out of that classroom like he was an Olympic track athlete. So yes, of course I had to go get him, right? I wasn't going to let him run out of the building. But what I learned to do was to go get him, bring him back to the classroom with minimal attention. No talking, no eye contact, no discussion, and then back to regularly scheduled programming. I minimized the attention. Now, before the Starve It and Replace It framework, what did I do? In one made-up word, hoopla. I did hoopla. I stressed, I freaked out, I ran. And you guys, do you know how crazy adults look running down the hallway after a student? You look nuts. And I talked and I talked and I talked to Chris while we were coming back to the class, telling him how he shouldn't do that and what else to do. And Chris was having a grand old time. But with the framework, when I changed what I was doing, I was able to keep him safe and provide minimal attention, which was contributing to that increase in the behavior. Now, replace it. This is the good stuff. This is the part people forget. Starving it alone will not work. It may work for a little, but it's not going to be the long-lasting change we all want. You need to teach a new positive pro-social way to get to the same reason that the negative behavior was getting to. Replacement behavior is the secret sauce to behavior change. You need it. Now, if you think your students already all have reliable effective replacement behaviors, I'm gonna tell ya, they don't, or at least they don't see the value in it yet. So you need to change your behavior so that replacement behavior works. It needs to be easier and more effective than the negative behavior to get buy-in. So how did we do that for Chris? Well, we focused our attention on teaching him new ways to get attention, and we started simple. We honestly started with a grunt. When he grunted, I was there. Soon after a while, we turned the grunt into a hey. Later, the hey turned into a I need help, and we moved on and on and expanded from there. But we started with something simple and doable and made sure that this communication method worked for him. The grunt was easier, and I made sure it was more effective than aggression or running. So there it is, my super speedy summary of my Starve It and Replace It model. There is more to it, but that's the basics. Now listen, I am not giving you a magic spell that is sure to give you immediate great results. If someone's promising you that, they are lying. What I can promise you is that real behavior change takes time but is possible. This might not work immediately, and this might not work every single time, but that's okay. Strategies that are used away from the problem behavior is when you're actually going to see change. The replace it part of my Starve It and Replace It framework is proactive and preventative. It's going to stop negative behaviors before they start. If you're only using or looking for calm down tools, that means you're expecting negative behaviors to happen. My goal for your student is they don't even need calm down tools that often because they are so successful with their communication they don't have as frequent of a need to calm down. I have personally utilized the Starve It and Replace It framework with hundreds of students, both with and without special needs. How this framework looks student to student, of course, varies. I've watched students at a variety of levels transform their behavior and communication in a positive way. How do we know when it's working, and how do we know when to move on to a new plan? Data. All right, that was the Starve It and Replace It framework. I think that's the fastest I have ever explained it. Now your next question might be, how do I know if this is working? How do I know when to move through these phases? Well, easy question there. The answer is data. The next video, What's Data Got to Do with It, is going to answer all these questions on how to track progress throughout your behavior plan. Then our last video, that's the Behavior Change Transformation, where we put everything together. Now if the data video doesn't sound so exciting to you, don't worry, it's gonna be fun. And I have one of my absolute favorite data sheets available to you for free within that video, which if you know me, that's saying a lot. So drop me a note in the meantime below, let me know what you think of the Starvit/Replaceit framework, how this could work in your classroom, in your therapy, or in your home settings, and I will go ahead and see you in video 3.