Reduce/Eliminate the Challenging Behavior (s)

This is frequently exactly what stakeholders want. They want the student's disruptive behavior stopped. To accomplish this goal the PBS needs to decrease and/or eliminate the opportunities and/or causes of challenging behaviors by:

1. Changing the consequences for the challenging behaviors – The BIP (PBS) should seek to change or remove the consequences that make the challenging behavior (e.g., aggressive &/or defiant, off task, etc.) reinforcing.  By changing consequences, the BIP (PBS) can also make the targeted challenging behavior (s) irrelevant, ineffective, inefficient, and possibly even aversive to the student. For example, if a student misbehaves to get attention, a time-out, or the withdrawal of reinforcement following the occurrence of undesirable behavior (e.g. planned ignoring, separating student from others, or the reinforcing setting), may make the behavior less fulfilling for the student.    

2. Changing the antecedent events and environmental causes of off task behaviors - If there are environmental factors in school which seem to be contributing to the misbehavior, (i.e., public reprimands, over-rigidity of class rules, seating arrangements, independent seat work, academics that are too difficult or boring, sensory issues,), then the BIP (PBS) may need to make modifications to these environmental factors. In this way, the PBS becomes pro-active and focuses on the antecedents of the challenging behavior, rather than relying solely on strategies that are reactive and focus only on the consequences of behavior.

These interventions rely on the ABCs of behavior - On a simplistic level, behavior (B) is a result of antecedent events (A) and the consequences (C) of the behavior (s). The antecedent events are events or actions that immediately precede and may trigger a challenging behavior. These antecedents can be the setting that the student is in, such as a particular classroom, with a particular group of students, or an unstructured activity. The consequences are events or actions that occur as a result of the problem behavior and reinforce it. For the most part, these consequences consist of something the student gains &/or avoids by the behavior. The following observation form can be used to collect baseline data on the student's challenging behavior, as well as providing ongoing monitoring during the implementation of the BIP (PBS):