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Megan Duffard

30 November 2016
Behavioral Intervention Project
For this project, I chose to focus on a student who has difficulty
transitioning between classes. I shall refer to the student as BW for the
remainder of this report.
During the first few weeks of school we noticed that BW had a
tendency to run away from teachers when told to line up. Several times he
ran fast enough to make it out of the school building. We began to observe
that the behavior typically occurred when transitioning from the Life Skills
classroom to his morning general education class or when leaving PE. During
both of these times, right before transitioning, BW is usually engaged in
some type of fun activity. We realized that he was behaving negatively when
transitioning because he knew he would have to go to class to work instead
of play.
As we were very concerned about his safety, we decided a behavioral
intervention would be very appropriate for him. With the approval of Mrs.
Gray, I decided to focus the intervention not only on minimizing the number
of times BW ran, but also shrinking the amount of time it took to get the
behavior under control. It was determined that data would be collected
whenever BW ran for the duration of at least one month. Mrs. Gray helped
me develop a chart to document the running occurrences, the setting in
which they took place, and the time the behavior started and stopped.

The first thing I decided to try with BW was a social story of how to
appropriately transition in the school hallway. I created the book using actual
pictures of BW modeling the correct behavior with hands behind his back
"ready wrangler," looking forward and walking on the green tape in line with
his peers. We read him the story before each transition, hoping that he would
want to imitate the behavior he himself exhibited in the book. The book was
also sent home with him the previous day so that he could read it with his
mom before coming to school.
I also created a box for BW with some of his favorite toys in it. It had
come to my attention early on in the semester that one of BW favorite things
to do is to put objects into a box and dump them out repeatedly. When I
created "B's Box" I thought maybe he would like to earn time to engage in
this favorite activity. I had a feeling it might be helpful in encouraging him to
transition appropriately, but also encouraging him to work in his classes. A
chart was created to go along with the box. The paraprofessional with BW
would take the chart along and put Velcro tokens on the front whenever BW
exhibited a positive behavior. If he earned three tokens he could have five
minutes with "B's Box" once back in the Life Skills classroom.
Unfortunately, BW did not respond positively to the social story and
ended up ripping it apart on the second day of using it. He had run two days
in a row at this point and we were beginning to feel that maybe the
intervention needed to change. Both times we had even had him practice

walking back and forth correctly in the Life Skills classroom, but this was
unsuccessful.
BW was very interested in "B's Box" however. In fact, several times in
his general education class he had earned time to play with it due to
completing his work and following directions. We decided to stop using the
social story completely and instead keep "B's Box" as a motivator in
transitioning. We knew that this would not be enough though to really
discourage BW from running out of the school so we decided to also
incorporate overcorrection as a behavior management technique.
Anytime he ran, it was determined that BW would immediately be
brought back to the Life Skills classroom and made to run back and forth. He
would have to run until he was tired and bored with it. The goal was to make
him realize that the consequences would not be fun. Soon he began to
associate running with having to do something he did not want to do.
Shortly after starting overcorrection with BW, the time it took to get his
behavior under control began to lessen. At first, he would start laughing and
think it was all a game, but after several minutes of running he would get
very tired. He would also get bored as the space he had to run in was pretty
confined. We went from about ten minutes of continuous negative behavior
to only three minutes of it. We noticed that it began to get easier and easier
for us to get BW back on track and even the time between running
occurrences began to widen. Soon his running episodes were not happening
as frequently.

I can look back over the semester and say with confidence that the
behavior intervention was successful for BW. Although he still runs away from
teachers occasionally, it takes hardly any time at all to get him refocused, it
is not nearly as often as it used to be, and definitely not as much of a safety
concern.

Behavior Intervention for Transition


12
10
8

Interval of Behavior (Minutes)

6
4
2
0
18-Aug

28-Aug

7-Sep

17-Sep

Day

27-Sep

7-Oct

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