You want to know the most important thing in your classroom? Maintaining safety. Hands down, everything else instantly goes to the wayside when safety is a concern. In order to maintain safety, you will need to know if your interventions and strategies are working. So your behavior data is arguable one of the most important things you do. Taking data on behavioral issues is hard. We are talking about crisis situations. While you are getting kicked in the head – do you really stop to make sure you tally each and every kick. No, absolutely not. You data collection system for behaviors needs to be EASY. I say this all the time – but more than ever – this system needs to be easy. Because you need to utilize it.
In an ideal world – we would have plenty of staff so we could take data on each and every behavior we so please. But I don’t live in this world and you probably don’t either – so let’s be realistic. Take consistent and thorough data on your worst, most dangerous, or most disruptive behavior. You will get to the other behaviors later.
I keep a set of data clip boards in the middle of the room on a board. They are all velcroed so I can grab them whenever I need them. I take behavior data on the most extreme and high need behaviors on a daily basis. Then I take maintenance data on other behaviors (weekly, monthly, etc.) to track progress across longer time periods. I also keep general behavior data sheets available for when new behaviors pop up.
Near my behavior data display. I have a white board dedicated to intervention changes. If you are anything like me, half the time you forget to tell the thousands of people who are in and out of your room about intervention changes you make. I love this intervention white board to alert everyone of changes. Keeps interventions consistent!
Next thing to do is make you data sheets easy and straightforward:
- Make the data sheet specific to the behavior you are taking data on.
- Make codes for prompts (pp= partial physical, v=verbal, g= gestural etc.).
- Fill in common antecedents.
There are a bunch of examples of great ABC (antecedent, behavior, consequence) data sheets in this post:
So maybe you are set with data organization for behavioral issues. Need a quick refresher on intervention ideas? Here you go:
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