Life couldn’t be too easy. If everything fell neatly and nicely into one perfectly sized box, we wouldn’t be special ed teachers. Our kiddos are tricky little guys. And sometimes they are really tricky. Their behaviors couldn’t be solely attention or escape – no, no, no. Our kiddos have to keep us on our toes and make sure we are working for our pay check. Sometimes behaviors are what we call multiple controlled. They have more than one function. Based on the context, the same behavior can be used for both attention, escape, and even sensory. This is the time to get a little creative and innovative because it’s essential you aren’t accidentally reinforcing the behavior.
Why do multiply controlled behaviors exist? These behaviors exist because our kids quickly figure out what works and generalize that for other types of needs. Is every behavior you engage in to get attention? No, we engage in escape and sensory behaviors all day. Our students will engage in a behavior towards a certain function. They bite their teacher when they want to escape work. The result is amazing. Almost like an instantaneous and consistent get out of work card. Well dang. That worked well. Hmm… what about when I want to get extra pizza? Remember that biting thing. Maybe I’ll try that again. It worked so well before. Chomp, chomp, and the exhausted teacher pushes over some extra pizza in sheer desperation. And the multiply controlled behavior is born.
There are a few must-read and must-do considerations for dealing with multiply controlled behaviors. They aren’t so cut and dry.
Re-examine Baseline Data
Look at your baseline data again. Investigate under which occurrences the behavior has one function over another function. Consider: environment, time of day, antecedent, presence of specific students/adults/reinforcers. Create some type of guideline or hypothesis of when the behavior has each function.
Explicitly Clarify Behavior Management Plans
These are not going to be the most basic or easy to follow interventions. You NEED to explicitly plan when to change interventions based on when you think the function has changed. Make an overly detailed plan. The key here is teaching your staff to follow this. This may be tricky because you may feel like you are haphazardly changing methods so it can be hard to train staff while playing around with interventions. Spend the time training and retraining your staff.
Tomorrow learn more on how to provide reinforcement for multiply controlled behaviors!
This post is part of Summer Series: Reducing Problem Behavior. Click here to see more in this series!
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2 Responses
Hi Sasha! This is all sooooo true. I have a kid who bites for sensory (when he doesn’t have his “chewie” for some time, to get out of work, and when he’s mad – all different situations, same behavior. So it definitely keeps us on our toes, and it’s good to know I’m not the only one!!
Quick question – what’s the 5-4-3-2-1 you have next to your intervention board? Looks like it’s something for behaviors or emotions or something. Thanks!!
It’s for volume identification for when we talk about needing to be “quiet.”