Helping Students Attain Individual Behavior Intervention Goals

In the world of RtI, it’s easy to get caught up in the details of planning for and initiating the right behavior intervention plan for students in need of secondary or tertiary supports. You spend time and energy developing just the right plan, ensuring all the adults know their roles, and getting the scheduling pieces down. But it’s important not to lose sight of the end-game: Attaining that behavior goal!

The most critical piece of any intervention—whether it’s academic or behavior—is having a firm practice of monitoring progress and acting on that knowledge as the plan moves forward. With the Kickboard Answers analysis tools, progress monitoring a behavior plan is an easy analysis check that requires no separate data entry on the part of the case manager or classroom teacher.

Let’s use Cindy Hansen as our example. Cindy is a 2nd grader who in the fall started exhibiting the very unsafe behavior of biting other people. The school RTI Team, after analyzing Cindy’s behavior patterns and exploring the root cause, initiated a behavior intervention plan. The plan includes a twice-weekly individual session with Mrs. Chapa, the school counselor to teach Cindy replacement behaviors for anger and frustration as well as a daily check-in/check-out to celebrate small successes. 

To help facilitate her daily check-in’s, Mrs. Chapa brings up Kickboard Answers and sorts for just today’s date. She quickly types Cindy’s name into the search bar:

She first checks on today’s timeline. The classroom teachers have entered behaviors into Kickboard as part of their regular routine of positive and corrective reinforcement. They do not have to use a separate tool for Cindy, which makes data collection a breeze. The teachers’ comments give this case manager greater insight into the behaviors Cindy has exhibited today. Ms. Chapa starts her check-in asking about the positive behaviors Cindy has shown today and celebrates the good choices for the day. She then moves into listening to (as opposed to talking to) Cindy about what happened with the one biting incident. She helps the child recall the replacement strategies they are working on for when she feels the need to bite. They do a quick role play to practice. 

Then, Mrs. Chapa quickly makes a quick intervention note of the check-in on the Daily Activity page, which is recorded as an internal (staff viewable only), 0-dollar behavior:

Most importantly though, Mrs. Chapa makes sure to check Cindy’s progress over time every week. If their daily and weekly efforts are paying off, then her incidents of biting should be going down. If they aren’t, it’s important to return to the RTI Team to problem-solve.

She pulls up Kickboard Answers on the Student Tab and broadens the date range to see the full semester. On the “include” sub-tab she filters out all other students except Cindy:

And on the Interactions sub-tab, she filters out all behaviors except “biting”:

To see the graph over time, she clicks the graph icon to switch off the list view: 

At the top of the graph, she makes sure the “students” box is checked and that the metric is set to “interactions” to portray a record count of the biting incidents. She sets the unit to “weeks” to populate a weekly progress monitor graph.

Each week, Mrs. Chapa analyzes this graph to be sure Cindy is gradually making progress in the right direction--in this case, reducing the undesirable behavior. Since her goal is to get down to zero incidents of biting in a week by the end of the school year, she is well on her way and the intervention needs to continue the course. If, on the other hand, this graph was trending flatly, upward, or randomly, Ms. Chapa would assemble the RTI Team to discuss altering the intervention. 

Ms. Chapa also periodically shows this graph to Cindy as a means of encouragement that she’s making progress. Seeing this visual fuels Cindy to continue her hard work, changing an unsafe habit—and the graphing lesson doesn’t hurt either!

If you believe your intervention plans might be more efficient and effective when powered by data, we’d love to help!