This week, we're talking about High-Leverage Practice #10: Conducting functional behavioral assessments to develop individual student behavior support plans. And Chris, oh, my goodness. Over the years, how many different FBAs have you run for how many different kinds of behaviors? For you, what does this practice look like?

Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, over the years, you kind of pick up some secrets as you go along. But it is a comprehensive process. It's not one of those boxes to check through. And that's kind of one of the things that I see a lot in schools is, we've got a challenging behavior, and we have to get to the root cause of it so we can hurry up and intervene. And oftentimes, the better you can identify what that function is, the more comprehensive and complete your behavior intervention plan is actually going to be. So I see it where it's full and comprehensive, and I've also seen it at times where it was that procedural hoop just to get to the behavior plan.

Well, so I know a lot of times I'm working with staff who understand that there is a thing called ‘function of behavior,’ but they don't always know, like, what does it mean, and how it's just not all attention and like, just those kinds of things? How do you break that down with your practitioners to find what you and I would consider the true behavioral function behind those needs, as opposed to what you can see on the outside or your first assumption, or, even if you're taking data, how do you even know that that's actually going to give you that evaluatory answer?

So when you look at an FBA, one of the most important things is you have to recognize that you have to use both indirect and direct measures. So oftentimes we know that indirect measures tend to be the easiest, the fastest, and they can guide our practices, but I think where oftentimes people start going awry, or they start shooting a little too much from the hip, is that they don't go through and do the due diligence. When I talk about indirect practices, we're talking about interviews or rating scales, rating tools that you can use the FAST or the FAI, or something along those lines, which give you a pretty good hypothesis. But even when you look at how they compare to an actual full FA, you're only looking in your 60s, you know, 60%, so it's not a true direct. You can't just use an indirect measure. You have to use direct measures as well. Use your ABC sequence analysis.

So it's taking all of those multiple streams of data and utilizing them collectively to take your best educated guess. You're never going to be able to prove one thing or another. You can make a very strong argument even if you go the full FA route. But it's all about developing a preponderance of evidence. I say that a lot. Using multiple tools that align and are all leading in the same direction. Well, there's a very high probability that what you're going to find as you go down that road is all of those things that are converging to the same. It's probably your best hypothetical approach. So, those direct and indirect measures, and making sure you do your due diligence.

How do you know what's the right one? Well, unfortunately, I'd love to be in a position to say, hey, if you just use this one tool, it's going to work every single time. But the reality of it is, I will give the most educator answer of ‘it depends.’ It just depends.

Well, I know you're using the words FA and FBA. And for our non-behavior analyst or non-school psych people, can you break down, like what is the actual difference? Because you're sort of saying that maybe one is better than or different from the other. Walk us through what those might be.

So, your FBA, Functional Behavioral Assessment. You're looking at identifying what the function of the behavior, or what is the purpose? Why does that behavior exist? What are the motivating factors behind it? And you know, it is taking your best educated guess using a variety of direct and indirect tools is what you should be doing, right? Looking at multiple sources and coming to a conclusion. And FA, Functional Analysis, it's the step beyond.

So, where you're still working in the hypothetical realms, under an FBA, it's a hypothesis. You're taking your best guess given the information you've collected. Your FA is kind of your confirmatory analysis. You're actually running that experimental design to pit and identify under these conditions where it is attention. This is what we're seeing when we specifically manipulate under an escape condition. And you lay your conditions out in such a way that they're mutually beneficial to one another to change an MO, which is a really fancy way of saying you're just using one condition presented in a way to make the other one more valuable.

And so the difference is your FBA is still working under that realm of hypothetical, where FA is you're starting to get to that confirmatory analysis. You can never prove, but you can come to a very strong conclusion using that experimental design.

I also want to call it. You've been talking about indirect and direct. Can you walk through what would count as direct data and what would count as indirect data? Both have strengths and weaknesses. But can you just sort of walk that through, too? Because it's really. It's all of these data pieces that we're pulling together. That is what is then creating that FBA, which is that evaluation.

So direct. I always think of it as an easy way to think of it as in vivo. It's live in the mix. You're seeing it in front of you. Whether it's sitting down and watching the scenario play itself out, and taking ABC sequence analysis data. Whether you are sitting there and counting the duration or the frequency or the rate or whatever you're seeing, directly observing and monitoring what is happening is going to be your direct.

Your indirect is always going to be, in layman's terms, from another source. Not a direct source. So it's an interview, or I'm going to sit and do a specific questionnaire with a teacher. I might use a FAST. I might use a screening tool that's going to help me narrow down. Is this approach, attention, or is it escape? Is it something aligned with a tangible? But it's something that I'm sitting with another person, and I'm not putting direct eyes on the kid to complete it or an adult, depending on what populations you're working with.

So indirect versus direct. And you really want to have a balance. It's kind of like a push-pull. You always want to make sure that you are balancing one with the other. If you have an indirect measure that you're saying, ‘I'm going to use this to come to a conclusion,’ it's always in your best interest to have a direct measure to actually get you to that point. Now you're going to hear a lot of purists say, “the only way you're ever going to get to that conclusion is by going full tilt and doing an FA.” And the reality of it is, yes, I will agree to that. However, you also have to look at the efficiency. When I was working in a large district, there would be times when I'd be working through 50 different FBAs at a given moment. So you have a big case log. You've got a lot of different behaviors in a lot of locations, spread across however many square miles your district is, and you're really working with teams to get that work done. You can't do it yourself.

And so you have to be efficient, and you have to know the letter of the law, what is acceptable in that area that you're working in. Of course, what you see in a clinical perspective or a clinical setting, the standard of acceptability might be different than what you see in schools, but it doesn't mean that you can't also be doing really good work in both realms. Just because you don't do something in a school perspective that you would find in a clinic doesn't mean you're not doing good work in that area. You can do good work in all of it, but simply doing an FA for everything, while it would align with best practices, it's definitely not something that's feasible, viable, or sustainable.

Yeah, thank you for saying that, because I know there are a lot of purists who will say, “This is the only way that you can actually derive an answer.” And then you run into a whole bunch of other things in education that it isn't always going to be that way. So thank you for walking through all the different types of data, the types of analyses that can be run, just kind of laying a land of that evaluation side. I want to shift us over to that behavior plan. Because it is for a purpose.

You don't just run an evaluation and be like, “Check, now we know the function, and then we just go back to business as usual.” There are actual decisions that can then be made from the outcome of that evaluation. So for you, what are some of the first things that you're like, “Okay, cool, now we've run the FBA, now we know what? We could try what?” Like, how are you then leading your teams?

When we look at it, obviously, how we're approaching it always drifts from that function. You always want to make sure you're doing- and I see this as a procedural mismatch often when I'm reviewing behavior plans and interventions, is that they don't follow what's known as the fair pair. For those of you who aren't familiar with what the fair pair is, it's if you're recognizing that the function of a certain behavior is to get attention. You want to make sure that the intervening approach that you're taking also comes out with something that's going to align with attention. Otherwise, you're peeding motivation against itself.

And you might be saying, “Hey, we're going to teach you this skill and reinforce it with a tangible.” But the reality of it is, if they're coming to the table with challenging behavior as a means to seek attention or to gain attention, a teacher's attention, a peer’s attention, whatever. If you're not intervening and teaching a skill set that's also going to be a more socially appropriate way to gain access to that attention or to escape more appropriately. It's a procedural mismatch. You're teaching apples, and they're looking for oranges. 

And so, first, you want to make sure that you're function-aligned. It's just a basic mismatch or matching procedure. You're function aligned. And then from that point, you're looking at what we're trying to establish as a skill set. Sometimes it's communicative in nature. So you have a student who really struggles, and they're using physical aggression, let's say, as a means to escape, but they don't have a functionally driven, socially appropriate means to request that. Give them access to request their escape. So you might be looking at a functional communication training protocol. You might be looking at FCT in a way to teach that individual a more socially appropriate way to escape.

So you start with that functional alignment. And then you always have to remember that your intervention plan isn't a management plan, it's actually an instructional plan. You're teaching a skill. We want to teach and empower that individual to come out with a socially meaningful and relevant behavior that is an alternative, or it's something that propels that person forward and empowers them as opposed to just simply managing a behavior.

Not that there's anything wrong with it, but you'd be surprised how many times I would see unrealistic plans that would come out that would focus on something called DR0 or DR-Zero. Differential reinforcement, zero rates of that behavior. Of course, you want this student to never do this behavior again. But when you look at it, number one, the criterion for acceptable performance is not zero; where they're at, it's too much of a drop. And number two, you always have to be thinking, how are we teaching? We're in the educational field. The educational sector, DR0, is going to keep a kid. You know, it might work with keeping a student or a child from engaging in that behavior, but there's no meaningful alternative behavior that you're teaching, teaching something else. So remember, functional-aligned. And then how are we going to teach and empower that person to gain access or to remove what they're trying to do in a more socially appropriate way?

So it sounds like you're talking about replacement behaviors. And one of the things that I run into pretty frequently is I'm looking at what teams have written as replacement behaviors, and they're really staff actions, like things that the adult will do, not necessarily what we're trying to support the student in doing. So when you're walking through your teams, I'm thinking specifically, those low-incidence students who aren't necessarily advocating for what they need or don't need, or maybe our transition students who are trying to fit into workplaces.

How do we know that we're actually teaching replacement behaviors? Not just supporting or helping. Like, how do we know that we're actually teaching them those skills that will actually meet that function in the way that you're talking about?

And not just putting something on a piece of paper that sounds good and looks good. Well, it's like anything else. If you are going to monitor, let's say you're looking at a decelerative plan. You're looking to decrease a specific behavior or a cluster of behaviors. You're obviously going to be monitoring that your intervention is effective on one avenue by the decrease in that behavior. But your alternative or your behavior that you're trying to teach, you also have to be measuring and monitoring that. It is less efficacious for you to say, “Hey, we nullified this behavior, but we really haven't taught anything,” than it is to say, “We've nullified this behavior. And in its place, they're using this.”

And I used some low-hanging fruit before when I said FCT, Functional Communication Training. But FCT is something you see, given the population that you were bringing up before, you see that as very, very frequently used. You look at a lot of these core behaviors, as a matter of fact, I was just talking with an educator the other day who's struggling with a student and they themselves said they have an AAC device and they really don't use it and they have no way to say that they want a break at all, but yet the student is eloping and when work comes beyond a certain period of time, they're smacking their hands away or they're trying to push the staff away or moving the work off the table and trying to escape or avoid from that work. And when you look at it, that communicative capacity in a more socially appropriate way to protest might be a good place to work on it.

So you have to be monitoring not only the problematic or the challenging behaviors, but you have to be looking at those behaviors that you're looking to instill, and then those are going to take reinforcement. You're going to have to set that condition up and set that environment up to empower those behaviors. So shifting of that MO and really setting it up so that way, not only are you putting the answer to the problem that you know to be coming in front of the child, but you're promoting it to happen, and then reinforcing the use. Because we know by definition, something that's reinforced effectively is something that's more likely to maintain or increase in the future. And so if you're going to truly empower one behavior, and you want to empower that behavior to have a really strong, meaningful, functional role for that person, then you have to empower it. You have to follow with reinforcement one way or the other. So it is measuring, it's monitoring, it's teaching, but it's also reinforcing. It's one of those things. You can't have one without the other.

Well, before we sign off today, I want to give you a little bit of time here to talk about the environmental shift. So this High-Leverage Practice is also focused on how do we leverage the environment so that reinforcement is almost automatic and natural for using that replacement behavior, and adjust the environment so that the target behavior and the things that were the maladaptives that we're trying to decrease are just less effective or less available. So how do you walk teams through specifically that environmental piece around everything that you were just explaining?

So when we're looking at the environment, there are a lot of ways that we can kind of structure it. We can use physical space, physical entities. So if we know that we want to teach a specific requirement, requesting behavior, we're going to establish it. But then we're going to have to strengthen it. We want that person to utilize that over space and time. You'll hear teachers constantly using, and I don't use this term, but we're going to ‘sabotage’ it. We're going to take that item, and we're going to put it so it's selectively out of reach, or they have to go across my midline to get access to it. And we're going to teach them how to request that more effectively.

And so you can utilize the environment in a lot of ways. If you think of states of deprivation satiation, we can establish environments that make some things more “rewarding” or “valuable.” So requesting behaviors. I used to love going into ECSE, early childhood special education classrooms, especially when we were working with individuals who have challenges with expressive and receptive communication.

And I used to love snack time because snack time was a time where it was great for us to be working on requesting, manding, commanding, demanding; those sorts of things. Establishing that voice, whether it's with a device, whether it's vocal, verbal, whether it's using a card, an exchange system, whatever that modality is, I can sit and use that environment and the conditions that exist in that environment, the MOs, to really make that Cheez-it or that mini M&M that that student has very valuable and I can empower that requesting as the access to it pieces at a time. We could be playing games, doing stuff like that, and getting those. You can use the environment to your advantage, and it's not always just sticking something on the shelf and hoping the kid's going to request it and catching them in the moment. You can use time of day. For example, when is food most valuable to you? Food is most valuable to you when you haven't had access to it for a while. So, snack time, if you strategically place your snack time and align it to some kind of FCT approach for requesting, you might be able to leverage that as a more effective form of reinforcement in your time. It's all about environmental management.

The other thing, too, that I see is when you're working with challenging behaviors, I use eloping as an example. It's a fancy pants term for saying a kid running out of the classroom, running out of the instructional environment, whatever it is. I often will walk into a classroom, and it's really interesting. Sometimes you see the spaces that the individual is tasked with the most robust work to be done immediately next to play and leisure time. Or an area that is used for social engagements, even at the middle school and high school levels.

And so you've set this environmental contingency up where it's like, wow, I can just slide out of my chair and be right here and have access to all those great things. And there's little time for someone to redirect or prompt to use a more appropriate- if you're working on FCT or something, a more appropriate means to request access as opposed to just straight eloping. So you have to think about your space, your layout, your classroom design. Think of your times of day. All of those are tools that you can use to your advantage when you're not only trying to teach that replacement behavior that has to be, required to be, in an intervention plan, but also how you can use it to that functional line side. Think about the access to tangible kit. Well, if I, you can't see it, but if I'm holding up my phone, it's got all the games in the world on it. Well, if I get satiated from that, it's probably not going to be a very effective reinforcer. The last thing you want after eating a Thanksgiving dinner is more turkey. You've got your fill. So using your environment, using those constraints of the environment. You have to use it to your advantage. You have to think of those MOs, and you have to think of how you can set up your environment and how you can set that student up for success to actually use the skills and put yourself in a position to empower those skills to be very effective, more so than the challenging behavior you're using. Because it's faster, it's easier.

I often think of behavioral economics. I know it sounds really weird, but if you think about it, we read these labels, and we read all these things, and it says calorie. Well, calorie is an expenditure of energy. I mean, a calorie is a measurement of energy. And from behavioral economics, if I can get something and it's easier, faster, more efficient, or, from even a survivalist perspective, less calories burned, I am more likely to utilize that approach to getting it than something else. So you have to devalue on one side and add value or empower another.

And when I would give presentations, I'd be working with educators or clinicians about looking at replacement behaviors. I have a slide that I always love to put up, and it's got, I'm sure you've probably seen it because I think you've seen some of my presentations before. But there are two hills or paths through the woods. And one of them is this very smooth, easy-to-navigate path that jets straight through the woods. And the other path is one that's uphill, and there are all these like sticks and chunks and rocks and lumps, and it turns a little bit around trees, and it's really hard. And I tell people, I want you to just close your eyes and take a look at these paths and think about something. Imagine you're in the woods and a bear is chasing you. In that moment, this bear is coming after you, and you have to get out, but safety is right on the edge of where you can't see. Right on the hill. What path are you taking?

Everybody always says I'm taking the fast, the easy, the quick path. Well, think about that. When you're working with challenging behaviors, and you're introducing and utilizing those replacement behaviors that you want to be more efficient, set them up to be that quick and easy, fast path, that efficient path. And put those little roadblocks and those stumps and those sticks and all those things, not literally, but metaphorically speaking. You don't want to be tripping kids, but you want to make that the path to their typical or what they were traditionally using as a means to get a payoff.

So if I can make it harder, maybe with response blocking or redirecting, but I can teach that more appropriate request, or another way to get that break. And that's the fast and easy way. Well, it's a lot faster, it's easier, it's more efficient. I'm going to establish that replacement behavior pretty quickly. And then from there, I can shape its use, and I can put some constraints around it, and I can build it up to the natural contingencies we see in the environment around us. That criteria for acceptable performance. But we have to do that. We have two paths. We're trying to teach the smooth; we got to make the other one a little bumpy, we got to make it a little less efficient because it's worked for that person for so long, it’s ingrained.So, how do we go about changing that? Give them a better way to go.

Well, I'm so glad that I asked you to have this conversation with me because I know this is stuff that you just nerd out on completely. And you've also written hundreds of FBAs and team-facilitated behavior plans and all of these things. So I know this is just a little teeny piece of the top of the iceberg for what this actually is. But thank you so much for taking your time this week with me to talk about it in a way that our practitioners can take it and figure out what works for them.

I appreciate you having me.