What Are the Benefits of Positive Behavior Support in Middle Schools?
Middle school is a time when students are beginning to develop their independence, which can bring behaviors such as self absorption, drugs and alcohol use and inappropriate clothing choices. Positive behavior supports can make this time less difficult.
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Identification
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Positive behavior supports focus on identifying the motive for a challenging behavior and provide a replacement that is socially acceptable. Functions of behavior usually fall into three categories: attention, avoidance and stimulation.
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Attention
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Attention-seeking behaviors are done to get positive or negative feedback, such as when a middle-school student wears inappropriate clothes to get her parents to notice. This can be dealt with by her parents giving her positive attention for something else, such as good grades.
Avoidance
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Avoidance behaviors are used to get out of an unpleasant experience, such as a student weak in math skipping class to avoid embarrassment in front of his peers. A positive behavior support would be to provide the student more opportunities to be successful in his math efforts.
Stimulation
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Behaviors that are done to seek stimulation are the hardest to support because they provide internal rewards. An example would be a middle-school student who rocks back and forth to stay focused and needs a positive behavior support plan to find something more socially acceptable.
Considerations
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Involving the student is important when coming up with a positive behavior support plan and will increase the likeliness of success.
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- Photo Credit "0180" is Copyrighted by Flickr user: RLFilipkowski (Rick Filipkowski) under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
