The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students

Summary

The Behavior Code unlocks a wealth of proven practices to help teachers, counselors, and parents identify the messages underlying challenging student behaviors and respond in supportive ways.

The authors guide listeners through their FAIR Behavior Intervention Plan, a systematic approach to decoding the causes and patterns of difficult behaviors and developing effective measures to address them in schools. They demonstrate how the FAIR Plan can bring about positive change, even with students who exhibit anxious, withdrawn, oppositional, or inappropriately sexualized behaviors.

Drawing on developments in cognitive science and educational psychology, the authors begin with a simple premise: all behavior is communication. Crucially, the first step of their FAIR plan is to discover the function (F) of a student's behavior. They encourage the use of nonjudgmental curiosity aided by standard data collection methods such as antecedent, behavior, and consequence (ABC) studies. The authors then give listeners the tools to look beyond behaviors to implement targeted accommodations (A), interaction strategies (I), and appropriate response strategies (R). As they guide listeners through their framework, they offer ample case studies and focused thought exercises that allow listeners to fully understand and implement suggested strategies.