It has long been a source of fury for me when students are moved to more restrictive settings without reliable data or without having tried every reasonable intervention to allow them to remain in the least restrictive educational setting. I’ve seen firsthand how it can turn a kid’s world upside down to be removed from their home school/classroom and sent somewhere else. It shouldn’t be a decision we make lightly, and–truthfully–I think teams often believe they are approaching the decision with care. But they often aren’t.
Decisions about placement are sometimes made without having methodically gone through the steps of proper data collection and implementation of more than one plan with fidelity. I’ve read some crappy BIPs that I know for a fact nobody followed at a student’s home school; the steps are too convoluted or the reinforcers are too hard to get for the plan to have been followed.
Administrators and behavior teams throw the word “data” around because it makes them feel like their decisions are justified, not because they have a true appreciation of the purpose of data. Any idiot can collect numbers; the art of behavior intervention comes when someone takes those numbers and creates a workable plan for getting a student from a bad place to a good one. Too often, data is just an afterthought teams use to cover their asses when they have had all of a student’s behavior they can stand.
This isn’t to say that changes of placement are never necessary. They absolutely are. But what I WILL say is that, if I’m sitting across the table from a kid’s mom, telling her I’m about to suggest changing how her kid feels about themself forever, I want to be damn sure I’ve checked my motivations and tried everything I reasonably can to keep them with their peers in a general education setting.
A colleague is getting a new student in class who needs help managing behavior. I started to go through old paperwork to find forms to share with her and realized that I have a lot of good-quality data collection tools that are no longer shared as a dropdown on the website. Bookmark this entry to access lots of my forms. Each is a downloadable PDF, but within each PDF, you’ll find a link to a Google docs version of the same form that you can copy then edit to fit your needs.
E2E FBA Form: If you are working with a team that hasn’t done a lot of FBAs, my FBA form is user-friendly, full of links to data collection tools and prompting questions to help you go through the process.
E2E Strategies Summary Matrix: When your team is trying to keep track of exactly what has been tried when working with a student, this tool can ensure that unsuccessful interventions don’t get repeated. Check out my example to see how this looks in real life when done correctly.
E2E Example Major Incidents Document: I advise teams to create a shared document for recording ABC narrative data (qualitative data) when a student engages in episodes of significant dysregulation. It can be an invaluable tool in capturing the nuances of what happens and when it is most likely to occur.
E2E Quantitative Data Forms: For the everyday sorts of behavior goal data, I’ve created some printable data collection forms for interval data collection, frequency count, on-topic response, and negative comments. When I was EBD full-time, these were program staples for progress monitoring goals.
I know that teams are busy. I know that teams are overburdened. But we still have to do everything we possibly can to improve the lives of students, even those whose behaviors make them hard to love.
Tags: data collection forms, behavior team, FBA
