Strategies for Prioritizing Behavioral Interventions In Your Classroom

Prioritizing behavioral interventions can be the key to behavioral success in your classroom. I am going to give you key strategies you can use to assess and prioritize interventions in you classroom. The main goal of our intervention implementation plans should be that we are implementing plans that are feasible for us so that we are carrying out the intervention with fidelity. 

Assess your classroom support. The very first thing I want you to do is assess you classroom support. To do this, outline your schedule for the day and identify when additional support like paraprofessionals and teaching assistants are in your classroom. If you have students who move in and out of your classroom throughout the day, also note that in your outline. Then you are going to identify what activities occur at the different times of the day. Based on this schedule, you are going to map out some different whole group or small group interventions you can carry out based on the times you have the support necessary to do so.  

 Prioritizing Behavioral Interventions. In order to prioritize behavioral interventions, go through your day and identify all of the supports, strategies, and interventions you provide. Once you have those identified, assess them in terms of skills they teach or how they support the independence of your students. I always prioritize behavioral interventions that focus on these goals. If you cannot identify how the support, strategy, or intervention meets these goals, I would put it on the back burner and bring other interventions into the forefront. 

Batching your Supports. Another great way to increase feasibility in your classroom is to batch supports. What I mean by this is create a bank of supports you provide that are ready to go at any time. For this, I am talking about any antecedent supports like visual schedules or choice boards and consequence supports like reinforcers. 

Batching Choices. Provide choice is a very powerful intervention, however, a lot of times I think we think tend to think of choices on the fly which can be difficult to do. Go through your day and identify the different activities you engage in. Then for each type or category of activity identify 2-3 choices you can offer. Use this as a launching place for when you provide individual choices. This reduces the amount of decisions you need to make and gives you a place to start so when a student is not completing a task you know what types of choices you can give and how you can support that students without starting from scratch. 

Systematizing Your Classroom. As much as you can identify systems and procedures around the tasks and activities you do in your classroom. Then build strong feasible methods for engaging in then. The important thing is you are developing these systems and procedures to increase feasibility within your classroom. If you see another teacher doing something really well, ask them what they procedure is for doing that, this can give you a place to start and then make it your own. If you are just starting out with this, identify two are three activities or tasks related to your job and create a system or procedure around them. That wraps up the strategies I have for you around prioritizing behavioral interventions in your classroom. Again, a lot of this has to do with creating feasibility within your classroom to carry out these interventions and supports. 

Resources Discussed in the Episode
Free Intervention Implementation Checklist
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