Positive Behavior Support Part 5: The Imporantance of Recognizing Partial Success

In this short episode you will learn why the "almost there" times, when a child makes progress on a behavior goal, but there is still a ways to go, those are the times they need to be recognized and reinforeced for that partial success.

The episode may be short, but I have found this concept alien to many educators.  You can make sure partial successes are recongized by your child's teachers.  You can also incorporate this concept into your home immediately. It's a matter of looking at adjusting how you view behavioral success.

Thanks to  soundimage.org for the free access to the AI generated music used in this podcast (https://soundimage.org/) 

Transcript

Behaviors -  the Importance of Recognizing Partial Success

Hello. Today I'd like to talk about something that I call approximating success in behavior. 

In the literature, it's called successive approximation, and it goes back to the original creation of applied behavior analysis and positive behavior support. 

Let me give you a description of what it looks like. John is that 2nd to 5th grader that doesn't raise his hand. He likes to call out instead. 

John has a behavior plan that calls for him to earn reinforcement if he raises his hand when the teacher asks a class wide question.  The class rule is that students need to raise their hands without calling out or otherwise vocalizing.

If John is reinforced for raising his hand and not calling out, that's fine. he's done the behavior; he's done what he's supposed to do. However, what about those times when John raises his hand and calls out at the same time, or those times that he calls out and then raises his hand a second later? 

Those are the times I'm talking about, those intermediate steps towards success. 

What parents often tell me and based on my experience observing classrooms when I was a special education administrator, is that there's a general lack of recognition of the importance of reinforcing a child's behavior for doing things partially correct. 

Someone working with John might use a statement like this, "John, you did okay, you still called out, so remember that you just need to raise your hand, remember, it’s all about raising your hand!”  

What the reinforcement should be, "John, you did great. You raised your hand, you did what you were supposed to do, we'll work on the other part." 

And so, you see what's happening is that we're emphasizing the positive that John has done instead of emphasizing what he's done wrong. 

The child needs to internalize the feeling of having done the correct thing; the importance of what they're doing is emphasized by accentuating the part they did correctly.

This is one of those instances where a child can be reinforced effectively so that they get the intrinsic feeling, that deep gut feeling, "Oh, this is what I'm supposed to do."  It has to become habitual so that they will use the new behavior automatically, without thought, it needs to become just the way they respond.

And so, even though they're not there yet, they still know the feeling of what success looks like. So, that's my short tidbit for today,