Classroom disruptions are a sore spot for teachers of special needs students. The teacher who has to stop her lesson repeatedly because a hyperactive student is out of his seat will want him to learn to sit quietly at his desk. If an autistic student has several tantrums a day, her teacher will want her to work on behaving in class.
Disruptive habits interrupt the whole class, and habits like tantrums can pose a danger for special needs student or others around him. The IEP, or Individual Educational Plan, is one tool teachers use to improve bad habits. Unfortunately, classroom disruptions are sometimes such a problem that teachers tend to focus on just them. The special needs child suffers when habit training objectives begin to replace academic goals, instead of complementing them.
Habit Training Goals on the IEP
Habit training objectives help lay the foundation for your child’s participation in school, but they shouldn’t replace academic and skills-based IEP objectives. Try to focus on only one or two habits at a time, beginning with the most urgent. Any more than that can be overwhelming to both the student and teacher, and it emphasizes the student’s weaknesses instead of his strengths. Ask your child’s teacher to balance habit training goals with academic objectives that will be fairly easily achieved, so she can see herself making progress over the school term.
Like all IEP objectives, habit training goals should be clearly expressed. A well formulated IEP objective includes a time frame for achieving the goal, and the criteria the teacher will use to evaluate progress. If the goal for a hyperactive child is to sit quietly to work, the objective might be written like this in his IEP: “During the fall term Johnny will work on completing assigned desk work. Johnny will successfully accomplish this goal when he can work quietly on his own for at least ten minutes, eight times on ten.” If there is no time frame, or if evaluation criteria are missing from the IEP, ask the school to add these before you sign the IEP.
Using Habit Training Cards
Habit training cards can help a student track her progress. Using them can also make classroom management easier for the teacher. There are different approaches to the cards, including a system that assigns one card to each task a child is expected to accomplish. This approach could be helpful for students with attention deficits, who often forget tasks that are routine for their classmates. Another system uses cards to count warnings or infractions, or it could be modified to count the number of times a student resisted the bad habit or remembered to follow a class rule.
Important Feedback for Parents
Children with attention deficits or communication disorders aren’t always able to tell their parents how their school day went. In this case parents may rely on feedback sent home from school by a teacher or classroom aide. Habit training cards allow for a quick count of successes and challenges each school day, and if cards are keyed to the IEP objectives it is easier for everyone to see how the student is progressing with habit training. This, in turn, helps parents plan for their next meeting with teachers and for IEP updates throughout the school year.