Students who exhibit challenging behaviours tend to have a long list of lagging skills. It is not reasonable to expect educators to address all of the lagging skills at once, so the question is:

How do you prioritise which stills to tackle first?

How do you determine what skills to develop first?

This is like asking, ‘how long is a piece of string?’. The answer will differ for each person, as people will have a different view of what is and is not a concerning behaviour. However, referring to your site’s Behaviour Support toolkit or accessing it online (via the link below) can help frame the behaviours of concern.

Behaviour Support Toolkit

Beyond this, behaviours can typically be sorted into three domains:

High-priority behaviours

· Behaviours that are a safety risk for the student or others

· Behaviours that have an impact on all learning areas

· Behaviours that impact the learning of all other peers

Medium-priority behaviours

· Behaviours that have an effect on most learning areas for the student

· Behaviours that impact social development

· Behaviours that are developmentally inappropriate

Low-priority behaviours

· Behaviours that are socially unacceptable

· Behaviours that have a minor impact, or are infrequent

· Behaviours that are inconvenient for the student, or may have compounding effects

Using your site’s behaviour plan, the Behaviour Support toolkit, and in consultation with your leadership or support staff, develop an agreed classification of what high, medium and low priority behaviours look like at your site.

It may look similar to the image below, or you may wish to be more explicit. I encourage using examples and specific behaviours or situations to contextualise the behaviours, so all stakeholders have a common understanding of how to prioritise and classify behaviour and skill development.

Take time to sort the unsolved problems of your student into high, medium and low priority categories and arrange them in order of most pressing to least pressing to intervene in.

I encourage you to write your reflections in a journal or Word document using these guiding questions:

Was it difficult to be explicit about what each level of priority looked like?

What criteria did you use to determine the priority levels?

How did you decide how to order behaviours within the priorities?