Personalizing Visual Timetables for Each Student

In a world where every child has unique learning needs, understanding and addressing challenging behaviors is crucial. A growing body of research suggests that the key lies in identifying the root cause of the behavior and teaching an appropriate alternative replacement behavior. This approach focuses on improving various executive functioning skills, which play a significant role in a child's daily life.

One such skill is working memory, the ability to remember directions and recall them while completing a task. By improving working memory, children can decrease their reliance on adults, reducing the need to escape or avoid a task when they don't remember what to do. Goals to improve working memory include completing tasks without needing additional instructions, understanding and articulating how to use tools to help recall instructions, and demonstrating self-control of challenging behaviors if they require more help.

Another vital skill is self-control, a child's ability to control impulsivity and control one's behavior at any given time. Improving self-control can reduce challenging behaviors by reducing impulsive actions and increasing the child's ability to think things out before acting.

Task initiation, a child's ability to initiate and independently generate ideas, solve problems, and respond to tasks, is another executive functioning skill that can help reduce challenging behavior. Improving task initiation can reduce the need for prompting, 'nagging' parents, redirections, and increase the likelihood of positive reinforcements.

Planning and prioritization, a child's ability to prioritize tasks and identify the most critical step in a task, can also play a significant role. By improving planning and prioritization, children can complete tasks more quickly and efficiently, reducing frustration and confusion associated with missed deadlines and not enough time.

Emotional control, the ability to keep feelings in check, is another essential skill. Individuals who have frequent outbursts, over-reactions, violent/aggressive behavior, struggle to bounce back after a set-back, engage in high rates of negative thoughts may need increased development in this area. Goals to improve emotional control include understanding and articulating emotionally controlled vs. uncontrolled behaviors, understanding the consequences of emotionally controlled vs. uncontrolled behaviors, controlling over-reactions with fewer instances of emotional outbursts, accepting feedback from others, and bouncing back after a period of emotional outburst.

Improving self-monitoring can decrease reliance on adults for consequence-based feedback because children are able to provide their consequences for challenging behaviors. Goals to improve self-monitoring include understanding and articulating the consequences of positive and negative behaviors, completing data collection or self-observation worksheets, self-monitoring a challenging behavior and displaying a resulting decrease in problem responding, and self-monitoring skill-acquisition behavior and displaying a resulting increase in positive responding.

Shift/Tolerance of Change, the ability to tolerate unexpected changes and promote flexible thinking and adjusting to changes and unpredictability, is another executive functioning skill that commonly connects to challenging behavior. By improving tolerance of change, children can play a significant role when the function of a child's challenging behavior relates to escaping or avoiding unpredictability. Goals to improve tolerance of change include understanding and articulating why a shift is important and what it means to be flexible, completing transitions between activities, switching or alternating attention between preferred and non-preferred topics/activities, tolerating changes in routine or unpredictable circumstances without challenging behaviors.

In conclusion, addressing challenging behaviors in individuals with unique learning needs involves a holistic approach, focusing on improving various executive functioning skills. The Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development (CBCD) offers a free, data-based PDF assessment to measure 11 areas of executive functions, providing a valuable resource for parents and educators.