Positive Behavior Support Individualized Planning

Person-Centered Planning

The first step in an individualized positive behavior support process at Tier 3 prevention level is to set up a person-centered plan. A person-centered plan is used to identify the important routines, activities, and people that a person associates with increased enjoyment, and positive quality of life. The person-centered planning process is driven by the person and includes a team of individuals including family, friends, caregivers, and other community members. Together, the person and his team meet to create a plan for achieving a meaningful and rewarding life. Person-centered planning should be put in place before more intensive individual positive support plans are considered. This link describes person-centered planning from a person-centered plan facilitator.

Functional Behavioral Assessment

Once the person-centered plan has been established, a functional behavioral assessment process begins. A functional behavioral assessment is used to gather information about the reasons why a challenging behavior is occurring. The functional behavioral assessment includes observations, interviews, record reviews, and surveys that can help the team better understand the reasons why challenging behaviors are occurring. The goal of this process is to identify the function maintaining the challenging behavior. The function maintaining a behavior falls into four different categories including 1) escape from unpleasant situations, people, or things, 2) to obtain access to important items, people, or places, 3) signaling a need for attention from others, and 4) due to internal, physiological reasons.

Function-Based Interventions

The information gathered during a functional behavioral assessment is used by a person and her team to identify strategies that will directly address the function of a challenging behavior. For example, sometimes challenging behaviors will communicate that a person wants to escape from an unpleasant activity. Other individuals close to the person will withdraw their requests whenever challenging behaviors occur. Over time, challenging behavior serves to communicate that the person engaging in challenging behavior does not want to be involved in a particular task. A function-based intervention in this scenario involves prompting the person to communicate that they want to end a task before their challenging behavior escalates. Changes may be made to the task making the activity easier, more enjoyable, or more meaningful for the person based on information gathered from person-centered planning and the functional behavioral assessment process. Interventions used in a positive behavior support plan focus on making challenging behavior irrelevant and less effective than positive social interactions with other people.

For more information on Positive Behavior Support visit Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports Minnesota (PBISMN) and the Association for Positive Behavior Support (APBS):