Identifying Reasons for Problem Behaviors

So you have resolved all of the teacher and curricula factors that may be contributing to student misbehavior.  Those were the easy ones to fix.  Now we have to look into this amazingly complicated being that is our student and try to figure out what is holding them back from being the best they can be.  My colleagues and I have discussed how magical it would be if we could just plug our students into a machine and get a printout of everything that is going on in their mind so we would know what to do about it.
Unfortunately, there is no magical machine that does that for us, and we have to do a lot of detective work and analyzing to figure out what factors we have to address our interventions at.  According to Howard Knoff, there are seven high-hit reasons that students demonstrate problem behaviors.  Those reasons really fall into three categories.  The first one is skill-based.  This could mean that the student simply has not mastered the behavior skill that we want them to demonstrate.  Maybe they are working on it, but they just aren't mastering it as quickly as their peers.  Maybe they have mastered the skill in some settings, but haven't been able to transfer it to other situations.  It's possible that they have mastered the skill, but their current emotions are getting in the way of them demonstrating it.  Finally, they may have mastered the skill, but they are simply choosing not to demonstrate it because they are not motivated to do so.  Another reason is inconsistency.  This could apply to any of the mentioned skill factors.  If we can identify and address an inconsistency, especially in how we are motivating our students to demonstrate appropriate behaviors, we may find our problem.  The final reason that students demonstrate problem behaviors is special situations that occur in common areas of the school, peer relationships, and events outside of school.
Identifying which of these high-hit reasons is most affecting your student may take some time and effort initially, but will save you a lot of time down the road that you may have wasted on interventions that addressed only the behavior and not the reason behind it.

Knoff, H. (Course Lecture). (2015). Interventions for Behaviorally Challenging Students: Module 2 [video]. American College of Education. Retrieved from http://ace.edu