Understanding Functional Behavior and Discipline: The Legally Blind Justice Podcast: Episode 37

Legally Blind Justice Podcast: Understanding Functional Behavior and Discipline

Join host Tim Markley and the special education advocacy team at K Altman Law as they explore the critical role of Functional Behavior Assessments (FBAs) and Behavior Intervention Plans (BIPs) in supporting students and promoting positive behavioral change. Featuring special guest Michelle Guffey from New Horizons Educational Group, this rebroadcast of an insightful webinar dives into the FBA process, legal rights, effective interventions, and the latest DOE guidance.

Learn how data-driven strategies can help address challenging behaviors, reduce disciplinary actions, and ensure schools provide the necessary support for all students. Whether you're a parent, educator, or advocate, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help navigate the complexities of special education and student discipline.

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Transcript: The follow transcript is autogenerated and may contain transcription errors.

 

 Tim Markley (00:20)

Welcome to the Legally Blind Justice podcast. I'm your host, Tim Markley. In this episode, we're going to talk about functional behavior and its role in discipline. This will be a rebroadcast of a webinar held by our special education team in which they were joined by Michelle Guffey of the New Horizons Education Group. So sit back and enjoy the podcast.

 

Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Loteck. I'm one of the special education advocates here at K Altman Law. And today we're going to be doing a webinar on functional behavioral assessments and behavior intervention plans. We also have a guest, Michelle Goofy. She's from New Horizons Educational Group and she's going to be joining with us and presenting as well. Today we're going to discuss functional behavior assessments and behavior intervention plans and the new DOE guidance on those. All right, Sarah, take it away.

 

Okay, so first as an introduction, today we're going to be presenting, it's going to be Taylor Ruiz, who is our Director of Special Education Advocacy here at K. Altman Law. And I already introduced myself, Loteck, I'm one of the Special Education Advocates. And then Michelle is joining us from New Horizons Educational Group. So we will be presenting together to go over the FBA process and behavior intervention plans.

 

So I'm going to start by talking about the purpose of a functional behavioral assessment. So a definition is that an FBA is a structured process used to identify the cause of a student's behavior. It helps to determine the function of the behavior and the factors that maintain it. So the goal of an FBA is to look beyond just the behavior itself and really figure out what's driving it and why schools conduct FBAs.

So schools conduct FBAs to really understand and support student success rather than resorting to discipline. So FBAs are best practice and allow us to take a proactive and data-driven approach to behavior. And it helps us identify root cause and develop effective interventions. The FBI lets us answer three key questions. What does the behavior look like? When and where does it happen?

And what is the function or the purpose of the behavior? So again, I went over what actually a functional behavioral analysis is, why we conduct it. Again, it's to help better understand a student's behavior, to really figure out the function of the behavior. How we do that? We do that by observing and taking really clear cut data on where the behavior is happening, the function of the behavior.

And then again, when the behavior is happening within that school day. Okay, so the FBA process. So in order to get the process started, we need to identify the behavior. So what is the actual challenging behavior that we want to study and analyze? We need to gather the data through observations, teacher reports, interviews, and ideally you wanna observe that student across settings, including different classes and times of the day.

We need to analyze patterns and triggers. We usually do that through an ABC analysis, which is where we look at the antecedent, what's happening before the behavior, the behavior itself, and the consequence. And then we develop a hypothesis about why the behavior occurs. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about who should conduct an FBA and when it's warranted. So an FBA is conducted by a trained professional, usually a behavior specialist or a school psychologist.

And it's necessary when a student's behavior interferes with their learning or their learning of other students, or if it's a result of a disciplinary action. And I just want to note something really important is that an FBA does not require an IEP. So a ch