Planning Transitions to Prevent Challenging Behavior - Essay Example

There are so many group care settings that have risen in the last decade like child care, Head Start, and preschools; thus there is also an increased pressure in documenting the children’s social and academic outcomes like children with challenging behavior.

Apart from the stated reasons above, the pupils might also exhibit challenging behavior because of other reasons like disabilities (autism, for example), limited communication from the adult to the pupil, limited cognitive and emotional skills, giving too many directions (and the child could not follow), differently carried routines and expectations, or they may want to continue what they are doing and refuse to do the next objective. Now these challenging behavior occur because of the program staff structure, schedule, and implementation of transitions – the transitions may be too long and the children spend a lot of time waiting for nothing to do, or just because of the instructions about the things to do aren’t clear.

To minimize transitions in a class, teachers should plan well and modify certain parts of the schedule so that the children would not be idle and be engaged in interesting activities. The trick in keeping challenging behavior minimal is to let the children know the expectations in a transition; this may require modeling by role-playing or by pictures/visual cues. For example, in hand washing, the teacher may use a pupil as a model for other pupils and use a step-by-step diagram to guide the children in washing their hands. These transitions also help foster social skills and emotional development as there is constant communication between students and the teacher (interactivity). However, there are some children who still continue to have challenging behavior. This may call for individualized transition strategies.

            When teachers find out and evaluated these transitions, they can now devise strategies to help children deal with transitions easily. This will lead to fun, successful and productive times for both the teachers and the students.