Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Brendan Keenan
Children with challenging behaviors have been assigned many different labels, including naughty, unmotivated, willful, disrespectful…
the list goes on. In schools, students who display challenging behaviors test the patience of the faculty, administration, and their peers.
Exclusionary discipline practices have stigmatized and isolated these students, and these practices have provided little information
about the root cause of the challenging behaviors. The movement towards classroom-based, teacher-driven skill building in the area
of emotional learning represents a significant paradigm shift for many teachers. At Bagnall Elementary School in Groveland,
Massachusetts, we are seeing improvements in student behavior as we begin to utilize the Assessment of Lagging Skills and
Unsolved Problems (ALSUP), the assessment component of Dr. Ross Greene’s Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) model.
“Go to the office!” This is a command that everyone has heard with great frequency in schools. This approach for
addressing challenging student behaviors often strains the relationship between the teacher and student, embarrasses
the student, and gives the student no information about how to improve. When the student arrives at the principal’s
office, they are often angry and crying, and begging not to return to class. Now we have an additional problem to
solve: rebuilding the relationship between student and teacher. Similarly, yelling at and shaming students who are
“misbehaving” can create the illusion of behavioral improvement when the child stops the problematic behavior, at
least for the moment. However, all of these approaches do not tell us anything about underlying causes.
Many schools are abandoning the ineffective disciplinary practices of the past and moving towards a collaborative
approach to involving the student him/herself in developing a plan. At Bagnall Elementary, faculty and staff have
recently been trained on the use of the ALSUP. The training represented a new framework for many faculty members
who had prior experiences with approaches such as “zero tolerance” and progressive discipline. Despite the paradigm
shift, we are experiencing some initial successes. Rather than focusing on identifying a student’s challenging
behavior, the ALSUP instead helps caregivers identify the problems that are causing those behaviors, along with the
lagging skills that are contributing to those problems. This sets the stage for the collaborative and proactive solving of
A kindergarten teacher at Bagnall, Shannon Campbell, has experienced some initial success with using the ALSUP.
She has collaborated with the school psychologist, Kathy Parker, to complete the ALSUP for a few students, and it has
had a positive impact for those students as well as other students. The ALSUP served as a helpful guide for focusing
the conversation about behaviorally challenging students to be solution-focused, rather than purely based on deficits
or weaknesses. Shannon said, “The process helped me focus on the ‘why’ of a student’s presenting behavior. It shifted
my focus from eliminating the behavior to helping the child learn the skills he needs to be successful.” This shift in
thinking, although subtle at first glance, is actually significant, and it opens up many more possible inroads to solving
Once the lagging skills were identified, Shannon and Kathy worked together to design whole class lessons to teach the
skills identified in the ALSUP. The skills for the identified students were lagging for most students to varying degrees.
The related lessons, which involved role-playing and the use of targeted language aimed at skill-building, helped to
promote positive behavior for all students in the class. Shannon remarked, “I was amazed by the results I observed
after completing the ALSUP and shifting my focus from eliminating the behavior to solving problems and teaching
lagging skills. It took a few weeks to begin implementing the lessons and to infuse the new language, but the time
The positive impact went beyond behavior, and positive changes were noted for academic outcomes as well. Shannon
commented, “The behavior of the identified students improved immensely, but one thing I didn’t expect was how their
ability to learn was transformed. They made huge academic gains in a short period of time since we changed our
‘when’ of the students’ behavior, which helped us decide what explicit instruction should be emphasized to further
develop and build on skill development and strategies. Using the ALSUP takes a little bit of time, but I have found that
it will reduce the amount of time spent on trial and error approaches.”
Sensory/motor difficulties
Finally, the collaborative component of the ALSUP can help to involve students and their families in the development
of interventions and strategies. Kathy said, “I have found that the collaborative approach of involving the student,
faculty, and parents together in brainstorming solutions to arrive at a plan of action has helped students to become
more invested in and responsible for their behavior, and it is a much more proactive approach when compared to
traditional approaches.”
We are experiencing some initial successes with the use of the ALSUP and CPS. The simple, one-page instrument is
free and available for use by parents and educators to provide a lens through which to view challenging student
behaviors in order to make strategic decisions about how best to support problem solving and skill development of our
students.