This sounds like its going to take a lot of time and individual attention, and I have 25 kids in my class!

You do have your hands full, but nothing is more time consuming than chronic problems that go unsolved and lagging skills that don’t get taught. Coming to school to be greeted by the same old problems, day in and day out, is the largest drain on an educator’s time and patience. Fortunately, we find that most challenging kids are challenging only under predictable circumstances, so that skills can be taught and problems solved proactively.

How does consistency fit in? As educators, we are taught that consistency is crucial for good behavior management in the classroom.

Consistency usually refers to doing the same thing for everyone which in our book means giving no one individual child what they need. Doing the same thing for everyone doesn’t tend to work well when it comes to meeting the varied academic needs of the kids in a class…and it doesn’t work very well when it comes to behavior difficulties, either. The trick is figuring out which specific problems need to be solved and skills trained for each given child. The approach is the same as you would use with any other type of learning disability.

It seems like more and more children are coming to school with serious psychiatric diagnoses these days. Does this approach work for children with emotional disabilities as well as behavioral disabilities?

We typically don’t find diagnoses or categorical descriptions to be very helpful. They certainly don’t explain what an educator’s role or goal is with a child. We prefer to describe the specific skills that may be lagging and problems that are reliably precipitating a child’s worst moments to make it clear what our task is: teach those skills and solve those problems! See the Pathways Inventory for an introduction to the types of skills we are talking about.

Is there research to support this approach as a best practice with really challenging kids?

Indeed. The CPS approach has been shown to be equivalent or superior to the standard rewards and punishment approach with extremely challenging children in an outpatient setting. It has also been shown to dramatically reduce detention rates in schools, to completely eliminate the need for restraint and seclusion practices in therapeutic schools and facilities, and to send recidivism rates plummeting in juvenile detention centers.