Powerful and Simple Behavioral Interventions for Students with Behavioral Challenges

Presenters

• Gregory J. Benner, University of Alabama - TuscaloosaFollow

First Presenter's Highest Degree Earned

PhD

Year First Presenter's Degree Was Awarded

2003

First Presenter's Field of Study

Special Education--Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Institution Where First Presenter Received Highest Degree

University of Nebraska

First Presenter's Institution

University of Alabama

First Presenter's Brief Bio and Description of Credentials for This Presentation

Dr. Gregory J. Benner is a nationally acclaimed keynote speaker, scholar, and systems-change leader who brings unmatched energy, clarity, and inspiration to every stage. He currently serves as the Helen and Pat O’Sullivan Professor of Special Education at the University of Alabama and Executive Director of the UA Office for Strong Schools. With over 25 years of experience in education and mental health, Dr. Benner is a trusted voice for school and district leaders seeking practical, research-based strategies to transform student outcomes and educator well-being. Dr. Benner is the co-founder of the Whole Child approach, a nationally recognized framework for sustainable school transformation that aligns academic, behavioral, and social-emotional supports. He has led groundbreaking initiatives such as Tacoma Whole Child, featured in Newsweek and Edutopia’s How Learning Happens series, and now leads Tuscaloosa Whole Child, a countywide effort to improve every school through community-driven, equity-centered strategies. In 2025, he was honored with the Community Partner Award by the Tuscaloosa County School System.

Location

Verelst

Document Type

Individual Presentation

Primary Strand

Mental Health

Relevance to Primary Strand

The purpose of this presentation is to build your capacity to apply practical emotional and behavioral interventions that work for students with students exhibiting challenging behaviors. Practical interventions for youth in need of Tier II or III emotional and behavioral supports will be shown. Attendees will be able to: 1) Build social, emotional, & behavioral strengths of youth with mental health concerns; 2) create a behavioral intervention system or plan that will work in your school; and 3) easily determine what behavioral interventions will work based on student patterns of behavior, or what the behavior is communicating.

Alignment with School Improvement Plan Topics

Climate and Culture

Brief Program Description

Tired of dealing with challenging behaviors all day? Are you ready for less stress and more student engagement? The purpose of this presentation is to build your capacity to apply practical emotional and behavioral interventions that work for students with students exhibiting challenging behaviors. Practical interventions for youth in need of Tier II or III emotional and behavioral supports will be shown. Attendees will be able to: 1) Build social, emotional, & behavioral strengths of youth with mental health concerns; 2) create a behavioral intervention system or plan that will work in your school; and 3) easily determine what behavioral interventions will work based on student patterns of behavior, or what the behavior is communicating.

Summary

This session is designed for educators who want less stress and more student engagement. You’ll walk away with simple, effective behavioral interventions that are easy to implement and tailored to what students actually need. Grounded in the Whole Child framework and trauma-informed practices, these strategies help you quickly understand what behavior is communicating and intervene with purpose. You’ll explore real-world interventions used in Whole Child Schools: Check & Connect, Reset Pass, leadership, self-management, and resilience interventions that have reduced behavioral risk and improved school climate. Leave with a ready-to-use toolkit to support every student, every day.

We will walk through a we will design a decision tree called the FAST (Find Assess Select Test) Method developed by the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa County School System Whole Child partnership to make it easy for you to quickly determine the function of student behavior, and to respond appropriately before student behavior worsens.

Using the FAST Method can raise each child's performance in your classroom and increase your level of resilience.

What is the goal of a child’s behavior? Does this question stop you cold in your tracks? Depending on the decade you were completing your administrator or teacher training, you may have learned to identify a misbehavior and apply a consequence. The intent was to apply “progressive discipline.” The spread of this approach, we now know, contributed to the tragic school to prison pipeline.

Children test limits, forget their good behavior, and simply misbehave. It is vital that we learn about the goal of a child’s behavior. All behavior is purposeful. We can use an intervention to meet student needs if we understand what that behavior is saying. Along with this, it is imperative we maintain a safe and welcoming environment where our students feel like they belong and can flourish as learners. Our emotions matter a lot as well. When we are interacting with students, we can sometimes feel upset, angry, challenged or provoked. Students observe our behavior and react to us.

Here is a powerful example of how quickly a teacher determined the goal of her student’s behavior and what she did to turn it on its end and empower her student.

The FAST Method is a powerful strategy and a quick way to help us understand the function or goal of a student’s behavior and mitigate or eliminate misbehavior. At the heart of differentiation and creating an equitable school environment is when we can meet our students’ needs. Understanding these needs gives us the best shot of meeting them. You already have seen or experienced this when it works.

The figures below describe the steps in the FAST Method. The three questions help us identify not only the goal of a child’s behavior but also ways we react. It outlines strategies to address each pattern of behavior. You can find the FAST Method materials on our blog here: https://www.effectiveness.org/blog/blog4-behavior-speaks-volumes

Can you see one or two ways you can practice these proven strategies? Eliminating and heading off misbehavior is a skill set you practice and hone. It is part of the joy of teaching and working with students. After all, most of us favor improved behavior over serial punishment as a productive outcome. More information about the function-based strategies that will be demonstrated in this presentation can be found via The Whole Educator Series, a comprehensive online training for more high-impact strategies.

Evidence

Researchers of a What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Intervention Report of Functional Behavioral Assessment-based intervention (IES, 2016) found that FBA-based interventions were found to have potentially positive effects on school engagement and potentially positive effects on problem behavior for children identified with or at risk for an emotional disturbance. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) identified 17 studies of FBA-based interventions that both fall within the scope of the Children Identified with or At Risk for an Emotional Disturbance topic area and meet WWC pilot single-case design standards. Across the 34 single-case design experiments for the school engagement domain, 25 experiments (74%) documented a positive effect and 0 experiments documented a negative effect. Across the 25 single-case design experiments for the problem behavior domain, 17 experiments (68%) documented a positive effect and 0 experiments documented a negative effect. WWC concluded that Function-Based interventions should promising effectiveness on school engagement and on problem behavior.

A meta-analytic review of the impact of functional behavioral interventions on students with disabilities within inclusive school settings to address challenging behavior was conducted. Researchers identified and systematically reviewed 27 studies to determine the overall effect of FBI on challenging and appropriate behavior and whether study characteristics moderated intervention outcomes (Walker et al., 2018). Characteristics of study participants and settings, characteristics of FBI applied within the studies, and quality of the studies were explored. Overall, FBI led to improved behavior in a variety of inclusive school settings. Interventions delivered after a teacher-administered functional behavior assessment and within the context of a whole group instructional arrangement resulted in significant reductions in challenging behavior and improvements in appropriate behavior, respectively.

Researchers have also conducted a systematic review of comparing the effectiveness of functional behavior assessment-based interventions (FBAI) versus non-functional behavior assessment-based interventions (NFBAI; Jeong & Copeland, 2020). Jeong & Copeland examined 24 single-case design (SCD) studies that directly compared the effects of these intervention approaches. All of the reviewed studies reported relative effectiveness of FBAI over NFBAI in reducing problem behaviors, showing a higher percentage of behavior reduction in FBAI than NFBAI conditions.

Researchers have also examined the omnibus effect that FBA-based interventions have on problem behaviors for students with or at risk for EBD in schools using a hierarchical linear modeling meta-analytic approach to single-subject design synthesis. Based on a sample of 69 FBA studies, 146 subjects, and 206 outcome graphs, results indicated that, overall, FBA-based interventions reduced problem behavior by an average of 70.5% and that the procedure was effective across all student characteristics. Differences of effectiveness were evident between functional analysis and descriptive assessment procedures. Findings of this study suggest that FBA-based interventions for students with or at risk for EBD are an effective approach for the reduction of problem behaviors (Gage, Lewis, & Stichter, 2012).

Recent research suggests that changing educator beliefs in their own ability to promote change in student behavior occurs as a product of actual implementation (Guskey, 2002). Mitchell, Hirn, and Lewis (2017) established that changes in belief are contingent on improved student outcomes. In regard to FBA, evidence of decreases in challenging behavior resulting from the intervention can change educators’ beliefs about behavior management, and their own perceptions on their ability to positively invoke change (Samudre, Ackerman, & Allday). The trainings included in the systematic review of general educator training with functional behavior assessments by Samudre and colleagues provides models for how to instill knowledge and increase ability to conduct parts of FBA in general education settings. However, findings from this review of the training literature with general educators, and arguably much of the research presented on FBA, do not capture the actual application of FBA in schools with no researcher support (Anderson, Rodriguez, & Campbell, 2015).

References

French, D. D. (2019). Essential components of school-based intervention for students with emotional and behavioral disorders: An integration of research and practice. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 63(4), 369–381. https://doi.org/10.1080/1045988X.2019.1619510

Jeong, Y., Copeland, S.R. Comparing Functional Behavior Assessment-Based Interventions and Non-functional Behavior Assessment-Based Interventions: A Systematic Review of Outcomes and Methodological Quality of Studies. J Behav Educ 29, 1–41 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-019-09355-4

Walker, V. L., Chung, Y.-C., & Bonnet, L. K. (2018). Function-Based Intervention in Inclusive School Settings: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 20(4), 203-216. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098300717718350

Gage, N. A., Lewis, T. J., & Stichter, J. P. (2012). Functional Behavioral Assessment-Based Interventions for Students with or at Risk for Emotional and/or Behavioral Disorders in School: A Hierarchical Linear Modeling Meta-Analysis. Behavioral Disorders, 37(2), 55-77. https://doi.org/10.1177/019874291203700201

Samudre, M. D., Ackerman, K. B., & Allday, R. A. (2020). A Systematic Review of General Educator Training With Functional Behavior Assessments. Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 31(1), 3-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1044207319869938

Learning Objective 1

Build social, emotional, & behavioral strengths of youth with mental health concerns

Learning Objective 2

create a behavioral intervention system or plan that will work in your school or facility

Learning Objective 3

easily determine what behavioral interventions will work based on student patterns of behavior, or what the behavior is communicating

Start Date

6-1-2026 1:00 PM

End Date

6-1-2026 2:00 PM

Recommended Citation

Benner, Gregory J., "Powerful and Simple Behavioral Interventions for Students with Behavioral Challenges" (2026). Southeast Conference on School Climate. 11.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/secsc/2026/2026/11

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.