Judge: Florida Teacher Who Soaked Autistic Kid's Crayons in Hot Sauce Should Get Job Back - Yahoo!

Judge: Florida Teacher Who Soaked Autistic Kid's Crayons in Hot Sauce Should Get Job Back - Yahoo!:

I am not going to lie, my first reaction to this story was, "What is the big deal?"  Comparing a woman who forces her child to drink hot sauce versus a teacher who is trying to help a student with autism stop eating crayons by putting them in hot sauce is overdoing it a bit.

However, upon deeper ponderation (not an actual word, according to spellcheck, which is also not a word.), I realized that the special education teacher messed up in one area.  We, as teachers, are required to be behavior managers, help manage behavior of students.

The first thing we need to do is figure out what is the function of that behavior.  I cannot say for guaranteed truth that the function of the behavior of putting a crayon in your mouth is to gain sensory, but that is what my hypothesis is (and that is all that a functional behavior assessment asks, the best hypothesis).  So, the child with autism wanted sensory feeling of putting a crayon in his mouth.

Here is where my path would diverge from the teacher's path.  The teacher just wanted to stop that behavior.  While that is a good idea, it is only part of the best practice.  In order for us to be the best behavior managers that we can be, we need to replace the negative behavior that we are trying to get rid of with a positive one that still serves the same function.

Now, looking at the fact that he likes to put things in his mouth suggests to me that he has was gaining an oral sensory thing.  What other things can go in the mouth that are socially acceptable and won't hurt the student?  For one, we could give him a sucker.  But suckers have calories, so I would have to talk to his parents to see if that is an option in their minds.  Another option might have been giving him sucking candy, there are low-calorie sucking candy.  With all of these ideas, I would want to talk to the parents before I do an intervention.

So, moral of this story, great behavior management is not about only stopping one behavior, it is about replacing that one behavior that we think is socially unacceptable with a behavior that is socially acceptable and gives the student the same thing as socially unacceptable behavior.