Intensive 2-Day Workshop: Cracking the Behavior Code: High Impact Trauma-Informed Strategies for Challenging, Oppositional and Aggressive Students – Nancy Rappaport

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You’ve seen it -a kindergartner who screams “You hate me” and pushes other kids; a student who makes a threat and may need an alternative placement; a student with a frantic fight or flight response who throws things when he is frustrated.

It’s time to optimize effective ways to understand and address students’ seemingly intractable behavior.

In this recording, Dr. Nancy Rappaport presents a comprehensive, accessible, and flexible framework for practical intervention with traumatized children and adolescents. As the author of the influential book The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students, Dr. Rappaport will share her method for understanding and improving behavior in challenging students which looks at the function of the behavior, accommodations, interventions, and nurturing responses to traumatized children.

You will also learn how to implement a comprehensive school safety assessment approach that allows schools to work with mental health professionals to prevent school violence and get students the support they need. This model allows schools to address concerns about students’ potential for targeted violence and make recommendations to enhance safety, connection, and engagement. Dr. Rappaport will have interactive case discussions that help participants practice and reinforce critical process of assessment and design a care plan.

1. Describe why traditional behavior plans of reward and consequences often do not work for students with challenging behavior.
2. List at least 6 concrete strategies for building underdeveloped skills that impact behavior.
3. Evaluate trauma’s impact on behavior and implement strategies for creating a traumasensitive environment in your school.
4. Design communication strategies for difficult conversations with families about challenging behaviors to defuse potential conflict.
5. List the 4 functions of challenging behavior and the tools to build the corresponding missing skills.
6. Demonstrate the Behavior Code approach to analyze a case and consider the appropriate interventions for a child with self-defeating disruptive behavior in school.
7. Identify key questions to ask when assessing potentially concerning behavior and determining how to intervene effectively.
8. List the components of a comprehensive safety assessment model and why they are necessary for determining student risk of acting on threat.
9. Characterize behavior that is within typical development range such as power struggles with authority and impulsivity from concerning behavior such as increasing desperation or agitation.
10. Develop concrete ways using creativity, humor and empathy to foster resilience and fuel a sustained commitment to working with challenging students.
11. Identify students who do and do not pose an imminent threat of targeted violence to themselves and others to create a safe school climate.
12. Apply key factors to maintaining one’s resilience to fuel a sustained commitment when working with challenging students.

Trauma’s Impact on Learning and Behavior

• 3 ways trauma affects learning
• 4 paradigm shifts and strategies to better engage students
• Create a trauma-sensitive classroom environment

Cracking the Behavior Code

• 4 SOS tips for challenging behavior
• Address skill deficits that often underlie challenging behavior

Building a Toolkit to Tailor Individual Education Plans

• The FAIR plan approach to deciphering behavior and developing an effective plan:
  • Determining the function of behavior
  • Accommodation to change the behavior
  • Interventions to stop a negative cycle
  • Response to an agitated student
• 4 functions of challenging behavior

Strategies for Teaching Skills & Changing Behavior

• Manage transitions and previewing
• Concrete tools, apps, and checklists
• Embedding choice in instruction
• Self-calming techniques
• Classroom-wide strategies to improve self-monitoring

Building Relationships

• Effective strategies for interacting with challenging students/parents
• Approaches to difficult interactions with role playing
• Effective responses to diffuse challenging behavior
• Breaking the cycle of power struggle – improve communication

Key Concepts on School Violence – Safe School Initiative

• School violence in context
• Critical questions for comprehensive evaluation
• Differentiate between typical vs. concerning behavior

Threat/Safety Assessment and Intervention

• Step-by-step approach to evaluating threats and intervening
• Comprehensive assessment components
• Prioritize risk factors without profiling students
• Differentiate between transient threats or substantive threats