Fredda Brown

Self-Determination for Individuals with the Most Severe Disabilities: Moving beyond Chimera:

Individuals with the most severe disabilities may be unsuccessful in effecting changes in their environment for various reasons. Because of limitations in cognitive and expressive language skills, their attempts at communicating may be overlooked or misunderstood, or may be knowingly or inadvertently obstructed. Consequently, self-determination is often dependent on our interpretation of what people with the most severe disabilities are communicating. This article explores the implications of making interpretations, the need for such interpretations, and the dangers. Current progress in supporting and promoting self-determination are acknowledged. It is suggested that although these procedures may be intended to increase self-determination, they do not automatically do so. In fact, they may function to limit self-determination. Strategies and methodologies must be critically evaluated to ensure that such efforts reflect the tenets and spirit of self-determination.

Creative Daily Scheduling: A Nonintrusive Approach to Challenging Behaviors in Community Residences

How a persons day is organized contributes to his or her quality of life. Some people choose to go about their day in a highly structured manner, whereas others choose to function in a more unplanned fashion. Many residential programs, however, do not take these types of life-style preferences into consideration when designing daily activity or routine schedules. Guidelines are presented for individualizing each persons daily schedule of routines to reflect better his or her preferred lifestyle. In so doing, increased control over daily life will be offered to each person. Manipulation of an individuals daily routine also represents a nonintrusive, multicomponent strategy for reducing challenging behaviors and increasing meaningful participation in daily life. The routine schedule offers a method of incorporating information from functional analysis into natural contexts across the day. Four dimensions are presented that can be systematically manipulated as independent variables to address challenging behavior in community residences. Examples are presented to demonstrate the application of schedule manipulations.

Positive Behavior Support: A Proposal for Updating and Refining the Definition

Positive behavior support (PBS) has been a dynamic and growing enterprise for more than 25 years. During this period, PBS has expanded applications across a wide range of populations and multiple levels of implementation. As a result, there have been understandable inconsistencies and confusion regarding the definition of PBS. In this essay, we offer an updated and unified definition. We provide a brief historical perspective and describe a process for developing a proposed definition. We also discuss the rationale for key elements of the definition.

Guidelines for Conducting Socially Valid Systematic Preference Assessments

Systematic preference assessment is the process of presenting sampling trials and observing the persons response. The response to those items is then interpreted as an indicator of preference. The empirical research on systematic preference assessment has greatly advanced the fields understanding of how to identify the preferences of individuals with nonsymbolic and limited symbolic communication skills. The purpose of this paper is to translate this research into guidelines for planning systematic preference assessments that strive to reduce the risk of missing or misinterpreting the persons preferences, as well as increase the social validity of the process and outcomes. We present four guiding questions for practitioners to plan preference assessments: (a) What will be offered? (b) When and where will sampling opportunities take place? (c) Who will present the sampling options? and (d) How will sampling options be presented?

Education and Treatment Needs of Students with Profound, Multiply Handicapping, and Medically Fragile Conditions: A Survey of Teachers' Perceptions

This investigation assessed perceptions of special educators regarding the education and treatment needs of students with profound or multiple handicaps or medically fragile conditions. A survey was distributed nationally to 500 special educators chosen randomly from the membership list of The Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps. The survey sought to: (a) identify what educators perceived to be important variables in delivering quality educational programs, (b) determine current classroom practices, and (c) identify what educators perceived to be strengths and weaknesses of their university teacher training programs. A total of 148 surveys were returned (29.6%) and 123 were included in the final data analysis. Results indicate that respondents did not feel adequately trained by university teacher training programs to work with many individuals having profoundly handicapping conditions. Some teachers did not include certain curricular areas (e.g., vocational skills, community living skills) because they felt they would not benefit students. For a variety of reasons, instructional techniques such as integration strategies, application of technology, and use of van Dijk, neurodevelopmental, and Piagetian procedures also are not implemented by some teachers. In general, as class size and the proportion of students with profound disabilities increases, teachers find implementation of some best practices to be less important.

Delineating Functional Competencies: A Component Model

This article describes a model for representing functional competencies in students with disabilities. Although strategies exist to identify skills and activities that are functional for students with severe handicaps, these strategies provide relatively little information on how to separate the functional skills into meaningful component parts that represent the range of behaviors needed in the natural environment. Data are presented to illustrate the narrow range of behaviors included in task analyses in current literature on skill acquisition. The Component Model of Functional Life Routines provides a systematic alternate approach to delineating the behaviors required in natural environments.

The Individualized Curriculum Sequencing Model (III): Small Group Instruction

This article extends the Individual Curriculum Sequence (ICS) model to small group instruction. Emphasis is placed on teaching opportunities which are unique to the group situation, including control of motivational variables, facilitation of observational learning, and enhancement of generalization. The ICS group model distinguishes between, and combines, intrasequential and intersequential structures. Three approaches to organizing the content of the group are discussed to facilitate group cohesiveness as well as procedures to coordinate a heterogenous group of students. A variety of examples of how data can be recorded for program monitoring and evaluations are presented.

The Individualized Curriculum Sequencing Model (II): A Teaching Strategy for Severely Handicapped Students.

Rationale and related research are presented to support an individual curriculum sequence (ICS) model for the education and training of severely/multiply handicapped persons. The article discusses several major components of the ICS model: translating assessment into educational objectives, selecting materials for teaching skills, and the clustering of trials. A sample program is provided to illustrate the conceptual basis and implementation of the ICS model in classrooms for severely/multiply handicapped students.

Personal Paradigm Shifts in PBS Experts: Perceptions of Treatment Acceptability of Decelerative Consequence-Based Behavioral Procedures.

Positive Behavior Supports (PBS) experts were surveyed to examine their perceptions of the treatment acceptability of commonly used decelerative consequence-based behavioral procedures. Findings illuminate the paradigm shifts that have occurred over the course of the careers of PBS experts and the factors that have contributed to these personal paradigm shifts. Many of the decelerative consequence-based procedures once used by respondents are no longer perceived by them to be acceptable. A small percentage of experts indicated that they still might use the full range of decelerative techniques under certain circumstances. The need for more training and ideological change were perceived to be the greatest challenges currently facing the field. Experts also indicated that involvement in PBS has broadened their understanding of applied behavior analysis, the function of behavior, antecedents, quality of life, and self-determination issues facing people with disabilities. The implications of the findings for current and future PBS researchers and practitioners are discussed.

School-Wide Positive Behavior Support Initiatives and Students with Severe Disabilities: A Time for Reflection

As we reflect on the national growth of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) initiatives, we are heartened by the idea that the same behavioral technology and philosophical orientation that have made such an impact on the lives of individuals with severe disabilities, from all appearances, may benefit a broader population of students, including those who have not been identified as having disabilities, those who, for a variety of reasons, are at risk for school failure, and those across the full spectrum of disabilities. We would expect that there will be positive outcomes for SWPBSVafter all, individual-level positive behavior support (PBS) is a technology based on good science and is grounded on a set of personal values focused on the respect and value of all people (Knoster, Anderson, Carr, Dunlap, &Horner, 2003; Scotti &Kennedy, 2000). Freeman et al. (2006) and Sailor, Zuna, Choi, McCart, and Thomas (2006) provide examples of successful school-wide efforts, and the literature base is increasing. Yet, we remain somewhat cautiousVnot about the positive impact on the broader population that we expect to see, but about the yet-to-be-determined ramifications and impact of SWPBS on students with severe disabilities. SWPBS is a relatively new application of PBS, and we are seeing rapid growth and adoption; but as some of the contributors to this issue have suggested, Bthe data are not in.[ As such, it is critical that we take the time to reflect and consider the path of this fast-moving trajectory or, as Vaughn (2006) describes it, tsunami. But any new approach or application will create not only action but also reaction. As SWPBS continues its evolution, it appears that those of us involved in the lives of individuals with severe disabilities have a lot to sayVand this special issue provides a venue. The articles that are contained in this special issue all point to the promise of the application of PBS to school systems, and it is hard to imagine an initiative that has seen such sweeping implementation in so short a time. However, along with praise for the application of our strong technology and philosophical orientation to the broader school population, most of these articles express some concerns on the place (i.e., the inclusion) of students with severe disabilities in the movement. Many of us are cautious, as we have already learned from inclusion efforts across the country that the acceptance of the Bshaping of inclusion[ (i.e., reinforcement of successive approximations to include all children) has allowed the terminal goal of including all students within their neighborhood schools to remain allusive. In other words, although educators praise, reinforce, and celebrate the primitive steps toward the approximation of full inclusion, students with severe disabilities remain excluded and waiting on the sidelines (Brown & Michaels, 2003). We want to assure that SWPBS, in its quest for broad-based legitimacy, does not inadvertently overlook or minimize the support needs of the very population of students who originally challenged us to examine and reconceptualize communication and the functions of behavior in new life-affirming, person-centered ways. We would like to reflect on two issues: (a) the sequence with which schools implement SWPBS (or the Bassumption of verticality[) and (b) the potential for SWPBS to legitimize a new continuum and new labels for students.