They are often highly motivated to please teachers they like but may have difficulty relating to teachers who don t give clear commands, say too many things at once, or are inconsistent even though friendly and effusive. There should also be a school-based advocacy system for working directly with these students to understand and interpret their behaviors to school personnel and to themselves. To be successful each district should establish an FAS task force that may impact each school. By taking a life-span approach, each district can begin early intervention, achieve smooth transitions between schools and programs, and begin planning early for successful life work, with supervision appropriate to the individual. Teachers and parents can help each other to understand and monitor these children who are unusually dependent on external support to frame their own behavior.
Collaboration means that parents and schools work together for the best interest of the child.
Teachers may have a need to educate themselves and to develop and refine their own strategies with this population. By recognizing the message behind the behavior, the educator can respond more effectively to the needs of the students. Students who inappropriately express their needs are often misunderstood and ridiculed or goaded by fellow students and viewed as troublemakers by administrators and teachers. Teaching these students to shape their inappropriate behaviors into appropriate words or actions is perhaps more useful to the student s success in life than a specific math concept or lesson in grammar. Effective educators using a life-span orientation will look for ways to generalize these social and functional learning skills outside of the classroom and eventually to facilitate adaptive behavior in the workplace.