Supporting Behavior for School Success: A Step-by-Step Guide to Key Strategies

Supporting Behaviour for School Success: A step-by-step guide to key strategies by Kathleen Lynne Lane, Holly Mariah Menzies, Robin Parks Ennis, and Wendy Peia Oakes New York, New York: The Guilford Press, 2015, 242 Pages ISBN: 978-1-4625-2139-5 (paperback) Supporting Behaviour for School Success: A step-by-step guide to key strategies is a book that offers a clear, structured presentation of classic yet effective teaching practices at a time when schools are searching for ways to improve student behaviour within the era of inclusive education. The authors of this book have put together an array of what is referred to in the field as 'best practices' in classroom management and instruction, presented in a format that allows the novice teacher as well as the experienced veteran to apply the suggestions with relative ease. Lane, Menzies, Ennis, and Oakes have taken a variety of established teaching practices and framed them effectively within a systems-level approach to serving all students. Drawing upon current trends in educational literature, the authors promote the need for collaboration and school-wide positive behaviour supports to enable access to learning for all students. The book highlights the need for multi-tiered support systems designed to offer a range or 'continuum' of interventions that are drawn upon according to an individual student's needs. Lane et al. suggest that the array of practices within their book can be integrated into a multi-tiered approach to behaviour management as Tier I, and in some instances, Tier II level interventions. The authors explore various comprehensive, integrated three-tiered (CI3T) models of prevention, emphasizing the work of Sugai (2013) and his vision of the benefits of well-designed, integrated models of positive behaviour interventions grounded in data-informed decision making. Citing a variety of empirical studies and grounding each of the suggested instructional practices effectively within this breadth of evidence, the book provides a high level of credibility to these authors and their stance on supporting behaviour for all students in school settings. Supporting Behaviour for School Success: A step-by-step guide to key strategies begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of CI3T models of prevention as they pertain to educational approaches to behaviour management, then delves into specific 'best practices' in teaching and classroom management that the authors propose are mainly low-intensity strategies, or Tier I interventions. A full chapter discusses each of the seven different strategy domains that the authors endorse: increasing opportunities to respond, behaviour-specific praise, active supervision, instructional feedback, high-probability request sequences, recorrection, and instructional choice. Despite the fact that none of these individual topics is new or innovative in reference to teaching or behaviour management, this book is unique in that it situates these strategies in a multi-tiered context and also includes clearly defined steps to implement each strategy. As each chapter begins, the authors thoughtfully define what the particular strategy is, and then explain why it is considered to be effective, pairing their explanation with supportive research. Each chapter also includes an implementation checklist as well as a hypothetical illustration of how these steps can be used within a CI3T context. Furthermore, the authors have included a section in each chapter that helps those using the strategy determine how well it is working, an important consideration in this era of accountability and data-driven decision making procedures. Of note in each chapter is the authors' description of the strategies, skillfully situated within 'real' scenarios, allowing the reader to readily envision each strategy in practice. …