ABSTRACT
This chapter presents specific recommendations and guidelines to design and implement effective behavior intervention plans that are most likely to promote emotional and behavioral health in children with challenging behaviors in the classroom. The three step process of addressing challenging behaviors are: Pay positive attention to all children, Build a naturally positively reinforcing classroom, Design a behavior intervention plan. All children, regardless of biological or developmental characteristics, need attention, validation, and acknowledgment. The literature related to praise for academic and developmental learning is mostly related to the research conducted by Dweck. Differential Attention (DA) is an effective method for teaching the child that his challenging behavior is not the way to get attention from adults. Differential Attention is a modified version of Differential Reinforcement of Other behavior (DRO) in which the adult ignores the child's inappropriate behavior when it occurs, but engages with the child immediately after the inappropriate behavior stops.
