The Behavior Plan Failed... And Everyone’s Looking at You

The Case Of The Behavior Plan

Every investigation starts the same way. Something happened, someone wants answers. And everybody remembers the story a little differently. In this case, the first report came in at 10:17 on a Tuesday morning. The subject had left the classroom again. According to witnesses, he'd been asked to put away his Chromebook and began his assignment. Words were exchanged, a chair may or may not have been kicked, and approximately three minutes later, he appeared in the school counselor's office. Again. Now, this wasn't their first incident. Far from it. There had been meetings, emails, phone calls, strategies, and a check-in-checkout sheet that disappeared about two weeks in. And eventually someone decided it was time to get serious. So they made a behavior plan. We know this because we've recovered the document. It has a table, several goals, and a place for signatures. Very official. And yet, the incidents continued, which leaves us with two questions. Who was actually responsible and why didn't it work? Hey, school counselor, welcome back. I feel like we need one of those evidence boards today. You know the ones you see on TV with the pictures and the sticky notes and the little pieces of red string that connect everything? Because behavior plans get weird in schools. Sometimes you're asked to give input, sometimes you're invited to meetings, sometimes people want you to write the whole dang thing. And too often the behavior plan becomes when student becomes upset, let them see the school counselor, which is less of a behavior plan and more of a forwarding address. We're gonna do a little investigating today. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. So, our student is sitting in your office again. There's apparently a behavior plan somewhere in the building, and somehow the school counselor's fingerprints are all over it. Now, before we make too much of that, there's something we probably ought to figure out. Was the school counselor even supposed to be involved? And if you're already imagining yourself in this situation and thinking, nope, behavior plans aren't my job, hang on, because our first piece of evidence makes this a whole lot more complicated.

What ASCA Actually Expects

Ask us current position statement on discipline says school counselors should consult with teachers, families, administrators, and other school partners to understand and promote appropriate student behavior. It includes participation in MTSS, multi-tiered systems of support. And it specifically says school counselors collaborate with teachers and other school partners to design and implement positive behavior and intervention support plans for individual students. So we are at the scene. Behavior support absolutely can be school counseling, but notice the word ASCA uses there. Collaborate, not receive, not inherit the plan, not send them down there and let the counselor figure something out. It's collaborate. And that's consistent with school counseling research that is looked at consultation as an indirect way of supporting students. Because sometimes the most useful thing we can do for a student with a behavior concern is not pull that student out of class to talk to them. It may be helping everyone look more carefully at what's happening, where the behavior is actually happening. When does it happen? When does it not? What changes when the adults respond differently? What does the student know that the adults can't see? That's school counselor expertise brought to the problem, which is very different from bringing the problem to the school counselor. And I know somebody listening right now is thinking, hey, that's great stuff, but nobody at my school is even going to let me consult. They're just going to ask me to take the kid. Fair. You may not have enough influence on your campus yet to change that expectation, especially overnight. But you don't need permission to start taking a more consultative stance. Instead of immediately accepting a behavior handoff, you can start asking better questions. What's happening right before this? When does it not happen? And what have you noticed works? That's something we work on a lot inside of my mastermind because influence usually is not built by announcing better boundaries. It's built when people start recognizing that you can help them see problems differently. So, no, our defense can't be behavior is not school counseling, because it can be. But collaborating on a behavior plan and being told to write the behavior plan are two very different things. And that's how school counselors end up responsible for behavior outcomes that they never had the power to produce in the first

Collaborate Versus Own The Plan

place. So let's get back to our case file. We have the document, but there's something we haven't figured out yet. Who wrote this thing? And maybe more importantly, who decided they were the person that should be writing it. This is where I think we need to be careful because I don't think it's accurate to say school counselors should never write behavior plans. You can contribute to them, and you might even be the person physically putting down the team's decisions into the document. But there's a big difference between writing down the plan and being the person who figures out what the plan should actually be. Imagine somebody comes in your office and they say, Johnny keeps leaving class. Can you write him a behavior plan? Okay, based on what? When is he leaving? When does he not leave? What happens right before and after? And what do we think he's getting from leaving? And what actually makes us think that? Because you're the counselor and you're good with kids is not a behavioral assessment. And here's another complication. Schools use the words behavior plan to mean about a thousand different things. A classroom support is not the same thing as a formal individualized BIP, right? And your title alone does not necessarily mean you're qualified to write either one. But interestingly enough, your title alone doesn't necessarily mean that you're not either. It depends on what kind of a plan we're talking about, what training you have, and what your state and your district require. So before you even answer the question, can you write this behavior plan? We need a better question, which is what exactly are you asking me to write? Which leads us to the next piece of evidence. Let's say our student walks out of math class every day. Why? Maybe the work is too difficult and leaving gets him out of it. Maybe he hates being corrected in front of everybody. Maybe leaving just gets him attention. Just knowing that he leaves doesn't answer that question for us. And that's why function matters. This isn't just us getting overly technical about behavior. Research

Function Over Good Intentions

comparing interventions has generally found better outcomes when interventions are based on what the behavior is actually accomplishing, which makes sense. If I'm wrong about why the behavior keeps happening, I can absolutely create a beautiful intervention for the wrong problem. And there's something that we need to be especially aware of here. We may know this student really, really well. We may know that he gets anxious. We may know some family history. And we may be the only adult on campus that this kid trusts enough to tell the truth. That is all so important. But also, knowing the student is not the same thing as knowing the contingency. You can know why this kid is hurting and still not know why this behavior keeps working for him in the classroom. And this is where the behavior plan can turn into a very official-looking collection of reasonable ideas. Take a break, use coping skills, earn points, check in with the counselor. That's wonderful. But why those things? What specifically do we think they're going to change? And there's something else in this case that we probably should not overlook. School counselors do this too. We know coping skills and check-ins and relationship building. So when a student is struggling with behavior, that's often where our brains go. And those are great tools, but they may not be the right tools for this particular problem. And actually, let's go back to our student for a second. He gets asked to start his math assignment. Things escalate, he leaves, and three minutes later, where is he? In the counselor's office. Huh. So if leaving math gets him out of work he can't do, and three minutes later he's sitting with an adult he trusts, our counseling office may just have become part of what works when they leave math. Well, now we're in the case file. That doesn't mean we stop supporting the kid, and it doesn't mean our relationship with them is the problem, but it does mean we'd better understand what's happening around the behavior before we decide what kind of support is actually going to help. Because a good behavior plan isn't just a list of things adults can try. It's supposed to connect what we know about the behavior to what we're going to change. So at this point in our investigation, we had a pretty reasonable theory. Maybe the plan didn't work because it wasn't a very good plan.

The Missing Piece Is Fidelity

Case almost solved. Except then we found something else. In 2024, researchers published an analysis of actual functional behavior assessments and behavior intervention plans being used in schools. These were not hypothetical plans or grad school assignments. These were the real deal. They examined 135 completed FBAs and 129 BIPs submitted from 13 school districts in one state. And overall, the technical adequacy scores landed at only about 40 to 50 percent of the possible components. So already the data's not fabulous. But then it got worse. The researchers looked at whether the behavior intervention plans specified how implementation fidelity would be measured. In other words, how are we going to know whether people actually do the plan? 92% scored zero on that item. 92%. So let's go back to our evidence. We found the student, we found the behavior, we found the intervention, we found the document. There's just one thing we're having a little trouble locating. Evidence that anybody checked whether the adults actually did it. Because when a behavior plan doesn't work, who tends to hear about it? He's still doing it. We already tried a behavior plan. Maybe he needs to see you more. Okay, but did we actually try the plan? Did we respond the way we said we would? Did we teach the replacement behavior? Did we reinforce that? Did we make environmental changes? And did we do any of this consistently enough to know whether or not it actually worked? If the only person whose behavior we're monitoring is the child, I'm not sure we understand how behavior plans work. That's not me being snippy. Without implementation data, we can't really know why an intervention failed. Maybe we were wrong about what was driving the behavior. Maybe the intervention wasn't a good match. Or maybe nobody did it consistently enough for us to even know. Those are three very different conclusions. But only one of them requires almost no investigation whatsoever. The counselor's plan didn't work. That's pretty convenient, isn't it? And no, I'm not suggesting that your faculty got together somewhere and conspired to pin all the behavior on you. It's usually a lot less dramatic than that. But the student is still struggling. Everybody's frustrated. Something was supposed to work and it didn't. And once that plan has somebody's name attached to it, it's really easy for the plan didn't work to become their plan didn't work. And that's exactly why implementation matters. Because if we're going to figure out what actually happened, we have to get everybody's name off the top of that page for a minute and look at the whole thing. What did the adults do? What did we follow through on? What changed around the student and what didn't? And did anything any of us were doing accidentally make the behavior more likely to happen again? It's not about spreading the blame around more evenly. It's about figuring out whether that plan ever had a fair chance to work. Which leads us to what may be the most important piece of evidence in

Adults Are Part Of The Plan

this whole case. A behavior plan is not something you hand to the adults who work with the student. The adults who work with the student are part of the behavior plan. And yes, this includes us. If the adults aren't involved in creating it, implementing it, and figuring out whether it's working, we don't have much of a plan. We have a document. And if you're thinking, okay, but what do I actually do the next time somebody asks me to help write one of these things?

Five Questions Before You Say Yes

I made you something for exactly that. It's called Before You Write the Behavior Plan. It is a one-page checklist with the questions that we're about to walk through, plus some really good resources if you need to dig deeper into function-based behavior planning. You can grab it free at schoolforschoolcounselors.com/slash plan, and I'll put that link in the show notes as well. For right now, though, there are five things I'd want to know before I said yes to anything. First, what kind of plan are we talking about? A classroom support, a tier two intervention, a formal BIP? Let's make sure we're talking about the same thing. Second, what do we actually know about the behavior and what's happening around it? Not he's disrespectful or she does this constantly. What does the student actually do? When do they do it and when don't they? What happens before and after? And what data do we have? Third, what exactly am I being asked to contribute? Am I consulting? Am I providing student perspective? Am I teaching a skill? Am I helping the team think through the data? Am I writing down the decisions the team has already made? Or am I being asked to figure out the behavior, design the intervention, and then become responsible for whether it works? Those are all very different asks. Fourth, who's actually doing this plan and how do we know they did it? Ask that before the plan fails. Because you don't want to end up being the scapegoat in this situation. And fifth, what part of this problem am I actually qualified to help solve? The point isn't to get out of anything, it's to stop confusing contribution with ownership and to get a whole lot clearer about what we're actually contributing. And listen, that's a lot to remember the next time somebody walks in your office and says, Hey, can you help with this behavior plan? So don't try. Remember, I put all five questions into that before you write the behavior plan PDF. And you can grab it right now at schoolforschoolcounselors.com slash plan. I'll have the link waiting for you in the show description as well.

The Real Intervention And Closing

So let's close this file out. Tuesday morning, 1017 a.m. Chromebook closed, words exchanged, chair allegedly kicked. Three minutes later, our student is sitting in the counselor's office. And somewhere else in the building, there's a behavior plan. We know because we've seen it. Goals, signatures, very official, and we've spent this whole investigation asking who was responsible for that plan. But maybe that's where we got the case wrong. Because the document was never the intervention. The intervention was what happened at 1017, what the adults did, what the student had been taught to do instead, what changed in the environment, and what happened the next time. You can assign one person to write a document, but you cannot assign one person to carry out a plan that requires everybody else. So maybe the mystery was never who wrote the behavior plan. Maybe it was whether there ever really was one. Take care.