Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA, is an evidence-based approach to understanding and changing human behavior. It can be used in a home, clinic, school, and community settings. School-based ABA focuses on applying these principles in a student’s educational environment. When a student struggles to succeed at school, the family or school team may bring in an ABA practitioner for support. The practitioner collaborates with the student’s teachers, classroom assistants, school administration, and any other staff involved in the student’s day.
Some students need help learning how to learn. In other words, they need help with the foundational skills required to sit in a classroom, listen to a teacher, and follow directions. Imagine a young student walking into their classroom on Monday morning, hanging up their backpack, and sitting quietly at their desk. The teacher says, “I love how you came right in and are ready to learn!” This simple, evidence-based use of positive reinforcement can change a student’s entire educational experience.
What Is School-Based ABA Therapy?
School-based ABA therapy involves applying applied behavior analysis principles in educational settings. One of the main priorities of ABA is that treatment plans be individualized to a specific learner’s needs.
Because of this, school-based ABA varies from student to student. Over 5 years, I have both professionally consulted as a BCBA for three separate school districts and used ABA in a preschool setting as a lead teacher. I did not have two cases implemented the same way! Sometimes I consulted only the student’s teacher to provide a written plan and advice; sometimes I directly trained the teacher, classroom assistants, and a few resource teachers on how to implement the student’s plan. The only consistent factor across all cases was that the intervention team’s goal was to help the student succeed at school.
Although school-based ABA will look different for each student, there are some similarities in the structure of services in an educational setting. Goals focus on reducing challenging behavior that directly affects the student’s ability to remain in their classroom and become productive members of their school. Some students may require specific goals about their academics, like completing assignments regularly or remembering to turn in homework.
Quite a few students need to work on social interactions, and a school setting offers many opportunities to do so. The level of support a student needs will determine who is directly providing services. Students who engage in extremely challenging or complex behaviors may need more direct support from a BCBA. In contrast, students with more goals related to academic needs may benefit from a paraprofessional trained by the student’s BCBA.
In contrast to clinical settings, the educational environment requires much greater flexibility in data collection and interventions. ABA practitioners often can’t be present for entire school days at a time, let alone every single school day. We must rely on the school staff’s ability to collect accurate and valid data. It would be irresponsible and unprofessional to give a teacher with 30 students a data sheet and ask them to collect data on five separate challenging behaviors at least ten times a day. That isn’t feasible for the teacher, and one of two things will likely happen: the teacher will have too much on their plate to collect accurate data, or they will get frustrated by the unrealistic request and won’t collect any data at all.
Either result threatens the efficacy of the student’s behavior plan. Likewise, the interventions we recommend must fit into the natural ebb and flow of the student’s school environment. If not, we risk the integrity of the plan because it most likely won’t be implemented correctly- and not for lack of trying!
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Who Benefits from School-Based ABA?
A variety of students can benefit from school-based ABA. Personally, I have worked with students with autism, ADHD, developmental delays, intellectual delays, behavior challenges, and even a few with no official diagnosis at all.
Medical and educational diagnoses don’t always align. If a student is having trouble, there are multiple ways a teacher can request additional support. A student with consistent difficulties will likely have an Individualized Education Plan, or IEP. An IEP ensures that all staff share the same goals for the student and identifies any accommodations or services the student needs to fully benefit from their education. In almost all cases, the goals an ABA practitioner chooses to address can be found on the student’s IEP. Goals on both the IEP and a school-based behavior plan should make sense in an educational context. They might include a student following classroom routines, engaging in group work, or transitioning between activities without problem behavior.
How ABA Is Integrated into the School Day
An additional challenge to implementing ABA into a student’s school day is maximizing where ABA can fit into natural parts of the day. A great way to do this is by training school staff on ABA basics, including antecedents and consequences, reinforcement versus punishment, data collection, etc.
While I might be the “expert” in ABA to school staff members, the staff are the experts on the school setting and the students. If I can successfully explain a behavioral concept to a teacher, the chances are high that the teacher will naturally find times in their day when that concept would best apply.
For example, a practitioner may include a token economy in a student’s program, and the teacher may recommend using it during small-group work- the time when they work with a smaller ratio of students, they can more easily focus on making sure the student gets their tokens, and the student also usually has a challenging time.
Oftentimes, schools are more limited than home or clinic settings in the types of reinforcement they can offer or the number of tangible items they can access or purchase. Practitioners must acknowledge these limits and work within the school system, while also advocating for the best plan of care for their client. Once you have established the types of reinforcers that are available to a student, there are a few tips to collaborate with staff on reinforcement systems and behavior plans:
- Start with initial training for all staff members involved with the student.
- Ask questions! It bears repeating that the school staff are the experts in their setting and profession.
- Schedule regular team meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page. Check in informally between those meetings to see how things are going.
Let’s look at an example of how a behavior plan might work in a science class. The student you are providing services to is demonstrating appropriate, on-task behavior during independent study time. The science teacher uses a class-wide reinforcement system involving points collected on a digital platform. Since this student has a bit more trouble than other students in class, they receive points more frequently.
The paraprofessional assigned to work with the student will likely sit off to the side, observing the student and providing the least obtrusive prompts possible to help the student stay on task (pointing, holding up a visual prompt to remind them to get back on task, etc.). When the student successfully stays on task, the paraprofessional will award digital points per the student’s behavior plan, so the teacher doesn’t have another task added to their 30-student classroom. The paraprofessional helps the classroom flow continue.
The Role of Collaboration
Collaboration is important in ABA therapy in general, but it’s probably the most challenging to engage in within a school setting. There are so many moving parts that it’s often easy to forget that an entire intervention team is working to support a student.
One student receiving ABA services at school could also receive services from a Speech-Language Pathologist, a school psychologist, a push-in special education teacher, and a social worker. With all these players involved, the team must work together to share data and ideas on how best to serve the student. Even one intervention team member not fully committed to collaboration could risk the student’s ability to reach their full potential.
Sharing data and strategies helps maximize student progress. While a BCBA may not always agree with a specific strategy recommended by another professional, we can still collaborate with that professional.
I have worked on a case in which an Occupational Therapist in an educational setting instructed a paraprofessional to practice a fine motor skill quite differently from how I would have recommended. The strategy didn’t align with any evidence-based ABA procedure that I could find, so I was ethically and professionally unable to back the recommendation. What I could do was collect data on the student’s skill acquisition while the teacher put the OT’s recommendation into practice and present that data to the intervention team. It turned out the recommendation was excellent for that specific student, and we had data to back it up, all thanks to collaboration between the student’s OT and BCBA!
Common Strategies Used in School-Based ABA
There are a few evidence-based strategies that are used more in school-based ABA than others, because of their ease of use. These include, but are not limited to:
- Positive reinforcement: Usually in the form of token economies, praise, and classroom reward systems, it goes a long way toward promoting appropriate classroom behavior.
- Task analysis: Many classroom routines can be taught using a task analysis, a list of small, teachable steps derived by breaking a more complex behavior into its component parts.
- Prompt fading and error correction: These procedures allow a student to make fewer mistakes during the learning process, leading to faster skill acquisition.
- Functional communication training (FCT): Teaching a student to request what they want rather than engage in challenging behavior is highly effective for encouraging appropriate behavior at school.
- Behavior intervention plans (BIPs): As with ABA therapy in any other setting, school-based ABA depends on understanding why a behavior occurs. The written plan for intervention resulting from behavior assessment can go by different names. In a school setting, it’s usually called a “Behavior Intervention Plan,” or “BIP.”
These strategies can be adjusted to fit the student’s needs and the needs of a busy classroom. Practitioners may start with reinforcement systems a teacher already has in place and make slight changes for the student. The routines a student needs to complete can be broken down into task analyses. BCBAs use existing classroom routines rather than creating new ones.
Measuring Progress and Outcomes
Data collection in a school setting can be a different beast than other ABA settings. Practitioners use the same measurement types as in other settings: how often a behavior occurs (frequency/rate), recording what happens before and after a behavior (ABC charts), how long a student refuses to start an assignment (duration), etc. In home and clinic settings, there are fewer barriers to making sure data is collected consistently and accurately.
Collaboration with staff in a school setting allows the practitioner to understand the best method for their specific setting. For example, a teacher may not be able to collect frequency data on disruptive behavior throughout an entire school day. They have other students and responsibilities to take care of. Teachers can collect data during select times to sample the students’ behavior.
Success in school-based ABA may also differ from what success looks like for the student in other settings. At home, success for that individual might come in the form of learning to shower or recognizing that their room needs cleaning. At school, the student’s goals may focus on broader skills, such as participating in class, reducing problem behavior, and performing more independently.
Challenges and Considerations
An unfortunate characteristic of school-based ABA is that there are often more barriers to providing services. School systems, especially those in public districts, have abundantly more red tape to work around than you will find in home services or clinical services. Students are only in school for so long each day. Older students often switch classes, leaving even less time in each specific class. Many schools struggle with staffing issues, which means students who need 1:1 support may not receive it consistently or at all.
Academic goals are important, but it’s also necessary to acknowledge that they can’t be met without foundational skills in place first. It’s a delicate balance that requires remembering that a teacher is the expert in their profession and may not have experience with behavior services before.
In their environment, academic goals are typically the highest priority. It’s the ABA practitioner’s responsibility to help school staff understand that we are there to help them better help their students —not just to tell them what to do or not to tell them how to teach!
Consistent communication with teachers and families about the student’s needs helps create an opportunity for those supporting the student to share their concerns. A practitioner who is willing to admit they don’t know everything and to learn from those around them goes a long way toward opening communication with the stakeholders in a student’s life. I like to remind any stakeholder I work with, whether it’s a teacher or a parent, that I am there to work myself out of a job. Ultimately, I want them to be able to help their student or child without additional support independently.
How Parents Can Support School-Based ABA
While a student’s parents aren’t physically present at school, they still play an important role in providing school-based ABA. Consistency across settings significantly impacts progress. Especially when challenging behaviors are involved, it’s essential to make sure that all parties interacting with the child respond consistently. A child who receives reinforcement for a new skill at school, such as asking for help, but not at home, is unlikely to ask for help independently at home. They might instead engage in a problem behavior until someone helps them. Parental involvement and consistency across environments can work together to reduce this behavioral contrast.
Parents can stay engaged with their student’s school-based behavior plan by checking in with teachers, reviewing their child’s data, and reinforcing new skills at home. Parents can be strong advocates, even from afar.
Practitioners should make sure that they offer a variety of ways to involve parents: inviting them to intervention team meetings, open communication via email or phone calls, and maybe even an invitation to discreetly observe their child at school once a semester (depending on school policies, of course). I have even used a cloud storage service to store a student’s data documents so that the parent can view them in real time!
School-based ABA that excludes the parent or caregiver is neither effective nor ethical, so I encourage parents to speak up immediately when they feel left out of the process.
Final Thoughts
Though different from ABA in other settings, school-based ABA uses the same research-backed methods to help children apply skills in an educational, real-world setting. Students can learn foundational skills that help them access new environments. Beyond the benefits for students, school-based ABA can change a school’s approach to behavior reduction and skill acquisition.
A beautiful and highly anticipated result of training school staff to work with one student is that they often figure out they can apply the same principles to other students.
The fundamental goal of school-based ABA is to help students grow in confidence and independence through the collaboration of educators, clinicians, and families. When schools and ABA professionals work hand in hand, students aren’t just meeting goals; they’re helping students develop the confidence and independence that will carry them far beyond the classroom.
