Creative Daily Scheduling: A Nonintrusive Approach to Challenging Behaviors in Community Residences

Abstract

How a person's day is organized contributes to his or her quality of life. Some people choose to go about their day in a highly structured manner, whereas others choose to function in a more unplanned fashion. Many residential programs, however, do not take these types of life-style preferences into consideration when designing daily activity or routine schedules. Guidelines are presented for individualizing each person's daily schedule of routines to reflect better his or her preferred lifestyle. In so doing, increased control over daily life will be offered to each person. Manipulation of an individual's daily routine also represents a nonintrusive, multicomponent strategy for reducing challenging behaviors and increasing meaningful participation in daily life. The routine schedule offers a method of incorporating information from functional analysis into natural contexts across the day. Four dimensions are presented that can be systematically manipulated as independent variables to address challenging behavior in community residences. Examples are presented to demonstrate the application of schedule manipulations.

Active support: A critical review and commentary

“…Such schedules can also be effective in improving engagement and reducing problematic behaviours among people on the autistic spectrum (Clarke, Dunlap, & Vaughan, 1999;Krantz, MacDuff, & MacClannahan, 1993). Creative activity scheduling is considered to be a key component of Positive Behaviour Support, where it is conceptualised as a primary procedure for preventing challenging behaviour (Brown, 1991;Mesibov, Browder, & Kirkland, 2002). Systems for planning or organising activities have also been identified as a significant predictor of resident engagement Hatton et al, 1996).…”

Reducing challenging behaviour of adults with intellectual disabilities in supported accommodation: A cluster randomized controlled trial of setting-wide positive behaviour support

“…These include, amongst others, opportunities for choice (e.g., Dyer, Dunlap, & Winterling, 1990), predictable environments (e.g., Flannery & Horner, 1994), positive social interactions (e.g., Magito-McLaughlin & Carr, 2005), more independent functioning (e.g., O'Reilly, Cannella, Sigafoos, & Lancioni, 2006) and personalised routines and activities (e.g., Brown, 1991). Such an approach has been endorsed by the NICE guidelines on challenging behaviour (Murphy, 2017;NICE Guidelines, 2015) in which the term "capable environment" is used to summarise the characteristics of support that may reduce the risk of challenging behaviour.…”

An Examination of the Effects of a Classroom Activity Schedule on Levels of Self-Injury and Engagement for a Child with Severe Autism

“…Indeed, the use of schedules has been associated with increases in engagement, maintenance and generalization of responding, as well as reductions in challenging behavior (e.g., MacDuff, Krantz, & McClannahan, 1993;Lalli, Casey, Goh, & Merlino, 1994). One potential limitation of this strategy is that not all students will have the ability to understand and follow a schedule (Brown, 1991). With such students we may need to examine ways to determine an optimal schedule and then evaluate the effects of such schedules on various parameters of responding such as engagement and challenging behavior.…”