About this Course

Reframing Challenging Behaviors is designed to help early childhood professionals reduce the rates of preschool expulsion while promoting social and emotional development. It is created for program administrators and practitioners who work directly with young children. This course will offer many strategies for supporting children’s social and emotional development and preventing challenging behaviors with the goal of reducing early childhood suspensions and expulsions. We will focus on six main strategies, one per cycle, that you’ll be able to plan and implement in your own program.

Learning Outcomes

• Define suspension and expulsion in early learning settings and describe policy recommendations to reduce the number of children expelled from those settings;
• Articulate the impact of preschool suspension and expulsion on children and families and the role implicit bias plays in practitioners’ responses to challenging behaviors;
• Implement developmentally appropriate strategies to help all children develop a sense of self-awareness, social awareness, and learn to build positive relationships with their peers;
• Plan and implement activities to proactively prevent challenging behaviors with a small group of children;
• Use ongoing observations to determine what a child is trying to communicate through their behaviors;
• Collaborate with families, community resources, and other professionals to create behavior intervention plans for children with persistent challenging behaviors; and
• Discuss program-wide policy recommendations, including connecting with community and professional resources, to reduce the rate of preschool expulsion.

These strategies are job-embedded and will need to be implemented with the preschoolers in your setting.