Field Trippin' with Josh Justice

I really enjoyed listening to Josh speak about his experiences with children who have EBD. Even though I am a special education major, I feel as if I have not had a lot of experiences with children who have this type of disability. The thing that I found most interesting was that the children are weened from all of their medications when they enter the program. I have always though that physicians were way too quick in labeling a child with a disorder and putting them on numerous medicines for it. I think that starting from baseline and seeing how the child acts without medication is a great idea. It allows you to start fresh and get the child what they really need to have a successful life. I also really enjoyed the inventive ideas he had for stopping behaviors, such as when he took the girl's shoes away. It is something that is small and not harmful, but it can have a big impact. I hope that with my future students I can find little tricks such as this to help extinguish their behaviors. I also really liked how Josh determines the function of behaviors and stops the behavior from reaching the function. This is an important aspect of behavior that a lot of educators and parents do no focus on. If a child knows that a behavior will not get them what they want, they will eventually stop exhibiting the behavior. For example when the boy acted up and got sent home from school every day, that was an easy way for him to get out of doing his schoolwork. Why wouldn't he continue misbehaving? Overall, I really enjoyed the different perspective that Josh provided on working with these children and their parents. Sometimes as teachers, we forget that a personal connection can make all the difference.