Supporting Student Behavior Through Behavioral Contracting

Behavior contracts define positive behavioral expectations and specify contingent rewards for displaying target behaviors. For decades, behavioral contracting has been successfully used as a strategy to promote prosocial and academic behavior for students with and without disabilities. What makes behavior contracts so robust is that they can be applied to students across a variety of settings, are free, and requires minimal teacher time to create and implement. Moreover, students can be active participants in their creation, facilitating student agency and self-determination. This paper outlines the steps for creating and implementing behavior contracts in a classroom setting for a student with at-risk behavior. In addition, this paper also outlines how teachers can use data to make decisions about maintaining, adapting, or fading the implementation of a behavior contract.