Research suggests that promoting social-emotionaldevelopment can provide support for children’s appropri-ate behavior and prevent challenging behavior. A pyra-mid framework includes four levels of practice to addressthe needs of all children, including children with persist-ent challenging behavior:

Level One: Building positive relationshipsSimply put, there are two reasons why early childhood

educators need to invest time and attention in getting toknow children. First, as adults build positive relationshipswith children, their potential influence on children’sbehavior grows significantly—that is, children noticeresponsive, caring adults. Children pay particular atten-tion to what such a teacher says and does, and they seekout ways to ensure even more positive attention from theteacher. Second, in the context of supportive relation-ships, children develop positive self-concept, confidence,and a sense of safety that help reduce the occurrence ofchallenging behavior.

Level Two: Implementing classroompreventive practices

The combination of giving children positive attentionfor their pro-social behavior, teaching them about rou-tines and expectations, and making changes in the physi-cal environment, schedule, and materials may encouragechildren’s engagement in daily activities and prevent ordecrease the likelihood of challenging behavior (Strain &Hemmeter, 1997). A teacher who examines the impact ofthe environment may make simple changes that reducethe frequency of challenging behavior (for example, byproviding children with choices, creating well-organizedlearning centers, eliminating wide-open spaces, limitingthe number of children in learning centers, and so on.

Level Three: Using social and emotionalteaching strategies

Key emotional literacy skills include being able toidentify feelings in self and others and act upon feelingsin appropriate ways. Discriminating among emotions

such as anger, sadness, frustration, and happinessrequires a vocabulary of feeling words.

Young children can be taught new and complex feel-ing words directly through pairing pictures of emotionalexpressions with the feeling word and reading children’sliterature featuring feeling words. Playing games providespractice, as in Feeling Face Bingo, in which children findthe picture of an emotion on a bingo card that matchesthe emotion named by the game leader. Children alsolearn when family and teachers label the children’s emo-tions as well as their own throughout the day. Over time,children will match feeling words with their physiologicalsensations and the emotions of others.

Level Four: Planning intensive individualizedinterventions

In the last decade, research has demonstrated thatpositive behavior support (PBS) is a highly effective inter-vention approach for addressing severe and persistentchallenging behavior. The focus of PBS is to help thechild develop new social and communication skills,enhance relationships with peers and adults, and experi-ence an improved quality of life.

Intensive individualized interventions are plannedand implemented by a team for application in home,early education, and community environments. Onceestablished, the team completes a functional assessment(a process of observing the child in key situations,reviewing the child’s records, interviewing caregivers andteachers, and analyzing the collected information) toidentify the factors related to the child’s challengingbehavior. This leads to the development of a behaviorsupport plan that includes prevention strategies, tech-niques for teaching new skills, and changes in responsesto the challenging behavior.

When the three lower levels of the pyramid are inplace, only about four percent of the children in a class-room or program will require more intensive support(Sugai et al. 2000). The key implication here is that mostsolutions to challenging behaviors are likely to be found

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The Teaching Pyramid: A model for supporting social competence

and preventing challenging behavior in young children

Editor: Gregory K. Fritz, Ph.D.

Editor’s Note: Subscribers are permitted to photocopy multiple copies for patients and colleagues who would benefitfrom the material. Not for resale or mass distribution. Executive Editor: Karienne Stovell, kstovell@wiley.com. For reprint information, contact the reprint coordinator at (201) 748-6011. The Brown University Child and AdolescentBehavior Letter, © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company.

by examining adult behavior and overall classroom prac-tice, not by singling out individual children for special-ized intervention. This is good news for teachers who areeager to provide all children with a high-quality earlyeducation experience.

The following example demonstrates how to imple-ment this model in a preschool classroom:

Emma, a preschool teacher of two- and three-yearolds, takes time to greet every child and parent on arrival.She talks to the child briefly about the upcoming day orevents at home. Emma is committed to building a nur-turing and supportive relationship with every child in herclass [Level 1].

The classroom is carefully arranged to promote chil-dren’s engagement and social interaction. When childrenhave difficulty, Emma first examines the environment tomake sure that the problems are not due to classroomarrangement or the structure of an activity [Level 2].

A few children in the class seem to need instructionon playing with peers, coping with anger and disappoint-ment, and using social problem solving. Emma uses acurriculum that includes strategies and activities forteaching specific social skills, and she is confident thatthis helps those children make progress [Level 3].

Although most of the children are doing quite well inher classroom, Emma worries about her ability to meetthe needs of one child who often screams and hits theother children. With the help of the director, Emma con-tacts the child’s home and begins working with the familyto develop an individualized behavior support plan thatcan be implemented at home and in the classroom [Level4].

This handout was adapted from an article publishedby the National Association for the Education of YoungChildren (www.naeyc.org). It was written by Lisa Fox, GlenDunlap, Mary Louise Hemmeter, Gail E. Joseph, andPhillip S. Strain.