From a Good Plan to a Plan That Actually Works: The PSA Coaching Checklist
- drbobcarey
- Aug 13
- 5 min read
by Dr. Bob Carey
One of the things I have learned over many years of working with children, families, and professionals is that the hardest part of helping with challenging behaviour is often not figuring out what might work. The greater challenge is helping the adults around the child use those strategies consistently, confidently, and in ways that actually fit into the realities of everyday life.
It is entirely possible to develop an excellent behaviour support plan that makes perfect sense on paper but becomes difficult to use once it reaches a busy classroom, a stressful family evening, or a situation where a child is already beginning to escalate. When teachers are unsure about what to do, caregivers find the recommendations unrealistic, or different adults respond in very different ways, even a well-designed intervention can lose much of its effectiveness.
This is one of the reasons I developed the Positive Systems Approach (PSA) Coaching Checklist.
The checklist was designed as a practical companion to my book, What if it’s Not Just The Behaviour?, and brings together some of the central ideas of PSA in a format that can be used by psychologists, behaviour consultants, teachers, educational assistants, support workers, and families. Rather than adding another complicated form or assessment to an already demanding process, the intention is to provide a simple way of asking, Are we actually creating the conditions that will allow this plan to succeed?
The process begins with understanding before intervention. Instead of immediately asking how we can stop a behaviour, PSA encourages us to step back and look more carefully at what is happening. What tends to occur before the behaviour? What might the behaviour be communicating? What strengths does the child already have? Are there particular relationships, routines, environmental conditions, developmental factors, or sources of stress that might be contributing to what we are seeing? In the PSA framework, this broader process of identification is essential because behaviour rarely makes sense when we look at it in isolation.
Once we have a better understanding of the child and the circumstances surrounding the behaviour, the next question becomes much more practical: Can the people supporting this child actually use the plan?
This is where I believe coaching has an important role to play.
The PSA Coaching Checklist encourages us to begin by building genuine buy-in from the people who will be implementing the strategies. Rather than simply handing caregivers or frontline staff a set of instructions, we need to involve them in the process by asking what is already working, what feels realistic, and what might make implementation difficult. A strategy that looks straightforward to a clinician may be much harder to carry out in a busy classroom or during a particularly stressful time at home. The book emphasizes this collaborative approach, with families and professionals working together rather than approaching one another as opposing sides.
The checklist then helps translate broad recommendations into clear and measurable goals. It is not enough to say that we want a child to "behave better" or have fewer meltdowns. We need to identify what we want the child to learn to do instead, and we also need to be clear about what the adults will do to support that new skill. Who will respond? What will they say or do? When will they provide the support? How often should the strategy be used? And, perhaps most importantly, how will we know whether it is actually making a difference? That last question leads to one of the most useful features of the checklist: implementation fidelity.
It is surprisingly easy to conclude that an intervention is ineffective when the real problem is that the intervention has not been implemented consistently enough for us to know whether it works. The checklist therefore includes a simple way of observing a few opportunities and recording whether the planned strategy was implemented as intended, partly implemented, or missed altogether. This provides a quick snapshot of what is actually happening rather than relying solely on impressions or assumptions.
I think this is particularly important because a low fidelity score should not automatically be interpreted as a failure on the part of a caregiver or staff member. It may instead be telling us something important about the system. Perhaps the strategy takes too much time, the materials are not readily available, the instructions are unclear, or the environment makes implementation unnecessarily difficult. Perhaps the person implementing the plan simply needs more coaching and an opportunity to practise the strategy.
That is why the checklist includes a quick environmental audit. One of the central ideas in PSA is that behaviour does not occur in a vacuum. The environment surrounding a child can either make success easier or make it considerably more difficult. A quick audit can therefore ask whether routines are predictable, whether demands are reasonable, whether the child has easy access to help or a break, whether positive interactions are occurring frequently enough, and whether adult responses might unintentionally be maintaining the very behaviour everyone is trying to change. The PSA framework places considerable emphasis on modifying environmental conditions and strengthening the systems surrounding the child rather than placing the entire burden for change on the child.
There is another question that I have found particularly important when working across home and school: Will the strategy travel? A child may make wonderful progress when a strategy is used consistently in one setting, only to struggle when the same child encounters a completely different set of expectations somewhere else. This is why PSA includes the concept of portability. The intention is not that every setting must look identical, but that the essential principles, language, and responses are sufficiently consistent that the child can recognize and use the skills they have learned across different environments. The book illustrates this with examples of strategies being carried from home into school so that the child experiences a more coherent and predictable system of support.
The accompanying video provides a brief walkthrough of the checklist and explains how these pieces fit together. It is deliberately short and practical, because I wanted it to be something that a clinician, teacher, caregiver, or support worker could watch without having to set aside an hour for another training session.
Ultimately, the PSA Coaching Checklist is not intended to replace assessment, clinical judgment, or individualized planning. Its purpose is much simpler. It is a way of stepping back periodically and asking whether the plan we have developed is actually workable for the people who are expected to implement it, whether the environment is helping or hindering the process, and whether we have enough information to see that meaningful progress is taking place.
After all, implementation fidelity is not really about perfection. It is about alignment. When the adults surrounding a child understand what they are doing, understand why they are doing it, and are able to support one another in doing it consistently, the child experiences a much more predictable and supportive environment. As the book emphasizes, consistency and portability help create the conditions in which children can develop new skills and experience greater success across the different parts of their lives.
And that, ultimately, is what the Positive Systems Approach is about: not simply trying to change a child's behaviour, but changing the conditions around the child so that more positive behaviour, communication, coping, and relationships become possible.
You can download the free PSA Coaching Checklist and watch the accompanying video walkthrough below.
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