Disclaimer:
As we begin this journey together, I encourage you to provide comments, seek advice, or ask questions regarding the use of PBS in your school and classroom. One caveat, we want to provide an environment that is safe to explore new ideas while maintaining the confidentiality of the individuals, districts and campuses involved. We will support the Family Education Rights Protection Act (FERPA) on this Blog.
- What is Positive Behavioral Support?
- Positive Behavior Support is a broad range of culturally appropriate practices of systemic schoolwide, classroom, & individualized strategies for achieving important social & learning outcomes while preventing challenging behavior of all students. PBS involves a systems-level approach for data driven decision-making and team-based problem-solving. The focus is on prevention and early intervention to successfully stop academic and behavior problems before they begin. PBS emphasizes effective teaching practices and on-going and meaningful staff development.
- This graphic provides a visual of the three-tiered intervention model.
- Let’s look at each level in more detail.
- Universal: Universal interventions happen for everyone on the campus. This level of intervention effectively prevents most school-based behavior problems. In fact, when used well, universal interventions work for about 75%-80% of students. School teams develop universal management interventions designed to meet the needs of all students and to develop a common language/focus for all staff, students, parents and the school community.
- Examples:
aBehavioral expectations are taught
aPositive, proactive discipline policies and procedures
aActive supervision and monitoring
aPositive reinforcement systems
aFirm, fair, and corrective discipline
- Selected: Some students may need something more than is available through universal interventions (about 15%-25% of students). For this group, selected interventions are developed to provide targeted or specialized group-based strategies for students who are considered “at risk” (e.g., low academic achievement, behavior, poor peer interactions, etc.). These interventions are applied more frequently in a smaller group format. Data are used to identify students who need selected interventions, and to monitor the effect of those interventions on these students’ target behaviors.
- Examples:
aIntensive social skills teaching, self-control, anger management, direct teaching
aSelf-management programs
aAdult mentors
aIncreased academic support
- Targeted: An even smaller group of students (5%-10%) will need more individualized, wrap-around services. These are highly specialized strategies for students who engage in chronic challenging behavior that is not responsive to universal or selected interventions.
- Examples:
aIndividual behavior support plans
aParent training and collaboration
aMulti-agency collaboration (wrap-around services)For maximum benefit to students,schools would have interventions at all three levels, otherwise, educators spend their time “putting out fires” rather than proactively approaching behavior improvement for all students.
(Information for this initial post was adapted from the Texas Behavior Support Initiative)
In the future, the Posts on this Blog will focus on a variety of techniques and intervention strategies that are founded in scientifically based research. I encourage you to become an active participant in this journey.
