PBIS

Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports (PBIS) is a prevention model. It is based on the premise that all students can benefit from well implemented, evidence-based practices for improving student behavior. Schoolwide PBIS provides a comprehensive framework that can be used by any school to design a system of behavioral supports for all students. It also provides informed decision-making, based upon data analysis that guides the process of assessing student needs and providing additional levels of behavioral support to students in need.

Schoolwide PBIS provides a positive focus to encouraging desirable student behaviors resulting in positive climate which maximizes learning. A set of universal expectations for behavior, positively stated, are established for all students in all locations of the school. These expectations generally promote core values such as respect, responsibility, and safety.

Expectations and interventions should be culturally and linguistically responsive for all students. Interventions and strategies are implemented to teach and reinforce these expectations. These include:

• Periodic direct instruction in specific student behaviors that demonstrate a common set of school wide expectations (e.g. respect, responsibility, and safety) in all locations in the school.
• Generous quantities of positive adult/teacher attention and other kinds of reinforcement to students for demonstrating positive behaviors, especially specific behavior expectations identified by the school.
• Predictable consequences for behavior infractions that are delivered consistently by all staff in a calm professional manner throughout the entire school. Consequences are not primarily punitive in nature; they are an opportunity for the student to learn from his or her mistakes and to accept responsibility for the choices that he or she made. The consequences are provided on a continuum matched to the intensity of the misbehavior.