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PBIS in schools

According to Wisconsin DPI, Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) is a systemic approach to proactive, school-wide behavior based on a Response to Intervention (RtI) model. PBIS applies evidence-based programs, practices and strategies for all students to increase academic performance, improve safety, decrease problem behavior, and establish a positive school culture. Schools implementing PBIS build on existing strengths, complementing and organizing current programming and strategies. The PBIS model has been successfully implemented in thousands of schools in over 40 states, resulting in dramatic reductions in disciplinary interventions and increases in academic achievement. Data-based decision making is a hallmark of PBIS, allowing successes to be easily shared with all relevant stakeholders. Most schools currently implement PBIS. Within PBIS, students are directly taught and systematically reminded of behavioral expectations. Certain individual and social behaviors are reinforced while other behaviors are systematically decreased. PBIS is designed to be practiced as a school-wide endeavor so that the social benefits of creating common, shared understanding of desirable behaviors among members of school communities are tapped. The PBIS approaches a school-wide prevention and intervention model that proactively improves school behavior issues. PBIS is grounded in multi-tiered framework of prevention The first tier of support is the universal tier. This tier is designed to meet the needs of all students, with direct instruction on social skills and expected school behaviors, opportunities to practice desired behaviors, and to reinforce compliance. The second tier is called the secondary. This tier addresses behavioral interventions in a smaller group and applied to students who are not responsive to universal supports. The third tier of PBIS is the intensive tier. Within this tier, a behavioral analysis is created, with members consisting of special educators, behavioral interventionist, school psychologist and counselors. Through these three tiers, PBIS focuses on the social organization of the entire school as well as individual student behaviors.

Challenges to PBIS

There are many challenges to the PBIS system. The first challenge is the lack of cohesion amongst educators, families and communities. The second challenge is related to implementing PBIS in diverse cultural context. Culturally Responsive Positive Behavior and Supports is the first framework to operationalized cultural responsiveness within the context of PBIS. According to Bal et al., PBIS is becoming a primary means of providing behavioral support in United States schools. In their literature Culturally Responsive Positive Behavioral Support Matters, the authors state, “While many schools have implemented PBIS successfully, and have reduced the amount of discipline referrals, PBIS has not impacted racial disproportionality. ” Racialized school discipline practices involve issues related to the socio- historical cultural practices designed to control and punish and the lack of professional development opportunities for developing culturally responsive teaching and classroom management practices. When considering cultural responsive PBIS implementation the literature states three major focus areas. The first focus area is collaborating with family and community members in teaching and reinforcing school wide behavioral expectations. The second focus area is monitoring disproportionality in office discipline referrals between dominant and non-dominant groups through analysis of trends in data disaggregated across student demographic characteristics. The third focus area is providing professional development aimed at increasing practitioners’ awareness of differences between their own and non-dominant students’ cultural patterns of communication styles that will allow them to interpret problem behaviors correctly.

Outcomes

When determining the desired outcomes for PBIS, Bal, mentions examining the motives for and understanding of expected school behaviors. CRPBIS shifts its major goal from eliminating negative behaviors, to supporting the development of students’ and teachers’ social agency to act in innovative ways that shape their schools and classroom communities. One innovative way to help shape schools and deal with negative behaviors, is implementing restorative practices. Restorative practice is a strategy that seeks to repair relationships that have been damaged because of negative behaviors. In order to repair these relationships, a sense of remorse and restorative action on the part of the offender and forgiveness by the victim must be initiated.