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Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is an evidence-based, tiered framework for supporting students’ behavioral, academic, social, emotional, and mental health. When implemented with fidelity, PBIS improves social emotional competence, academic success, and school climate. It also improves teacher health and wellbeing. It is a way to create positive, predictable, equitable and safe learning environments where everyone thrives.
Learning the basics of PBIS:
School wide PBIS has four critical features:
Locally-meaningful and culturally-relevant outcomes
Empirically-supported practices
Systems to support implementation
Data to monitor effective and equitable implementation and to guide decision making.
Because PBIS is not a packaged curriculum or intervention, schools implement the core features of evidence-based practices in a way that fits with the schools’ cultural values.
When it comes to school-wide practices, all schools:
Document a shared vision and approach to supporting and responding to student behavior in a mission or vision statement.
Establish 3-5 positively-stated school-wide expectations and define them for each school routine or setting.
Explicitly teach school-wide expectations and other key social, emotional, and behavioral skills to set all students up for success.
Establish a continuum of recognition strategies to provide specific feedback and encourage contextually appropriate behavior.
Establish a continuum of response strategies to provide specific feedback, re-teach contextually appropriate behavior, and discourage contextually inappropriate behavior.
If you haven't started the PBIS implementation process yet, begin by identifying a representative leadership team. This team typically:
Completes readiness activities like securing staff buy-in and evaluating data systems
Identifies relevant training and coaching resources (your Climate Coach can support you with training)
Develops an action plan to guide implementation of PBIS practices, systems, and data school-wide
Implements a contextualized approach to PBIS to match the school’s values and culture
Monitors, evaluates, and adjusts implementation in an on-going way
Are you part of a high school team?
Check out our PBIS in high schools page for support on secondary school PBIS implementation!
PBIS in High Schools
Check out this video on Using Data for Decisions for PBIS from the Center on PBIS
Tier 1 (Universal):
Collaborating with students, families, and educators to define positive school/program-wide expectations and prioritize appropriate social, emotional, and behavioral skills
Aligning classroom expectations with school/program-wide expectations
Explicitly teaching expectations and skills to set all students up for success
Encouraging and acknowledging expected behavior
Preventing and responding to unwanted behavior in a respectful, instructional manner
Fostering school/program-family partnerships
Tier 2 (Some):
Providing additional instruction and practice for behavioral, social, emotional, and academic skills
Increasing adult support and supervision
Providing additional opportunities for positive reinforcement
Increasing prompts or reminders
Increasing access to academic supports
Increasing school-family communication
Tier 3 (few):
Engaging students, educators, and families in functional behavioral assessments and intervention planning
Coordinating support through wraparound and person-centered planning
Implementing individualized, comprehensive, and function-based support
Have you remembered to gather stakeholder feedback on your PBIS system? Family and community engagement are key to a successful PBIS implementation. When everyone in the community is working to support the same goals, recognizing students (in and out of the building), and using universal language, everyone wins.
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