CDS MS PBIS Mission Statement:

Mission Statement: The purpose of the CDS MS PBIS Team is to promote and teach positive behavior expectations to the entire CDS learning community. The goal of proactively teaching these expectations is to help students grow academically, emotionally, socially, and become engaged global citizens. 

What does PBIS look like at CDS?

We want CDS MS to be a place where students understand and are able to demonstrate the expected behaviors in order to promote a positive learning environment for students to grow academically, socially, emotionally, and enjoy. At CDS MS, we have four behavior expectations for the community. As Cheongna Dalton Phoenixes, we want our community to R.I.S.E. :

Respectful

Integrity

Safe

Engaged

As a community, we discuss what each expectation is and what it practically looks like for each person. We practice and complete lessons that are focused on instilling these behavior qualities into our community. We also have isolated what each expectation looks like for certain areas in the school, through our behavior expectation matrix.

CDS MS Behavior History

In general, our community is fortunate to have few discipline problems. Many students understand how they need to behave and in general do well caring out their personal expectation. Most of our students are driven by grades and having a high GPA, so they will work hard to be successful academically. Of course, we have the occasional major disciplinary problem that arises which may constitute a disciplinary council meeting with parents, suspension, or restorative reflection. In general, our community primarily deals with minor behavior infractions, many of which can be dealt with in the classroom by the teacher.

In 2016, our school was fostering a traditional way of dealing with behavior by utilizing detentions. If a student incurred a discipline infraction, a teacher could assign a detention as a consequence. Detentions could range from having 3 tardies to class, arguments between students, uniform violation, Chromebook misuse, etc. Students would then fulfill their detention by sitting quietly in the detention room, where we encouraged them to "reflect on what they did". Using detentions set a negative tone to our environment and there was little behavioral improvement among students. Giving out detentions also hardened the relationship between teachers and students. Some teachers gave out detentions a lot more frequently than others. In general, the detention system set a negative tone to the school community, was not always accurate due to teachers involved and behavior infractions, and it did not help foster a growth mindset of instilling positive behavior.

Thus, in the 2017-18 school year, we implemented Restorative Justice! A Social Studies teacher, who had the new role of Student Affairs, worked tirelessly to bring restorative justice to CDS MS. He organized a Google Form for teachers to fill out behavior infractions and used the data identify common problem behaviors and students who needed restorative justice intervention. During our Co-curriculum time, he would pull students out and put them through a restorative justice session having them reflect and make up for the wrong that they did. If students were found leaving a mess around the cafeteria, a restorative action would be to have them pick up trash around the school. He did an excellent job setting a positive environment and helped change students view on how to deal with a problem behavior. Unfortunately, the task was too much for one teacher and had the prospects of leading to burnout. He also left the school after his 2-year contract.

To kick off the 2018-19 school year, our MS division director suggested we implement PBIS to support students with behavior. The staff agreed that we needed to have a system in place to deal with discipline problems orderly and in a restorative manner. Under his initiation, our director asked for staff volunteers who would be interested in being part of the PBIS Team. Here is our story of implementing PBIS at Cheongna Dalton Middle School!