What is School-Wide PBIS?

School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports (also referred to as SW-PBIS) is a proactive approach to discipline that emphasizes prevention, instruction on social skills, and data-based decision making to reduce behavior and improve academic performance. It 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 and engages with families to create locally-meaningful and culturally-relevant outcomes, and uses data to make informed decisions that improve the way things work for everyone. It also improves teacher health and wellbeing. It is a way to create positive, predictable, equitable and safe learning environments where everyone thrives.

Social emotional competence is achieved through social emotional learning (SEL). SEL is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.3 Decades of research have shown that children need social and emotional competence to succeed in school. Regardless of socio-economic factors, social-emotional competence leads to improved relationships and increased school connectedness, which all provide powerful support for academic success.

SW-PBIS is rooted in the behavioral or behavior analytic perspective in which it is assumed that behavior is learned, is related to immediate and social environmental factors, and can be changed. PBIS is based on the idea that students learn appropriate behavior in the same way they learn to read—through instruction, practice, feedback, and encouragement.