Each school should form a diverse team of staff, parents, and students who are charged with coordinating and monitoring the universal actions taken by building staff to promote a positive school climate and prevent disruptive behaviors. All of the activities described on this page are the responsibility of the Tier I team. The team should meet on a regularly scheduled basis, more often as needed, to monitor PBIS systems for fidelity and efficacy. The team also seeks ways to encourage and develop staff capacity to implement PBIS practices, as well as ways to improve upon current systems.

Considerations for administrators when forming or reforming a Tier I Team:

• Are all socio-economic and cultural groups present in the building represented with equal voice?

• Are parents involved? Buildings with an active PTA may elect to invite them to the team, but should also consider whether active PTA members are representative of all families in the building. If the answer is no, keep the PTA involvement, and look to engage more parents from diverse experiences.

• Staff members who are also parents should count as staff members for the purposes of forming the team.

• Are student voices present? Are only successful students given a voice? Are students who struggle behaviorally and/or academically also invited to the process?

• Are special educators and students with disabilities represented on the team?

• Of the staff members selected for the team, do they have the time, mindset, and experience to help guide and facilitate the teams' work?

• Be cautious of teacher burnout - just because a teacher has been a great team member in the past does not mean they must always take on this responsibility.

• Are there new teachers who lack experience, but have the right skills and mindset for this work? Are there teachers whose practice would benefit from the experience of being on the team?

Keep the scope of the PBIS Tier I Team's work in mind. That scope is delineated on the rest of this page. Be cautious about assigning work to the team outside of this scope (i.e. planning a school dance may fall outside the scope of the work, unless that dance is explicitly to celebrate student achievement as a PBIS incentive and was selected as an activity by the team.)

Also, administrators should consider the other leadership teams present in the building and how the PBIS Team will communicate with those groups.

The Building Student Achievement Team (BSAT) is tasked with monitoring and improving the teaching and learning in the building by providing professional development and aligning the work of teachers with district initiatives (such as standards-based grading, for example.)

The Student Intervention Team (SIT) which monitors the success of students both academically and behaviorally and determines needed interventions for students. The SIT routinely looks at data that reflects student behavior and achievement, including but not limited to Behavior Incident Reports (also known as office referrals), absences, and tardies.

The PBIS Tier II and Tier III Teams, who are charged with implementing and monitoring support for students needing additional interventions at the second (targeted) and third (individualized) tiers of intervention for behavior.

It should be stated that administrators in smaller buildings may choose to collapse two of these teams into one. However, it is important not to lose sight of the unique responsibilities of each team. For example, the members of the BSAT may be the same people who serve as the staff constituency of the PBIS Tier I Team, but should only conduct the business of the Tier I team when parent and student constituents of that team are also present.

At its most basic level, the philosophy behind PBIS asserts that students cannot be held accountable to know something they have never been taught - this applies to behavior as well as academics. With this in mind, buildings develop a short list - between three and five - positively stated behavior expectations. Positively-stated means that they define how students should behave, rather than how students should not behave. Most of the tier one practices within a building flow from these behavior expectations.

The Tier I Team is responsible for drafting the school's positively worded behavioral expectations and teaching matrices (see below). These are then brought to the whole staff for consensus before adoption. These should also be reviewed periodically to meet the needs of students. Again, the Tier I team should be diverse in makeup, consisting staff, parents, and students who are representative of the demographic and cultural groups who have a stake in the success of the school and its students.

All building staff should engage in proactively and positively acknowledging student behavior, striving to achieve a 4:1 ratio of praise to correction statements or actions. This ratio is well established by research in applied behavior analysis, dating back well over fifty years. Maintaining this ratio helps to develop and sustain the positive relationships between teachers and students needed to create a safe and efficient learning environment.

This intentional practice defines the tone and culture of the building. It is also crucial to developing a school system that is culturally and linguistically responsive to all students, aligning with the concepts of validating and affirming cultural behaviors. All staff members in the building, including custodians, para educators, and lunch workers, should strive to adopt a mindset of trying to “catch” students doing right. This concept is supported by decades of research across multiple domains in behavioral science.

Importantly, some students may require a praise to correction ratio higher than 4:1. Many of these students may receive services at Tiers II and III, and building staff should make a coordinated effort to provide them with this additional positive acknowledgement. Building staff should coordinate their efforts in this regard - this can happen informally, i.e. one teacher may share with their colleagues that the student responds well to additional positive reinforcement. More formally, students identified by the Student Intervention Team as needing support beyond Tier I should be identified to all staff, with the goal of increasing the amount of positive acknowledgment they receive throughout the day. This is discussed more fully in the Tier II section of this website.

This document defines the school-wide expectations and describes how they “look” across various settings and locations. Each area of the building displays a teaching matrix for that area. For example, if a school has an expectation of being respectful to others, a teaching matrix defines what it means to be successful in each specific area of the building (i.e. the cafeteria vs. the gym.) In this way, students learn all of the ways to be respectful of others, and how that behavior may look and feel different, depending on the context.

School wide behavior expectations (the same as on the teaching matrix) are proactively and explicitly taught, modeled, and reviewed throughout the year, by all staff members. For example, this could mean that on the first day of school, all staff members teach the same lesson about showing respect in the cafeteria to the classroom that they take to lunch. Lessons are created, revised, and reviewed as needed throughout the year, based on need. If the building experienced an uptick in late arrivals after lunch, for example, teachers might create a lesson about being on time and how being on time is related to the behavior expectations in the building.

Social-emotional health is also explicitly taught, modeled, and practiced. For example, a teacher might explicitly teach ways to disagree in a contextually appropriate way for an academic environment, then allow students a chance to practice this disagreement embedded within lessons throughout the year.

The Tier I team is charged with designing incentive systems for both students and staff who engage in a specific target behaviors. For example, many schools will develop a merit/point/token economy. Students may earn a token which can later be spent in a school store, entered into a raffle or drawing, or used to receive other incentives, such as preferred activity time. Incentives need not be tangible. Sometimes, lunch with a preferred adult, a positive phone call home, or a class party are more effective in developing intrinsic motivation than the opportunity to purchase a new pencil, snack, or toy. Incentives must be meaningful to students, fairly implemented, and manageable for staff.

Such systems are more impactful when a specific behavioral skill is the target. So, rather than students earning a ticket for "good" behavior, students during a specific week can earn a ticket only for engaging in a target behavior, such as keeping the school clean, or encouraging others. Students might also earn points for their class or grade, in friendly competition with others classes.

Staff members should also be recognized: for engaging in PBIS practices with fidelity, for success in teaching a particular unit of study, for having a relentlessly positive attitude, or for other meaningful work that contributes to the success of the school.

Staff responses to problem behaviors are consistent throughout the building. Consequences are clearly defined, appropriate to the severity or duration of the behavior, and consistently applied to all students. Data is used to track the effectiveness of consequences and interventions.

Each building should come to consensus on the continuum of responses staff members will follow in their building. When will a student receive a phone call to a parent? What strategies must a teacher exhaust before sending a student to the office? When will a detention be given? What consequences can be given that do not reduce class time? Buildings should discuss these questions and come up with solutions that serve their student population. This conversation should include parents and guardians, so that school and home can present a unified message to students regarding expected behavior at school.

However, any continuum must align with state SRI reporting requirements, as well as school board and district guidance on discipline.

Schools intentionally and proactively engage with parents and community members. As stated above, parents and guardians from diverse backgrounds should be included as members of the PBIS Tier I team. But schools must offer other opportunities for parent/guardian voice and involvement.