It’s easy to focus on behavior issues and forget how many students are doing exactly what they are supposed to. Repeat offenders and high-intensity situations tend to stand out. It can quickly feel like all of your time is dedicated to these behaviors. A couple of factors can make this worse and create a spiral of negativity in your school culture.

A lack of quality data can allow for feelings and opinions to dominate behavior discussions. Then that lack of data issue can be made worse because you can’t provide a tiered support system that would help delegate your time and resources.

That’s what Kari Franchini found when she arrived at Creekside Middle School: a behavior system that couldn't provide the data needed to make quality decisions around discipline and a staff that was stretched too thin as a result.

The Problem

When Kari arrived at Creekside they had a PBIS system in place that utilized paper bucks as both a reward and a data management tool. Positive behavior was rewarded by hand, on the paper slips and the paper slips could be counted to gather information on what was working and what wasn’t.

This system was ripe for inconsistencies and relied on herculean efforts by a few staff members to get what data they needed. Hand-counting reward tickets during your planning period is a very tedious process and one ripe for inconsistencies and aren’t helpful in real-time.

This lack of data also meant that tiered supports were being utilized on an as-needed basis once behaviors were present and causing a disruption to the learning environment.

Kari saw an opportunity to improve her school's culture by addressing both issues. If she could implement a system that allowed for easy and accurate data collection, then her team could delegate resources where it was needed through a Multi-Tiered System of Support. This would also shift behavior conversations in a way that wouldn’t overlook all of Creekside’s students who were meeting expectations.

The Solution

Change is difficult in schools, as norms and customs can be longstanding and staff can sometimes work exclusively within silos of influence like departments or grade levels. This resistance to change can have a negative impact on your Tier 1 plan because that plan is only as strong as the consistency it is implemented with. So how do you implement change?

Her team created the pillars that their Tier 1 system would stand on including:

• Setting School-Wide Expectations
• Defining Behaviors within those expectations through their behavior rubric
• Deciding what consequences matched what behaviors
• Coming to a consensus on what behaviors were Office-Managed vs Classroom-Managed
• A Digital Classroom Management tool for recognizing positive behaviors, rewarding students, collecting data, and communicating with parents.

PBIS Vision

Kari and her team included stakeholders as a part of the process. They built the system with their staff. That’s how they got the buy-in and ownership needed to move forward. She asked for volunteers who cared about discipline and culture at Creekside and she made that group her “vision team”.

Once the system was in place how do you keep your staff bought in? The most direct way is to talk to them. Listen to their concerns. Really hear them. When a staff member had a concern and offered a solution, Kari and her team worked with them to make that suggestion a reality.

After implementation, it was necessary to course correct what staff members saw as working and not working. Particularly with behaviors that were emphasized by staff when developing the system but not present once data was being collected. Being able to shift emphasis to targeted behaviors also meant that Creekside’s system was flexible enough to change as new students and staff entered the program.

Defining Behavior and Consequences

Customization made their behavior matrix a living document. She polled her staff to determine what behaviors they felt were worthy of a student being removed from class and what were not.

Now that they had a consensus it was time they created their new matrix in LiveSchool. This meant that every staff member had a chance to give input on how behavior would be managed in their school. They all got to say what behaviors they could manage vs what behaviors required removal from the classroom.

Rewards

Creekside runs a PBIS store through LiveSchool. Students can now be awarded points by staff, see those points add up in their account, and then spend them on rewards they value. They utilize reward levels where students can spend points on smaller items or save up for larger events like the “Turkey Bowl” or the “Food Truck Rally”.

The Results

“It got rid of the paper, the collaboration is now automatic”

The digital platform has made collaboration a breeze for the teachers and administrators at Creekside. Now all the parties that need to know, do know.

If interventions are necessary they can now be planned with accurate and consistent statistical information.

Not only are they able to make informed decisions on interventions, but if something drastic like a placement change is necessary they are now going into those discussions with accurate data and timelines to support those recommendations.

When a student has very noticeable, intense behaviors or behavior events it is very easy to let the emotion of the incident impact your decision-making process. This can lead to consequences that aren’t logical or helpful towards improving the student's behavior. This is like a Dr. seeing a patient in pain, not looking at any medical records or running tests, but simply acting on feel and prescribing pain medication. Maybe that helps the issue, maybe it doesn’t.

By collecting accurate data they could now focus on what was really happening. They could delegate their student support staff resources to the students who needed that level of support.

Your School's Turn

“It is what we do. If we tried to take it away I’m not sure what we would do now.”

Creekside was doing the work, they knew the importance of behavior management. They had a paper system, but the data wasn’t very helpful and running rewards was very labor intensive.

When your data isn’t easily retrievable, your message gets lost. The purpose of what you're doing gets lost. Culture is all about connections, and going digital has helped Creekside strengthen those connections by making conversations between participants revolve around collaboration.

If you handle behavior issues as they happen then you're always going to be swimming upstream. You are at the mercy of stronger currents and you are so tired you barely notice the calm waters. Going digital allowed Kari and her team to distribute the resources her staff needed to navigate those waters and allowed them to celebrate the great things that were already happening at Creekside.