Kim joined Jordan and Hannah to chat about everything from PBIS training to measuring the results of your work.
Kim joined Jordan and Hannah on the podcast to dive into the specifics of utilizing PBIS at the district level.
Well, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports are really a framework. It’s a framework for organizing your systems, practices, and data so that you can get the best outcomes for all of your students.
We talk about it as a three-tiered framework. It also works that way with staff too. This is the rulebook for how the staff operates as a team. For example, this is how we collect data or this is how we have our ongoing meetings.
The practices within PBIS are the things that the staff do for kids to support kids from a prevention level or response level. All those things are outlined and those are evidence-based practices to meet everybody's needs.
Next, we then have the data. That's one of my favorite parts. What are the important data points that we need to capture, measure, and monitor so that we know that we're getting to where we want to get to? The 10,000-foot view of PBIS is that it's this framework that has to have all those three parts: systems, practices, and data.
It is also applied as a framework for students too. All students are at tier one, so when we talk about a tier one approach, those are the systems and practices that we have in place for all of our kids.
The general logic of PBIS points in your school is that if you're doing your tier-one practices with fidelity, then it’s going to meet the social, and emotional behavioral needs, of most of your kids. It should be meeting the needs of about 80% of your students.
You're going to have some of your students who need a little bit of additional support. That might be 15 to 20% of your student population which requires a little bit of an additional boost. We're talking about shorter-term interventions that are easy to deploy quickly, but that provide additional opportunities for skill teaching, practice, reminders, and feedback.
All of that is to hopefully meet those identified tier-two needs for some of your kids.
Then when we look at tier three, that's where we talk about the few students.
2 to 5% of your student body might have more intensive needs. We need to connect them with more individualized interventions. Such as behavior intervention plans, counseling or IEPs, wraparounds, or things along those lines.
There was a huge decrease in suspensions for our district. There’s been a focus on other means of correction. We really make sure that we're doing our tier-one practices like teaching acknowledgment and making sure we have consistent responses to unexpected behavior.
We've seen in our programs, a huge increase in the amount of instructional minutes that the students are in the classroom for. So before, even if we weren't suspending a student, maybe they were getting sent out of class for a reset a lot.
So several years ago, I compared the average number of minutes that kids were out of class, and the drop that we saw was huge.
We see at least a correlational increase in academic achievement along with that. We have seen this county-wide as well as regionally. We provide services for students who are expelled from their local school districts.
County-wide, more and more districts have been receiving training and implementing PBIS. We've seen fewer expulsions. Our student body has probably been chopped in half over the last several years at our expelled site for students.
As far as school climate, we see improvements over time with the school culture surveys that we do every year. So things like:
Our scores have been increasing and have been maintained at a really high level. We have district-wide goals which are just maintenance goals to keep our school climate survey scores at this positive level that they've now been at for a long time.
It always morphs over time, based on the needs of the student body. But when we're talking about tier-one strategies, we look at evidence-based practices in the classroom.
Each classroom has its expectations clearly posted and clearly taught because kids aren't mind readers. They need to know what the teacher expects.
When it comes to getting out of your seat, should I raise my hand? Do I need my laptop for this class? Then we also use pre-corrections.
So if I know this is an area where not all the kids are gonna get it, I'm gonna remind them or pre-correct before the error can happen ahead of time.
Then we look at different instructional strategies. We really kind of blend it with our instructional coaching. Those aren't two separate things. We talk about how engaging instruction is your biggest tool against problem behavior.
If the kids are acting out, or they're disengaged, I need to look at maybe changing what I'm doing with instruction.
The first is that if you have support from a top down, there's visibility for your programs. There's support for it. There's funding for it.
PBIS is an everyday word from our superintendent all the way down. They have seen the data, and they've seen the evidence for PBIS written into our district-wide plan.
That kind of support is huge so that we know that it's not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan thing. Another benefit of having it be district-wide is accountability. There’s a shared culture and shared value across school sites and across leaders.
They know that this is how we do things. It's just part of the expectations. One thing I love is when I'm getting together with all of my site principals it leads to really rich conversations between the site teams.
They can then collaborate and say, “Oh, this is what we're doing in our program, and this is what we're doing here.” There is a sense of stealing ideas and sharing ideas among the district leaders.
For larger districts and larger schools, a lot of the time it's this kind of year-long training process for every tier of PBIS. So it might be four days, four full days where the team is trained, and you're building up one aspect of your PBIS program at a time.
Then they go back to their sites and get feedback from the staff. Then start by just doing one thing at a time. Then they might come back a couple of months later to get more information and do that process again.
For our smaller programs, I feel really fortunate, because I can customize the training. So I can say, “Hey, we're just gonna do a training for two hours, and build our rubric,” and then roll that out. Next, we'll come back next month, and then we'll work on our progressive discipline matrix, and go from there.
There are a couple of different ways that you can do that initial training piece. PBIS training never stops, because our students change, our context changes, our handbooks and our systems, and our practices always change based on what the needs are.
For example, in the programs that I coach, we still do formal PBIS boosters every year and we incorporate training into our school-wide PBIS meetings.
If there's a new evidence-based practice that they haven't used before, then we'll do little pieces like that. The training doesn't stop when you're looking at your data and saying, “Okay, here's kind of where we need to focus on to build our skills.”
Kim joined Jordan and Hannah on the podcast to dive into the specifics of utilizing PBIS at the district level.
Well, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports are really a framework. It’s a framework for organizing your systems, practices, and data so that you can get the best outcomes for all of your students.
We talk about it as a three-tiered framework. It also works that way with staff too. This is the rulebook for how the staff operates as a team. For example, this is how we collect data or this is how we have our ongoing meetings.
The practices within PBIS are the things that the staff do for kids to support kids from a prevention level or response level. All those things are outlined and those are evidence-based practices to meet everybody's needs.
Next, we then have the data. That's one of my favorite parts. What are the important data points that we need to capture, measure, and monitor so that we know that we're getting to where we want to get to? The 10,000-foot view of PBIS is that it's this framework that has to have all those three parts: systems, practices, and data.
It is also applied as a framework for students too. All students are at tier one, so when we talk about a tier one approach, those are the systems and practices that we have in place for all of our kids.
The general logic of PBIS points in your school is that if you're doing your tier-one practices with fidelity, then it’s going to meet the social, and emotional behavioral needs, of most of your kids. It should be meeting the needs of about 80% of your students.
You're going to have some of your students who need a little bit of additional support. That might be 15 to 20% of your student population which requires a little bit of an additional boost. We're talking about shorter-term interventions that are easy to deploy quickly, but that provide additional opportunities for skill teaching, practice, reminders, and feedback.
All of that is to hopefully meet those identified tier-two needs for some of your kids.
Then when we look at tier three, that's where we talk about the few students.
2 to 5% of your student body might have more intensive needs. We need to connect them with more individualized interventions. Such as behavior intervention plans, counseling or IEPs, wraparounds, or things along those lines.
There was a huge decrease in suspensions for our district. There’s been a focus on other means of correction. We really make sure that we're doing our tier-one practices like teaching acknowledgment and making sure we have consistent responses to unexpected behavior.
We've seen in our programs, a huge increase in the amount of instructional minutes that the students are in the classroom for. So before, even if we weren't suspending a student, maybe they were getting sent out of class for a reset a lot.
So several years ago, I compared the average number of minutes that kids were out of class, and the drop that we saw was huge.
We see at least a correlational increase in academic achievement along with that. We have seen this county-wide as well as regionally. We provide services for students who are expelled from their local school districts.
County-wide, more and more districts have been receiving training and implementing PBIS. We've seen fewer expulsions. Our student body has probably been chopped in half over the last several years at our expelled site for students.
As far as school climate, we see improvements over time with the school culture surveys that we do every year. So things like:
Our scores have been increasing and have been maintained at a really high level. We have district-wide goals which are just maintenance goals to keep our school climate survey scores at this positive level that they've now been at for a long time.
It always morphs over time, based on the needs of the student body. But when we're talking about tier-one strategies, we look at evidence-based practices in the classroom.
Each classroom has its expectations clearly posted and clearly taught because kids aren't mind readers. They need to know what the teacher expects.
When it comes to getting out of your seat, should I raise my hand? Do I need my laptop for this class? Then we also use pre-corrections.
So if I know this is an area where not all the kids are gonna get it, I'm gonna remind them or pre-correct before the error can happen ahead of time.
Then we look at different instructional strategies. We really kind of blend it with our instructional coaching. Those aren't two separate things. We talk about how engaging instruction is your biggest tool against problem behavior.
If the kids are acting out, or they're disengaged, I need to look at maybe changing what I'm doing with instruction.
The first is that if you have support from a top down, there's visibility for your programs. There's support for it. There's funding for it.
PBIS is an everyday word from our superintendent all the way down. They have seen the data, and they've seen the evidence for PBIS written into our district-wide plan.
That kind of support is huge so that we know that it's not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan thing. Another benefit of having it be district-wide is accountability. There’s a shared culture and shared value across school sites and across leaders.
They know that this is how we do things. It's just part of the expectations. One thing I love is when I'm getting together with all of my site principals it leads to really rich conversations between the site teams.
They can then collaborate and say, “Oh, this is what we're doing in our program, and this is what we're doing here.” There is a sense of stealing ideas and sharing ideas among the district leaders.
For larger districts and larger schools, a lot of the time it's this kind of year-long training process for every tier of PBIS. So it might be four days, four full days where the team is trained, and you're building up one aspect of your PBIS program at a time.
Then they go back to their sites and get feedback from the staff. Then start by just doing one thing at a time. Then they might come back a couple of months later to get more information and do that process again.
For our smaller programs, I feel really fortunate, because I can customize the training. So I can say, “Hey, we're just gonna do a training for two hours, and build our rubric,” and then roll that out. Next, we'll come back next month, and then we'll work on our progressive discipline matrix, and go from there.
There are a couple of different ways that you can do that initial training piece. PBIS training never stops, because our students change, our context changes, our handbooks and our systems, and our practices always change based on what the needs are.
For example, in the programs that I coach, we still do formal PBIS boosters every year and we incorporate training into our school-wide PBIS meetings.
If there's a new evidence-based practice that they haven't used before, then we'll do little pieces like that. The training doesn't stop when you're looking at your data and saying, “Okay, here's kind of where we need to focus on to build our skills.”
Kim joined Jordan and Hannah on the podcast to dive into the specifics of utilizing PBIS at the district level.
Well, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports are really a framework. It’s a framework for organizing your systems, practices, and data so that you can get the best outcomes for all of your students.
We talk about it as a three-tiered framework. It also works that way with staff too. This is the rulebook for how the staff operates as a team. For example, this is how we collect data or this is how we have our ongoing meetings.
The practices within PBIS are the things that the staff do for kids to support kids from a prevention level or response level. All those things are outlined and those are evidence-based practices to meet everybody's needs.
Next, we then have the data. That's one of my favorite parts. What are the important data points that we need to capture, measure, and monitor so that we know that we're getting to where we want to get to? The 10,000-foot view of PBIS is that it's this framework that has to have all those three parts: systems, practices, and data.
It is also applied as a framework for students too. All students are at tier one, so when we talk about a tier one approach, those are the systems and practices that we have in place for all of our kids.
The general logic of PBIS points in your school is that if you're doing your tier-one practices with fidelity, then it’s going to meet the social, and emotional behavioral needs, of most of your kids. It should be meeting the needs of about 80% of your students.
You're going to have some of your students who need a little bit of additional support. That might be 15 to 20% of your student population which requires a little bit of an additional boost. We're talking about shorter-term interventions that are easy to deploy quickly, but that provide additional opportunities for skill teaching, practice, reminders, and feedback.
All of that is to hopefully meet those identified tier-two needs for some of your kids.
Then when we look at tier three, that's where we talk about the few students.
2 to 5% of your student body might have more intensive needs. We need to connect them with more individualized interventions. Such as behavior intervention plans, counseling or IEPs, wraparounds, or things along those lines.
There was a huge decrease in suspensions for our district. There’s been a focus on other means of correction. We really make sure that we're doing our tier-one practices like teaching acknowledgment and making sure we have consistent responses to unexpected behavior.
We've seen in our programs, a huge increase in the amount of instructional minutes that the students are in the classroom for. So before, even if we weren't suspending a student, maybe they were getting sent out of class for a reset a lot.
So several years ago, I compared the average number of minutes that kids were out of class, and the drop that we saw was huge.
We see at least a correlational increase in academic achievement along with that. We have seen this county-wide as well as regionally. We provide services for students who are expelled from their local school districts.
County-wide, more and more districts have been receiving training and implementing PBIS. We've seen fewer expulsions. Our student body has probably been chopped in half over the last several years at our expelled site for students.
As far as school climate, we see improvements over time with the school culture surveys that we do every year. So things like:
Our scores have been increasing and have been maintained at a really high level. We have district-wide goals which are just maintenance goals to keep our school climate survey scores at this positive level that they've now been at for a long time.
It always morphs over time, based on the needs of the student body. But when we're talking about tier-one strategies, we look at evidence-based practices in the classroom.
Each classroom has its expectations clearly posted and clearly taught because kids aren't mind readers. They need to know what the teacher expects.
When it comes to getting out of your seat, should I raise my hand? Do I need my laptop for this class? Then we also use pre-corrections.
So if I know this is an area where not all the kids are gonna get it, I'm gonna remind them or pre-correct before the error can happen ahead of time.
Then we look at different instructional strategies. We really kind of blend it with our instructional coaching. Those aren't two separate things. We talk about how engaging instruction is your biggest tool against problem behavior.
If the kids are acting out, or they're disengaged, I need to look at maybe changing what I'm doing with instruction.
The first is that if you have support from a top down, there's visibility for your programs. There's support for it. There's funding for it.
PBIS is an everyday word from our superintendent all the way down. They have seen the data, and they've seen the evidence for PBIS written into our district-wide plan.
That kind of support is huge so that we know that it's not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan thing. Another benefit of having it be district-wide is accountability. There’s a shared culture and shared value across school sites and across leaders.
They know that this is how we do things. It's just part of the expectations. One thing I love is when I'm getting together with all of my site principals it leads to really rich conversations between the site teams.
They can then collaborate and say, “Oh, this is what we're doing in our program, and this is what we're doing here.” There is a sense of stealing ideas and sharing ideas among the district leaders.
For larger districts and larger schools, a lot of the time it's this kind of year-long training process for every tier of PBIS. So it might be four days, four full days where the team is trained, and you're building up one aspect of your PBIS program at a time.
Then they go back to their sites and get feedback from the staff. Then start by just doing one thing at a time. Then they might come back a couple of months later to get more information and do that process again.
For our smaller programs, I feel really fortunate, because I can customize the training. So I can say, “Hey, we're just gonna do a training for two hours, and build our rubric,” and then roll that out. Next, we'll come back next month, and then we'll work on our progressive discipline matrix, and go from there.
There are a couple of different ways that you can do that initial training piece. PBIS training never stops, because our students change, our context changes, our handbooks and our systems, and our practices always change based on what the needs are.
For example, in the programs that I coach, we still do formal PBIS boosters every year and we incorporate training into our school-wide PBIS meetings.
If there's a new evidence-based practice that they haven't used before, then we'll do little pieces like that. The training doesn't stop when you're looking at your data and saying, “Okay, here's kind of where we need to focus on to build our skills.”
Kim joined Jordan and Hannah on the podcast to dive into the specifics of utilizing PBIS at the district level.
Well, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports are really a framework. It’s a framework for organizing your systems, practices, and data so that you can get the best outcomes for all of your students.
We talk about it as a three-tiered framework. It also works that way with staff too. This is the rulebook for how the staff operates as a team. For example, this is how we collect data or this is how we have our ongoing meetings.
The practices within PBIS are the things that the staff do for kids to support kids from a prevention level or response level. All those things are outlined and those are evidence-based practices to meet everybody's needs.
Next, we then have the data. That's one of my favorite parts. What are the important data points that we need to capture, measure, and monitor so that we know that we're getting to where we want to get to? The 10,000-foot view of PBIS is that it's this framework that has to have all those three parts: systems, practices, and data.
It is also applied as a framework for students too. All students are at tier one, so when we talk about a tier one approach, those are the systems and practices that we have in place for all of our kids.
The general logic of PBIS points in your school is that if you're doing your tier-one practices with fidelity, then it’s going to meet the social, and emotional behavioral needs, of most of your kids. It should be meeting the needs of about 80% of your students.
You're going to have some of your students who need a little bit of additional support. That might be 15 to 20% of your student population which requires a little bit of an additional boost. We're talking about shorter-term interventions that are easy to deploy quickly, but that provide additional opportunities for skill teaching, practice, reminders, and feedback.
All of that is to hopefully meet those identified tier-two needs for some of your kids.
Then when we look at tier three, that's where we talk about the few students.
2 to 5% of your student body might have more intensive needs. We need to connect them with more individualized interventions. Such as behavior intervention plans, counseling or IEPs, wraparounds, or things along those lines.
There was a huge decrease in suspensions for our district. There’s been a focus on other means of correction. We really make sure that we're doing our tier-one practices like teaching acknowledgment and making sure we have consistent responses to unexpected behavior.
We've seen in our programs, a huge increase in the amount of instructional minutes that the students are in the classroom for. So before, even if we weren't suspending a student, maybe they were getting sent out of class for a reset a lot.
So several years ago, I compared the average number of minutes that kids were out of class, and the drop that we saw was huge.
We see at least a correlational increase in academic achievement along with that. We have seen this county-wide as well as regionally. We provide services for students who are expelled from their local school districts.
County-wide, more and more districts have been receiving training and implementing PBIS. We've seen fewer expulsions. Our student body has probably been chopped in half over the last several years at our expelled site for students.
As far as school climate, we see improvements over time with the school culture surveys that we do every year. So things like:
Our scores have been increasing and have been maintained at a really high level. We have district-wide goals which are just maintenance goals to keep our school climate survey scores at this positive level that they've now been at for a long time.
It always morphs over time, based on the needs of the student body. But when we're talking about tier-one strategies, we look at evidence-based practices in the classroom.
Each classroom has its expectations clearly posted and clearly taught because kids aren't mind readers. They need to know what the teacher expects.
When it comes to getting out of your seat, should I raise my hand? Do I need my laptop for this class? Then we also use pre-corrections.
So if I know this is an area where not all the kids are gonna get it, I'm gonna remind them or pre-correct before the error can happen ahead of time.
Then we look at different instructional strategies. We really kind of blend it with our instructional coaching. Those aren't two separate things. We talk about how engaging instruction is your biggest tool against problem behavior.
If the kids are acting out, or they're disengaged, I need to look at maybe changing what I'm doing with instruction.
The first is that if you have support from a top down, there's visibility for your programs. There's support for it. There's funding for it.
PBIS is an everyday word from our superintendent all the way down. They have seen the data, and they've seen the evidence for PBIS written into our district-wide plan.
That kind of support is huge so that we know that it's not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan thing. Another benefit of having it be district-wide is accountability. There’s a shared culture and shared value across school sites and across leaders.
They know that this is how we do things. It's just part of the expectations. One thing I love is when I'm getting together with all of my site principals it leads to really rich conversations between the site teams.
They can then collaborate and say, “Oh, this is what we're doing in our program, and this is what we're doing here.” There is a sense of stealing ideas and sharing ideas among the district leaders.
For larger districts and larger schools, a lot of the time it's this kind of year-long training process for every tier of PBIS. So it might be four days, four full days where the team is trained, and you're building up one aspect of your PBIS program at a time.
Then they go back to their sites and get feedback from the staff. Then start by just doing one thing at a time. Then they might come back a couple of months later to get more information and do that process again.
For our smaller programs, I feel really fortunate, because I can customize the training. So I can say, “Hey, we're just gonna do a training for two hours, and build our rubric,” and then roll that out. Next, we'll come back next month, and then we'll work on our progressive discipline matrix, and go from there.
There are a couple of different ways that you can do that initial training piece. PBIS training never stops, because our students change, our context changes, our handbooks and our systems, and our practices always change based on what the needs are.
For example, in the programs that I coach, we still do formal PBIS boosters every year and we incorporate training into our school-wide PBIS meetings.
If there's a new evidence-based practice that they haven't used before, then we'll do little pieces like that. The training doesn't stop when you're looking at your data and saying, “Okay, here's kind of where we need to focus on to build our skills.”
You know what they teamwork makes the dream work. These articles have been written by the wonderful members of our team.
Kim Wood is a behavior specialist and PBIS coach at the Placer County Office of Education in Northern California. She is a board-certified behavior analyst that has worked in the field for almost thirty years. She is also acting as a PBIS Regional Coach and Trainer supporting different school districts of all sizes throughout Northern California.
Kim joined Jordan and Hannah on the podcast to dive into the specifics of utilizing PBIS at the district level.
Well, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports are really a framework. It’s a framework for organizing your systems, practices, and data so that you can get the best outcomes for all of your students.
We talk about it as a three-tiered framework. It also works that way with staff too. This is the rulebook for how the staff operates as a team. For example, this is how we collect data or this is how we have our ongoing meetings.
The practices within PBIS are the things that the staff do for kids to support kids from a prevention level or response level. All those things are outlined and those are evidence-based practices to meet everybody's needs.
Next, we then have the data. That's one of my favorite parts. What are the important data points that we need to capture, measure, and monitor so that we know that we're getting to where we want to get to? The 10,000-foot view of PBIS is that it's this framework that has to have all those three parts: systems, practices, and data.
It is also applied as a framework for students too. All students are at tier one, so when we talk about a tier one approach, those are the systems and practices that we have in place for all of our kids.
The general logic of PBIS points in your school is that if you're doing your tier-one practices with fidelity, then it’s going to meet the social, and emotional behavioral needs, of most of your kids. It should be meeting the needs of about 80% of your students.
You're going to have some of your students who need a little bit of additional support. That might be 15 to 20% of your student population which requires a little bit of an additional boost. We're talking about shorter-term interventions that are easy to deploy quickly, but that provide additional opportunities for skill teaching, practice, reminders, and feedback.
All of that is to hopefully meet those identified tier-two needs for some of your kids.
Then when we look at tier three, that's where we talk about the few students.
2 to 5% of your student body might have more intensive needs. We need to connect them with more individualized interventions. Such as behavior intervention plans, counseling or IEPs, wraparounds, or things along those lines.
There was a huge decrease in suspensions for our district. There’s been a focus on other means of correction. We really make sure that we're doing our tier-one practices like teaching acknowledgment and making sure we have consistent responses to unexpected behavior.
We've seen in our programs, a huge increase in the amount of instructional minutes that the students are in the classroom for. So before, even if we weren't suspending a student, maybe they were getting sent out of class for a reset a lot.
So several years ago, I compared the average number of minutes that kids were out of class, and the drop that we saw was huge.
We see at least a correlational increase in academic achievement along with that. We have seen this county-wide as well as regionally. We provide services for students who are expelled from their local school districts.
County-wide, more and more districts have been receiving training and implementing PBIS. We've seen fewer expulsions. Our student body has probably been chopped in half over the last several years at our expelled site for students.
As far as school climate, we see improvements over time with the school culture surveys that we do every year. So things like:
Our scores have been increasing and have been maintained at a really high level. We have district-wide goals which are just maintenance goals to keep our school climate survey scores at this positive level that they've now been at for a long time.
It always morphs over time, based on the needs of the student body. But when we're talking about tier-one strategies, we look at evidence-based practices in the classroom.
Each classroom has its expectations clearly posted and clearly taught because kids aren't mind readers. They need to know what the teacher expects.
When it comes to getting out of your seat, should I raise my hand? Do I need my laptop for this class? Then we also use pre-corrections.
So if I know this is an area where not all the kids are gonna get it, I'm gonna remind them or pre-correct before the error can happen ahead of time.
Then we look at different instructional strategies. We really kind of blend it with our instructional coaching. Those aren't two separate things. We talk about how engaging instruction is your biggest tool against problem behavior.
If the kids are acting out, or they're disengaged, I need to look at maybe changing what I'm doing with instruction.
The first is that if you have support from a top down, there's visibility for your programs. There's support for it. There's funding for it.
PBIS is an everyday word from our superintendent all the way down. They have seen the data, and they've seen the evidence for PBIS written into our district-wide plan.
That kind of support is huge so that we know that it's not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan thing. Another benefit of having it be district-wide is accountability. There’s a shared culture and shared value across school sites and across leaders.
They know that this is how we do things. It's just part of the expectations. One thing I love is when I'm getting together with all of my site principals it leads to really rich conversations between the site teams.
They can then collaborate and say, “Oh, this is what we're doing in our program, and this is what we're doing here.” There is a sense of stealing ideas and sharing ideas among the district leaders.
For larger districts and larger schools, a lot of the time it's this kind of year-long training process for every tier of PBIS. So it might be four days, four full days where the team is trained, and you're building up one aspect of your PBIS program at a time.
Then they go back to their sites and get feedback from the staff. Then start by just doing one thing at a time. Then they might come back a couple of months later to get more information and do that process again.
For our smaller programs, I feel really fortunate, because I can customize the training. So I can say, “Hey, we're just gonna do a training for two hours, and build our rubric,” and then roll that out. Next, we'll come back next month, and then we'll work on our progressive discipline matrix, and go from there.
There are a couple of different ways that you can do that initial training piece. PBIS training never stops, because our students change, our context changes, our handbooks and our systems, and our practices always change based on what the needs are.
For example, in the programs that I coach, we still do formal PBIS boosters every year and we incorporate training into our school-wide PBIS meetings.
If there's a new evidence-based practice that they haven't used before, then we'll do little pieces like that. The training doesn't stop when you're looking at your data and saying, “Okay, here's kind of where we need to focus on to build our skills.”
Kim Wood is a behavior specialist and PBIS coach at the Placer County Office of Education in Northern California. She is a board-certified behavior analyst that has worked in the field for almost thirty years. She is also acting as a PBIS Regional Coach and Trainer supporting different school districts of all sizes throughout Northern California.
Kim joined Jordan and Hannah on the podcast to dive into the specifics of utilizing PBIS at the district level.
Well, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports are really a framework. It’s a framework for organizing your systems, practices, and data so that you can get the best outcomes for all of your students.
We talk about it as a three-tiered framework. It also works that way with staff too. This is the rulebook for how the staff operates as a team. For example, this is how we collect data or this is how we have our ongoing meetings.
The practices within PBIS are the things that the staff do for kids to support kids from a prevention level or response level. All those things are outlined and those are evidence-based practices to meet everybody's needs.
Next, we then have the data. That's one of my favorite parts. What are the important data points that we need to capture, measure, and monitor so that we know that we're getting to where we want to get to? The 10,000-foot view of PBIS is that it's this framework that has to have all those three parts: systems, practices, and data.
It is also applied as a framework for students too. All students are at tier one, so when we talk about a tier one approach, those are the systems and practices that we have in place for all of our kids.
The general logic of PBIS points in your school is that if you're doing your tier-one practices with fidelity, then it’s going to meet the social, and emotional behavioral needs, of most of your kids. It should be meeting the needs of about 80% of your students.
You're going to have some of your students who need a little bit of additional support. That might be 15 to 20% of your student population which requires a little bit of an additional boost. We're talking about shorter-term interventions that are easy to deploy quickly, but that provide additional opportunities for skill teaching, practice, reminders, and feedback.
All of that is to hopefully meet those identified tier-two needs for some of your kids.
Then when we look at tier three, that's where we talk about the few students.
2 to 5% of your student body might have more intensive needs. We need to connect them with more individualized interventions. Such as behavior intervention plans, counseling or IEPs, wraparounds, or things along those lines.
There was a huge decrease in suspensions for our district. There’s been a focus on other means of correction. We really make sure that we're doing our tier-one practices like teaching acknowledgment and making sure we have consistent responses to unexpected behavior.
We've seen in our programs, a huge increase in the amount of instructional minutes that the students are in the classroom for. So before, even if we weren't suspending a student, maybe they were getting sent out of class for a reset a lot.
So several years ago, I compared the average number of minutes that kids were out of class, and the drop that we saw was huge.
We see at least a correlational increase in academic achievement along with that. We have seen this county-wide as well as regionally. We provide services for students who are expelled from their local school districts.
County-wide, more and more districts have been receiving training and implementing PBIS. We've seen fewer expulsions. Our student body has probably been chopped in half over the last several years at our expelled site for students.
As far as school climate, we see improvements over time with the school culture surveys that we do every year. So things like:
Our scores have been increasing and have been maintained at a really high level. We have district-wide goals which are just maintenance goals to keep our school climate survey scores at this positive level that they've now been at for a long time.
It always morphs over time, based on the needs of the student body. But when we're talking about tier-one strategies, we look at evidence-based practices in the classroom.
Each classroom has its expectations clearly posted and clearly taught because kids aren't mind readers. They need to know what the teacher expects.
When it comes to getting out of your seat, should I raise my hand? Do I need my laptop for this class? Then we also use pre-corrections.
So if I know this is an area where not all the kids are gonna get it, I'm gonna remind them or pre-correct before the error can happen ahead of time.
Then we look at different instructional strategies. We really kind of blend it with our instructional coaching. Those aren't two separate things. We talk about how engaging instruction is your biggest tool against problem behavior.
If the kids are acting out, or they're disengaged, I need to look at maybe changing what I'm doing with instruction.
The first is that if you have support from a top down, there's visibility for your programs. There's support for it. There's funding for it.
PBIS is an everyday word from our superintendent all the way down. They have seen the data, and they've seen the evidence for PBIS written into our district-wide plan.
That kind of support is huge so that we know that it's not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan thing. Another benefit of having it be district-wide is accountability. There’s a shared culture and shared value across school sites and across leaders.
They know that this is how we do things. It's just part of the expectations. One thing I love is when I'm getting together with all of my site principals it leads to really rich conversations between the site teams.
They can then collaborate and say, “Oh, this is what we're doing in our program, and this is what we're doing here.” There is a sense of stealing ideas and sharing ideas among the district leaders.
For larger districts and larger schools, a lot of the time it's this kind of year-long training process for every tier of PBIS. So it might be four days, four full days where the team is trained, and you're building up one aspect of your PBIS program at a time.
Then they go back to their sites and get feedback from the staff. Then start by just doing one thing at a time. Then they might come back a couple of months later to get more information and do that process again.
For our smaller programs, I feel really fortunate, because I can customize the training. So I can say, “Hey, we're just gonna do a training for two hours, and build our rubric,” and then roll that out. Next, we'll come back next month, and then we'll work on our progressive discipline matrix, and go from there.
There are a couple of different ways that you can do that initial training piece. PBIS training never stops, because our students change, our context changes, our handbooks and our systems, and our practices always change based on what the needs are.
For example, in the programs that I coach, we still do formal PBIS boosters every year and we incorporate training into our school-wide PBIS meetings.
If there's a new evidence-based practice that they haven't used before, then we'll do little pieces like that. The training doesn't stop when you're looking at your data and saying, “Okay, here's kind of where we need to focus on to build our skills.”
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