How a Sixth-Grade Teacher at Bowmar Elementary Made PBIS Data Work for Her Classroom

Building the Rubric Together

Bowmar’s implementation started with the whole staff sitting down to define expectations. The team identified every area of the school where students spend time – cafeteria, hallway, restroom, recess, auditorium, special area classes, and regular classrooms – and set clear expectations for each. Visuals were posted at every location. At a schoolwide assembly, administrators walked students through the rules for each space.

The rubric categories were customized to fit Bowmar’s culture. As a Leader in Me school, they built in a Seven Habits section so teachers could award points when they observed students practicing habits like Think Win-Win or Seek First to Understand. They added a category for moments of excellence – students exceeding expectations in any setting. They also created infraction categories for behaviors that needed tracking on the negative side.

The customization was iterative. After collecting data for several weeks, the team reviewed which categories were being used heavily and which were being scrolled past. If a behavior was rarely tracked, they removed it. The rubric became a living document, refined by real usage rather than hypothetical planning. As Wood put it, they were always learning when it came to using technology, and that was perfectly fine.

Ten Points a Day

Wood’s sixth-grade team made a collective decision: every student should have the opportunity to earn at least ten positive points per day. That number became the baseline. It was not a ceiling – students who went above and beyond regularly surpassed it – but it established a floor that ensured every child received recognition for meeting basic expectations.

To hit that baseline consistently, Wood focused on only one to three behaviors at a time. Each Monday, she told her students exactly what she was looking for that week. One week it might be how students entered the classroom. Another week, cleaning up after lunch and maintaining appropriate volume in the cafeteria. Another, playing cooperatively at recess without coming in to tattle. Narrowing the focus made the system manageable and gave students a clear target.

Consistency was the hardest part. Wood set reminders on her phone at the beginning and end of every class period. She also assigned a student in each class the job of politely reminding her to give points. LiveSchool lived on her phone – back pocket or desk – and she kept it pulled up on her J-Touch interactive display when she was not actively teaching on it. Students tall enough to reach the screen could tap on it to check their standing for the week.

The top students in Wood’s classes had accumulated over 1,500 and 1,600 points in the first two nine-week periods – well above the roughly 1,100 they would have earned simply by hitting the 10-point daily baseline. Those numbers gave Wood a concrete way to recognize high performers, whether through a call to the principal, a positive phone call home, or public acknowledgment in class.

Houses and Free Shirt Fridays

Bowmar grouped students into colored houses – black, red, green, pink, gray, white, and several more. Every point a student earned individually also counted toward their house total. The principal displayed house standings on a TV in the hallway, right by the boys’ bathroom, so students saw the leaderboard every time they walked past.

The house with the most points each week earned a House Spirit Day on Monday. At a uniform school, that meant the winning house got to wear their house color instead of the standard uniform. Teachers dressed in that color too. Wood described watching her sixth graders spot their kindergarten buddies wearing the same lime green and light up with excitement – a connection across grade levels that the house system made visible.

The sixth-grade team added its own layer: Free Shirt Fridays. Any student with 50 or more positive points and fewer than 10 negative points from Friday through Thursday could wear a free shirt with jeans the following Friday. Wood said there was nothing cooler to a sixth grader than coming to school in a new shirt. Students who found themselves at 48 points on a Tuesday would find a way to earn those last two by Thursday afternoon.

Schoolwide PBIS parties happened once every nine weeks. The threshold for the current quarter was 550 positive points, calculated based on the number of school days and the 10-point daily baseline. No office or bus referrals were allowed. The events ranged from glow parties with neon-painted shirts to tailgates with hamburgers and hot dogs, kickball tournaments at a local high school, sock hops for the younger students, and guided paint parties led by parent volunteers.

Data She Never Had Before

The shift from paper to digital gave Wood something she candidly admitted she had always struggled with: the ability to assess her own data. She could now pull up behavior trends for her homeroom, her grade level, or the entire school. She could see which positive behaviors were being reinforced most and which negative behaviors were spiking. She could identify where problems were concentrated – cafeteria, recess, a specific classroom – and bring that information to team meetings.

For individual students, the data replaced guesswork. Wood no longer had to keep a mental tally of who was struggling. LiveSchool surfaced the patterns automatically. If a student’s negative points were climbing, Wood could decide whether to involve the school counselor, call a parent, or simply check in. The data also revealed students who were quietly excelling – kids who might never cause a disruption but whose consistent positive behavior deserved recognition they had not been getting.

The administrative view offered its own insights. Wood could see which teachers were giving the most positive points and which were logging the most negatives. That data opened the door to pairing teachers together – someone with strong classroom management coaching someone who was struggling – without relying on subjective impressions.

Ninety-Eight Percent of Families

At the beginning of the year, Bowmar sent home LiveSchool parent sign-up notes. Ninety-eight percent of families created accounts. Students in Wood’s classroom could check their points on their Chromebooks during free time, seeing exactly why they received each positive or negative mark. Parents received the same visibility through weekly recaps.

That communication channel changed the nature of behavior conversations at home. A parent could see that their child earned three positive points for listening in science but lost a point for being off task in the cafeteria – specific, timestamped, and tied to a teacher. It replaced the vague report-card comments and end-of-quarter surprises with a running record that both sides could reference.

Wood acknowledged that the system was not effortless. Giving points took time, even if only a minute or two per batch. She kept the LiveSchool categories collapsed on her phone screen and expanded only the one she needed, which sped up the process. For teachers who found the workflow slow, she recommended the same approach she used: set a phone alarm, assign a student reminder, and keep the app visible. The consistency, she said, was what made everything else work – the data, the rewards, the culture, the parent connection. Without consistent input, none of it held together.