How Langston Chapel Used Monthly Focus Areas to Rebuild Teacher Practice
Langston Chapel Middle School faced a common challenge: PBIS was new to the district, teacher turnover was high, and consistency was elusive. PBIS Coach Adrien Malone and her team developed a pragmatic system of monthly behavior focus areas, morning announcement reminders, PBIS trivia with student voice, and a deliberate soft rollout of LiveSchool that prioritized verbal praise before digital points.
“You earned that point. Whatever it was, doing something else doesn't take away the fact that you just did an unbelievably wonderful thing.”
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The Challenge: New Initiative, High Turnover
Langston Chapel Middle School is a Title I campus in Bulloch County, Georgia, where many students come from homes where basic needs are the priority. The district launched a PBIS initiative and told campuses to implement it, but left the specifics up to each school. For Langston Chapel, that meant building everything from the ground up – expectations, rubrics, incentives, and a system for tracking it all.
The biggest obstacle was not the students. It was teacher turnover. Every year, significant staff changes meant the PBIS team had to restart the onboarding process from scratch. New teachers arrived unfamiliar with the school's expectations, the rubric, and the tools. Consistency – the single most important factor in any behavior system – was constantly under threat.
Malone and her committee needed an approach that was simple enough for new teachers to pick up quickly, specific enough to be actionable, and engaging enough that students would hold the adults accountable. What they developed was a system built around monthly focus areas, morning announcements, and a deliberate strategy of verbal praise before digital tracking.
Chapel Way Expectations and the Behavior Rubric
The school's expectations are called "Chapel Way" – the fundamentals of positive language, appropriate peer interaction, leadership skills, responsibility, and respect. These were not pulled from thin air. The PBIS committee analyzed years of behavior referrals and write-ups to identify the most common issues, then built the rubric around three categories: Respectful, Responsible, and Leadership.
The rubric was designed to be realistic. Nowhere does it say "be quiet in the hallway" or "be silent during transitions," because with 700-plus students moving through the building at the same time, silence is an unrealistic expectation. Instead, the standard is "appropriate language" – it can be a little loud, but it needs to be school-appropriate. As Malone describes it, that pragmatism is what made teachers trust the system. They knew the expectations were not grasping at straws but were very intentional, based on real data about what was actually happening in the building.
Each category has specific, observable behaviors that teachers can recognize and reward. The specificity matters: rather than asking teachers to award points for "being good," the rubric tells them exactly what to look for – pushing in chairs, cleaning up after yourself, using respectful language with peers. That precision reduces ambiguity and makes the system usable even for teachers in their first week on the job.
Monthly Focus Areas: One Thing at a Time
The committee's most effective innovation was simple: focus on one rubric category per month. January was Respectful. February was Responsibility. March was Leadership. The student who earned the most LiveSchool points in that month's category – and the teacher who awarded the most – both received a special reward.
The monthly focus solved the teacher onboarding problem. Instead of asking new staff to track everything at once, the morning announcements told them exactly what to look for that month. A teacher who heard the announcement saying the focus was responsibility and that students could show it by pushing in chairs and cleaning up after themselves knew precisely what behaviors to watch for and reward.
Students responded by holding teachers accountable. They would approach their teachers directly: "Did you see me push in that chair? I'm getting points for that, right?" That dynamic – students reminding adults to use the system – is the strongest indicator of a healthy PBIS implementation, and the monthly focus made it happen by simplifying the ask for everyone in the building.
PBIS Trivia and Student Voice
When the PBIS committee needed a way to ensure students actually knew the school's expectations – not just that the posters were on the wall, but that the content was internalized – one team member proposed trivia. Twice a week, a Google Classroom form quizzed students on expectations for specific settings: What is the correct expectation for the restroom? What would you add or remove from the hallway rules?
Students who got a perfect score had their names entered into a raffle wheel for prizes. The trivia accomplished two things simultaneously: it verified student knowledge in a way that felt fun rather than punitive, and it incorporated student voice by asking what they would change. One response that circulated through the staff room: for the hallway, a student suggested the expectation should be "walk with purpose – walk like you've got somewhere to be."
The trivia was brand new, launched mid-year as an experiment. The PBIS committee had debated how to foster genuine conversations about expectations without policing them, and trivia emerged as the answer. As Malone put it, the team decided they wouldn't know until they tried it – and it made a difference immediately.
The Soft Rollout: Verbal Praise Before Digital Points
Most schools introduce their behavior platform at the start of the year alongside every other new initiative. Langston Chapel did the opposite. When LiveSchool was purchased, only a handful of staff members knew it existed. The school deliberately withheld the tool and focused the entire first phase on one thing: positive verbal acknowledgment.
The reasoning was strategic. PBIS was already new to the school and the district. Adding a digital tracking platform on top of pre-planning and all the other start-of-year demands would overwhelm teachers. More importantly, the committee wanted to establish the habit of relationship-building conversations before attaching a point system to them. Teachers needed to practice noticing and naming positive behaviors verbally before they could do it meaningfully in an app.
When LiveSchool was eventually introduced, teachers who had already been having those conversations found it natural. The tool enhanced what they were already doing rather than creating a new behavior. And students, who had been hearing verbal praise for weeks, understood the context: the points were a reflection of the positive interactions that were already happening, not a replacement for them.
Data, Correlations, and Baby Steps
Malone pulls all the LiveSchool reports for the campus, using the Insight reports to filter by category, grade level, and teacher. The data reveals patterns that would otherwise stay hidden. When a grade level has low LiveSchool usage and high behavior referrals, the correlation is visible. When individual teachers have zero LiveSchool activity alongside high referral counts, the implication is clear: if a teacher is not awarding points, they are probably not having the positive conversations either.
The committee does not use this data punitively. Instead, the PBIS team members assigned to each grade level – two per hallway – use it to provide reminders and support to their colleagues. The approach is peer-to-peer rather than top-down, which keeps the culture collaborative rather than surveillance-driven.
Malone's message to other PBIS coaches is rooted in patience: baby steps. Success is not always a dramatic transformation. It is a student volunteering to help with newspapers because he genuinely wants to. It is kids filling out a trivia form because they are excited about it. It is those small moments, accumulated over time, that signal the culture is shifting. As Malone reflects, those moments do not happen every day and they do not happen all at once, but learning to find those little moments where things are working is what sustains the work.
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