I'm not sure your experience with PBIS but I've had some really positive experiences and seen some real growth in students. In this video, I share how a school could set up PBIS; in a later video I will show you how I run it in my classroom. I will say that there are a lot of ways that this can go wrong but there are also many ways it could go right. I want to start with things that have hinder it's success.
Presentation is key when sharing with your teachers. As a teacher if it feels like one more thing on my plate, its going to be hard to be energetic about it as our plates are already overflowing. It's important to have a plan for not just how you are going to start but how you are going to continue to grow in the process. When creating this plan, please include the teachers since they are the main ones that will be implementing the process. When the plan wasn't thought out or the majority of the work feel to the teachers, I noticed it failed at those schools or lost momentum quickly. There is also the positive side.
The best and most successful way I have seen to start the process is with paper. I've been at 2 schools that have started with paper and it has gone well. Here's an example, we were given a stack of great job papers and asked to hand out 3 a day for any reason we wanted. Yes, this is not specific but it got the students to buy in. Students could receive a paper for holding a door, bringing a pencil, or anything we felt was positive. After a few weeks of this, we focused on student behavior in the classroom and started to only reward for that behavior. Why did this process work? As a teacher I had to hand out papers, which was easy and took all of 30 seconds. My only other involvement was if a student wanted to turn it in for a lunch pass, which meant I had the student during lunch block, this occurred all of 3 times in a full year. All of the other prizes, drawings, and rewards were handed out by the office or people over seeing the process. It was easy for me as a teacher and the prizes were enticing for students.
What about the prizes? You might be surprised by how many local businesses will step up and help with prizes. You could also keep it simple, at one school we had a monthly drawing and pep rally. You could enter your tickets into the box for the drawing, pep rally, or both depending on how many you had. The monthly drawing was always an unknown prize sometimes it was something simple like a 6 pack of Gatorade other times it was a ticket to the Friday night football game which is huge at this school. For the pep rally tickets, names were drawn and those students were the participants in the events at the pep rally.
If you want to see how I specifically use this in my classroom, that video will be coming soon.
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