Tier 1

Examples of School-wide expectations:

Universal Interventions— All Students

General academic and behavior instruction and support provided to all students in all settings.

School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports (PBIS) is a prevention model. It is based on the premise that all students can benefit from well implemented, evidence-based practices for improving student behavior. School-wide PBIS provides a comprehensive framework that can be used by any school to design their own system of behavioral supports for all students. It also provides informed decision- making, based upon data analysis that guides the process of assessing student needs and providing additional levels of behavioral support to students in need.

School-wide PBIS provides a positive focus to encouraging desirable student behaviors. A set of universal expectations for behavior, positively stated, are established for all students in all locations of the school. These expectations generally promote core values such as respect, responsibility, and safety. Interventions and strategies are implemented to teach and reinforce these expectations. These include:

• Periodic direct instruction in specific student behaviors that demonstrate respect, responsibility, and safety in various locations in the school.
• Generous quantities of positive adult/teacher attention and other kinds of reinforcement to students for demonstrating positive behaviors, especially specific behavior expectations identified by the school.
• Predictable consequences for behavior infractions that are delivered consistently by all staff in a professional manner throughout the entire school. Consequences are not primarily punitive in nature; they are an opportunity for the student to learn from his or her mistakes and to accept responsibility for the choices that he or she made. The consequences are provided on a continuum matched to the intensity of the misbehavior.

A PBIS school incorporates a few fundamental practices that are crucial to sustaining the program over time. These include:

• The establishment of a representative, school-based PBIS team with a strong administrative presence and support. The PBIS team uses the “framework” of school-wide PBIS to design that school’s unique set of practices.
• PBIS activities are embedded into existing school activities such as school improvement and student assistance teams.

The school establishes a system for using behavioral data (e.g., office discipline referrals or some other method of incident reporting). These data are analyzed and used to make data-driven decisions to guide the design and implementation of additional behavior supports, especially at the targeted and intensive levels.