Sometimes schools just need a little push to help them maintain their schoolwide positive behavior support (SWPBS) efforts. I often get to meet with high schools that have great support. They receive excellent training and coaching from outside of their school. These schools are just struggling to find a few additional supports to meet their specific needs.
Image from Flickr Creative Commons
I recently had several requests from schools about specific tools to help secondary schools address implementation barriers. As I put these items into a list, I thought they would make a useful blog. So, here we go..
Problem – How do we address buy-in if we had a false start?
From my experience and research, I have found that starting with open ended, qualitative interviews or focus groups are a great way to find out what problems you can solve in the setting. If you focus on solving someone’s problem, rather than selling a package, they might find your suggestions more useful. In sales, this is called “qualifying the customer.”
These are the focus group questions I use with staff to work on buy-in (link).
Next, I move on to a self-assessment of some kind, like the Effective Behavior Support Self-Assessment (link), that can help you gain staff perspectives on their needs. This tool can be completed online using PBISApps (link).
We also have a also few tools and resources related to developing buy-in in high school settings.
Blog on Gaining Traction for PBIS Buy-In (link)
Blog on a Process for Establishing Buy-In (link)
Blog on Preventing Sabotage of Buy-In (link)
Additionally, Kevin Filter at the University of Minnesota Makato has a very good tool for determining the current level of buy-in for schoolwide positive behavior support (see PBIS Action and Commitment Tool (PBIS-ACT) (link)
One last thought. Sometimes we need to re-brand. You might consider calling your initiative by another name – school climate, school spirit, school culture. You need to keep the components of the SWPBS, but having a new name might help you hit the restart button.
Problem – We have staff who will take over our training and negatively impact the thinking of the larger group.
One way we have prevented this kind of contagion is to break large groups into smaller ones using circuit training. For example, in one large middle school, we ran three circuits of about 30 teachers each. These sessions included teaching expectations, acknowledging students, and student behavior redirection strategies. Each group spent 45 minutes on a topic, then moved to the next area.
This document is an example of our circuit training approach (Word doc).
Problem – Non-classroom settings – We see a lot of problem behavior in our non-classroom settings.
These problems include students walking in the hallway and also areas where students are not supervised and intimidate other students.
The Effective Behavior Support Self-Assessment Survey (SAS) (link) mentioned above has a section dedicated to non-classroom areas. The part of the tool that deals with non-classroom settings, along with using office discipline referral data, can be used to develop an action plan to identify problems and create solutions in non-classroom areas.
This article is an example of how to use the SAS to address non-classroom settings in a high school setting (link).
Problem – Our school board or local school council have misconceptions about multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and SWPBS.
We have two articles that were written specifically for school boards or local school councils. Both materials were designed to provide people without formal training on education with information about the importance of schoolwide approaches. One article focuses on MTSS (link) and the other addresses SWPBS (link)
Problem – school climate is an area for improvement for our school, but other than office discipline referrals, are there different ways to measure areas for growth and development?
My favorite tool for getting a snapshot of your school climate is the School Safety Survey (SSS, link). I like this tool for two reasons. First, the SSS provides insights into the overall environment of your school from multiple perspectives. Second, the instrument relies on a small, stratified random sample of your community (including students). Asking fewer people to complete the tool still allows you to obtain valid and reliable data, without overburdening your community with data collection. This tools is also online at PBISApps (link).
Problem – I have trouble finding information about implementing SWPBS in high schools in general.
We recently put together a blog with resources (e.g., articles, examples, presentations) that are specific to high school implementation of SWPBS (link).
I hope these resources help your school(s). What tools do you recommend to solve any of the problems mentioned in this blog? Or what are some of the implementation issues your are finding that were not mentioned here? I would love to hear from you. Feel free here to post your thoughts here or send an email to hbohano@luc.edu.