Our middle and high schools are participating in an important district initiative. It is called Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS). Middle and High School parents and guardians were recently e-mailed an invitation from SchoolMint HERO, our software platform for monitoring student PBIS progress.
What is Positive Behavior Interventions and Support?
PBIS is a process for creating safer and more effective schools. It is a systems approach to enhancing the capacity of schools to educate all children by developing research-based, school-wide, and classroom behavior support systems. The process focuses on improving a school’s ability to teach and support positive behavior for all students. Rather than a prescribed program, PBIS provides systems for schools to design, implement, and evaluate effective school-wide, classroom, non-classroom, and student specific plans. PBIS includes school-wide procedures and processes intended for all students and all staff in all settings. PBIS is not a program or a curriculum. It is a team-based process for systemic problem solving, planning, and evaluation. It is an approach to creating a safe and productive learning environment where teachers can teach and all students can learn.
What is PBIS at WHMS & WHHS?
Both MS and HS staff and students will be working on identifying and adopting a unified set of behavior expectations. These guidelines will define our shared expectations for behavior in our schools and you will soon see these posted throughout our buildings. As part of our PBIS process, teachers and other staff members will use evidence-based practices to increase student learning and decrease classroom disruptions. To keep students on target in a positive manner, we do the following when teaching academics and behavior:
Constantly teach and refer to our school-wide expectations.
Provide students with more praise than correction.
Talk to students with respect using positive voice tone.
Actively engage everyone in the class during instruction.
Use pre-correcting, prompting, and redirecting as we teach.
Look for the positive first and provide positive, immediate, frequent, and explicit feedback.
If you have questions about Positive Behavior Support, please feel free to contact your child’s teacher. We look forward to a wonderful year of teaching your child.
*Western Heights elementary schools utilize Class DOJO points for their PBIS system.
