A Six Step Plan for Implementing School-Wide PBS
Transcript of October 23, 2008 webinar
Dr. Terrance M. Scott and Dr. Peter Alter
University of Louisville
Educational Research Newsletter

©2008 Educational Research Newsletter

Note: This transcript is provided for your convenience. Minor edits have been

madefor clarity. An ellipsis is used when words or sentences have been omitted.

This transcript has not been reviewed by the presenters. Please refer to the recording

if you have questions about any points in this text.

Larry Sterne

Good afternoon to those of you on Eastern or Central time and good morning to those of you in the Mountain States, West Coast, and Alaska. My name is Larry Sterne. I’m publisher of Educational Research Newsletter and the host of today’s webinar – “A Six Step Plan for Implementing School Wide Positive Behavior Support.” Today’s presenters are professors Terrance Scott and Peter Alter of the University of Louisville.

Terry is a professor of emotional and behavioral disorders and director of Special Educational Programs at the University of Louisville. He has conducted more than 300 trainings throughout the United States and Canada and is the editor of the professional journal Beyond Behavior. He is also a partner in the federally funded National Center for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support.

Peter is assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning. He has also made numerous presentations on school-wide systems of Positive Behavior throughout the United States and Canada,many with Terry. Before joining the university he was abehavior resource teacher in Florida supervising a three-classroom, emotionally handicapped, self-contained unit in Florida.

It is one thing to hear theory and it’s another to see how it has actually worked in practice. Terry and Peter are going to give you some real life examples today at all grade levels to show you how you can make Positive Behavior Support work in your school.

And with that I am going to turn this presentation over to Terry.

Dr. Terrance Scott

Hello and welcome. Thank you all very much for tuning in with us today. It is a beautiful day in Louisville, Kentucky and Peter Alter and I are looking forward to spending a little time with you today talking about some of the work we’ve been doing with Positive Behavior Support. The way we are going to run this is we are going to have a very brief overview of what PBS is, just to kind of give you the logic. and then we are going to spend the vast majority of our time going through a step-by-step. If you are going to do School-Wide Positive Behavior Support in your school what would that look like and how would you do it?

To start with, we always begin looking at it by talking about it in terms of a triangle. That is just a visual for us. The triangle shows us that if any given school is out there and you go in and say to all of the kids: “Hey, let’s all of us walk in the hall,” 80% of the kids will probably from that point forward walk in the hall. There’ll be a group, maybe 15% or so, that forget or weren’t listening in the first place, or don’t understand. Then there’ll be a group that understands, remembers, but chooses not to. What we know is if all we do is sit back and wait for those ones at the top of the triangle, the red ones to show up, they will, but there will be a whole bunch of them. The evidence we have says if you go into your school and instead of waiting for those red ones to show up, focus your time and energy and effort on creating green. So in other words, how can we make that green zone on that triangle go up to 90%, which would mean that the yellow and red zones would have to be cut in half. So how dowe minimize problem behavior by maximizing appropriate behavior? That’s the way we are going to look at it. That is the theory of PBS.

Now, what we are really going to be trying to do is saying how do we build an instructional environment?And for those of us working in schools, those instructional environments could be hallways, or restrooms, or cafeterias, bus stops, playgrounds, locker areas. How do you create an instructional environment where we could predict that kids will be successful more often than they fail? If we could get them to be successful with whatever it is we want them to do at a rate of about four times success to one failure or80% of time being successful, evidence suggests that there is a good chance they will keep doing it and that they will keep doing it without us. So what are the things that we’ve got that we can use to make them successful four times more often than they are not? Well, all of those things come back to good instruction. Teaching them. Showing them. Modeling it. Encouraging them. Reminding them. Prompts and queues within the environment. Adults that are within proximity to be able to say things to them. All of those are things that we can do that increase the probability of success. So we have to keep thinking in our school: How do we create a hallway where the probability of a kid succeeding is 80%? How do we create a cafeteria where the probability of kids doing the things we want is 80%? All of those things that we do for probability are teacher things. It is good instruction. The curriculum we use. How we present it. What the examples are. How many times we remind them. Where we are standing. How we arrange the seating. Those are all things we control. Through the control of those things we control the probability of success.

So PBS is really four simple things: Predicting when your kids will fail, where they’ll fail, what they’ll fail with. So we could say,“I predict our kids will fail in the hallway at 1pm right outside the cafeteria.” Then, question two is “What is the simplest set of things we could do in that cafeteria to make the probability of success 80% or better? Three is “How will all of the adults do the same thing so we are all making the same comments to the kids and we’re all encouraging the same things and we’re all enforcing the same rules?” Four is “Are we monitoring what we are doing to see if it works?”

If we put every kid in our school in that hallway and said we want them all to walk we’d say “OK, when will they not walk?” Those are the times we should do something different. What should we do? We should teach. We should model. We should encourage. We should set up these systems. Will we all agree and do it together? Yes? Take your data; find the kids for whom that is not working. Hopefully that will be a small group – 10% or so. Take that 10% and put them back in box one and say where will that group have problems?When will they have problems? What is something simple that we could do for that group of kids? How will we be consistent with that group and we take data to see if it is working? When we are done taking data with that groupyou’re going to find a small group of kids for whom it’s still not working. That’ll be maybe 3%. For those 3% we’re going to want to go back to box one and do them one at a time. Why is Billy failing? What could we do for Billy? How will we be consistent with Billy? Is it working? How about Sally? Why is not working for Sally? What could we do for Sally? Etcetera.

So we’re going to go through it three different times: A green zone for everybody, a yellow zone for some and a red zone for a few, one at a time. To get this started we are going to start by getting everybody in your school adult-wise to commit that these are the things that they want to do. When we do that commitment these are the things that we ask: Do you have a team of people in your school that can help lead this effort? That team of people should be representative of the staff that you have. So on that team should be someone who represents Gen Ed teachers. Maybe it should be from the younger Gen Ed teachers and the older. Or maybe it should be from the Math Department and the Reading Department. Maybe it should be from some other kind of way you have your school organized.

But are all your teachers represented? Instructional Assistants should be represented. Administrators should be represented. I would like to think that bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and custodians are represented. What you’re going to do on that little team is gather data about your school and say where do kids in our school have problems? What are the kinds of things that the adults in our schools are concerned about? We’re going to talk to them and get all of the adults in our schools to agree that we need to move forward and do things as a team to make it work. So we’re going to set up a little team whose job it is not to do PBS but organize our school to do PBS. So we going to want to go in and going to want to talk to all the adults in the school. We’re going to want to remind them of these kinds of things. PBS is not a curriculum. It’s a framework, which means that we can do anything we want. We can set it up this way or that way. We can collect data in this way or that way. We make the decisions based upon our school. So if your school has problems x, y and z you might choose a certain set of interventions that you all adults think would work. Well, another school might have the same set of problems but decide there’s something different that would be needed. All we want people to remember is that we are all in it together and we make all the decisions. So if you decide to do PBS you don’t automatically do any particular intervention. All you do if you are doing PBS is do those four steps.

What are our predictable problems? What are the simple things we can do about it? How will we be consistent and then, finally, how will we know if it is working or not? We decide what we are going to do. We decide how to evaluate our progress. We decide whether to keep going or leave it sitting there. Those are all decisions that we get to make. Now, finally on this first step, we suggest that you have your entire faculty and staff vote and that you set it up so that you need, a good rule of thumb, 80% of your faculty and staff to vote that they want to do this. If they vote yes,“I want to do this” what they are saying is:

  1. I will do box one. I will tell you when I think our kids will fail.
  2. I will do box two. I will tell you what the simplest logical things we could do to set up an environment where they are successful 80% of the time would be these things. I’ll tell you what I think we should do.
  3. Box three – I agree with whatever decisions we come up with as a school. I’ll follow along because I know that all of us doing the same thing is going to make a bigger impact than each of us doing our own thing.
  4. I commit that we will keep doing whatever it is that we said we’d do until we have data that says it doesn’t work. If the data says that it is working I commit that I will keep doing it.

So in order to move this forward it’s pretty important that you get 80% of the people in your school to agree that those four boxes are important and that they will go along with it. So in other words, we want everybody to agree yes, we believe that doing this as a team is important;we believe prediction and prevention are important,and we’re all going to be involved in doing those things. So I want to, after everyone of these steps, hand it over to my colleague Peter Alter who is going to give you examples from real schools.

Dr. Peter Alter

Thank you Terry. A couple of examples that I feel illustrate what Dr. Scott has covered up until this point. First of all I want to reiterate the idea that when we are talking about developing this system we are talking primarily about targeting common areas first, and by common areas we are talking about hallways, cafeterias, places where students are waiting to get on or off of a bus, areas where there are a number of adults who are responsible for supervision and for making decisions about rules. . . . I was just talking with a teacher earlier this week who mentioned that in his high school what he is seeing is common area problems; fighting, pushing, shoving, running, and yelling are bleeding over into his classroom time. So by targeting these common areas first we have an opportunity to help teachers in their classrooms on a secondary level.

The second thing I want to have you consider is the fact that when we present that triangle with a green, and a yellow, and a red zone we’re cognizant of the fact that students don’t fit into these tidy categories so neatly. That there are students who probably hover between green and yellow and students who hover between yellow and red. Earlier, we heard talking about a group of students who we classify as “at risk.” These are students that are not classified in special education but have been identified as students who could soon fit that criteria. This would be an example of students who are between the yellow and the red zones in regard to their behavior. We realize how important it is to develop those targeted interventions for students in the yellow zone because what the data shows us is that those yellow zones drift up into the red zones so that the red zone becomes larger and ultimately we have more issues rather than less. We were going to implement this in an early childhood center, and they have their own considerations. One of the things they have noticed is that they don’t have problems with a large number of their students. The majority of their students do what they are asked to do, they participate, they don’t engage in disruptive behavior and so they raised the question “Well shouldn’t we just go right to yellow or right to red and to more intensive interventions?” When that was attempted what we found was we were trying a lot of very difficult things before trying a lot more simple things. So when we consider that four tiered or four component slide we’re looking for the simplest ways to target challenging behavior before it occurs. Finally to consider is the issue of buy in.

As Dr. Scott showed we are looking for 80% staff consensus, and I sense that those of you who are participating in this webinar today are probably not the people who are going to be in the other 20%. The 20% who are saying, “Oh, another program that’s being rolled out that I’m going to have to put up with that is going to be implemented for a certain amount of time and then something new will come along.” What we want to consider at this point is the fact that this group that we would call resistors or treatment resistors, we can predictably say that there will be about 20% who fall into that zone either because they weren’t paying attention or becausethey view this as just another headache to try to deal with stuff that they don’t want to deal with.

So what we want to do in that situation is we want to confide in them. We want to identify people who might be resistant to this type of implementation and make them a part of the project. This has been done very successfully. We had a school district in Southern Illinois where they identified a small number of teachers who were going to be resistant to this logic and to this type of framework and what they did was before rolling it out to the faculty as a whole they pulled this smaller group aside and individually talked to them about this idea of PBS and got individual consent before they tried to go forward to get a more faculty-wide consent and it was highly effective. Especially when this smaller group of teachers felt empowered and felt like they were a part of this PBS planning team. So going forward we see some examples of ways that we can draw that smaller group of teachers on board. That we can use simpler logic before we try to put in more complicated interventions and that we can identify the fact that there are going to be a number of students who don’t fit into such a neat category as green, yellow, or red, but rather we want to look at those students as they are.

Whether they are at risk students, whether they’re students who are compliant and fit into the green zone or whether they are at the top of the triangle - the red zone where students typically struggle. We want to make sure we’re going to try the simplest things first before we go forward to the more complex interventions. I’m going to turn it back over to Terry and let him talk about how we go about doing this.

Terrance Scott

You’ll see on your handout a couple of things that you could use. This school-wide behavior survey, very quickly, is just one way you could get the adults in your school to start thinking about what kinds of things would make a difference in your school— if you could change a hallway, if you could change a time in a hallway, etc. Another thing that we can use is—as Peter was talking about, people often say this is going to take us a bunch of time and we’ve already got a million things going on—one of the things you might want to consider is what do you have going on already, and who is involved and what are the outcomes? What we’ve found is generally when we’ve had people do this they can find committees that really duplicate efforts and ones where things could really be taken away from them and given to a PBS group. So there are things to consider as we go through there in terms of making people think this is simpler. The second step, after you get people to actually buy in, is to actually get people to say “OK, here is what we think.” So step two really involves a lot of brainstorming. Where will our kids fail and what is the simplest thing we could do to keep them from failing in that situation again in the future?