Creating a successful PBIS program

 

 

This last school year, a few co-workers and I decided to create a PBIS program for our students. It was pretty successful overall and I wanted to go through some of the different steps on how we developed it. Our program is far from perfect and I will be making updates to this blog as we continue to develop our PBIS program.

Survey

The first thing we did was we created a survey for our students to take. The questions that were included in the survey were if they saw problematic behaviors in class, if they were distracting, how we may be able to fix it and what types of rewards they would like as an incentive for positive behavior. From our results we saw that many students thought that a reward system would be beneficial to our program and they gave us many great ideas for rewards.
From the results from our surveys, we were than able to give something concrete to our administrators so they could see that this was a problem in our program and that we needed to address it. We asked for a budget and our administrator asked us to contact our parent's club. We wrote a nice letter to them and than we had our budget.

Posters/Expectations

After we had the okay to proceed from our administrator and a budget, we than created posters that defined our expectations in different settings. We decided to create a 3 bees poster, where it defined our expectations in a simple 3 step expectations poster. The 3 expectations he students were expected to follow were to be respectful, be safe and to be responsible. We than defined what that meant in the hallways, in the classroom and in the lunch room. We also created our very own titan tickets that were to be given out to the students for good behavior and they could redeem for rewards.
After our posters and tickets were created we had a large congregation to explain the brand new program to our students. We told them about our new expectations and how they could earn rewards. We also gave out raffle prizes during our meeting to get the kids excited, which they were.

Here are two examples of the posters we would use to show that we have specific expectations in different settings:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rewards

Overall a lot of the reward we used were food. We would go around on Fridays and the students would be called out to buy different items from the cart. We had small candy, larger candy, and little dollar store trinkets. Than every other week we would have a big prize. These prizes would be something like going outside for an hour, playing board games, going to the gym or watching a movie. These rewards would be expensive for the students but quite cost efficient for us. In the future we are planning on adding more "games" to our PBIS program. We have thought of games like the "Price Is Right" or "Family Feud" where students would need a certain amount of tickets to play in the game where they could possibly earn more rewards.
As a last reward, we wanted it to be extremely rewarding, so I being the dedicated teacher I am I let the students shave my head. The students loved it and it was a group experience at the end of the year.

 

 

Using the cart/roles

Another aspect of using a PBIS cart is that you can make it academic and a job readiness skill. Our students were given specific jobs each week that they were supposed to do to maintain the cart. The jobs included:

•  Make the signs for our cart
•  Stocking the cart 
• Greeters at the door to tell the teacher the cart was there
• A ticket counter
• A cashier who gave out the rewards

The PBIS program also engaged our students in the curriculum by having them keep as a checking book of their tickets. They would count them every week and write down the amount and the difference from the week before.

 

Quote of the week:

 

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

 

-Dr. Seuss

 

Website of the month:

If you are like thousands of other teachers out there you may feel that your students are constantly coming to you with a never ending supply of personal issues. Some more serious than others. First take a breath and realize that you are only one person and won't be able to solve every problem that your students have. We do what we can for our students and we try to intervene when we can help but there is always more work to be done. This is why I wanted to share this really helpful site with all of you. It is called 7 cups of tea and it has trained listeners to listen to peoples problems. It will set you up on a message link to talk to someone who is trained to listen to peoples problems and give them advice. If a student needs a little extra guidance and is not in an emergency type of situation than this would be a perfect resource for them to use. Also as a side note, they also are trained to listen to people talk about work stress;)