PBIS Curriculum

What is School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports?

School-wide PBIS is a multi-tiered framework to make schools more effective places. It establishes a social culture and the behavior supports needed to improve social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes for all students. PBIS is flexible enough to support student, family, and community needs.

Foundational Elements of PBIS

The four critical features of SW-PBIS include:

  • Locally-meaningful and culturally-relevant outcomes

  • Empirically-supported practices

  • Systems to support implementation

  • Data to monitor effective and equitable implementation and to guide decision making.

Outcomes

Setting observable and measurable goals helps schools hold themselves accountable to creating the kind of place where every student succeeds. Schools select the outcomes to target based on data they find meaningful, culturally equitable, and centered on students’ achievements or school-level implementation.

Practices

Schools implementing PBIS select, implement, monitor, evaluate, and adapt the evidence-based practices they use in their settings. Specifically, they invest in practices that are:

  • Defined with precision

  • Documented with how and for whom to use them

  • Documented with specific outcomes

  • Demonstrated through research to be effective

Because PBIS is not a packaged curriculum or intervention, schools implement the core features of evidence-based practices in a way that fits with the schools’ cultural values.

When it comes to school-wide practices, all schools:

  • Document a shared vision and approach to supporting and responding to student behavior in a mission or vision statement.

  • Establish 3-5 positively-stated school-wide expectations and define them for each school routine or setting.

  • Explicitly teach school-wide expectations and other key social, emotional, and behavioral skills to set all students up for success.

  • Establish a continuum of recognition strategies to provide specific feedback and encourage contextually appropriate behavior.  

  • Establish a continuum of response strategies to provide specific feedback, re-teach contextually appropriate behavior, and discourage contextually inappropriate behavior.