The Principal's Handbook

Why Tier 1 Behavior Systems Are a Game Changer (And What to Do If You Don’t Have One)
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Principal's Handbook. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about why tier one PBIS. Systems are a game changer and what to do if you don't have one. That's all coming up next on the Principal's Handbook. ,
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Principal's Handbook, your go-to resource for principals looking to revamp their leadership approach and prioritize self-care. I'm Barb Flowers, a certified life coach with eight years of experience as an elementary principal. Tune in each week as we delve into strategies for boosting mental resilience, managing time effectively, and nurturing overall wellness.
From tackling daily challenges to maintaining a healthy work-life balance. We'll navigate the complexities of school leadership together. Join me in fostering your sense of purpose as a principal and reigniting your passion for the job. Welcome to a podcast where your wellbeing is the top priority. I.
welcome back. Today we're talking about tier one PBIS systems.
How they're game changers and [00:01:00] what to do if you don't have one. I want you to think about the behavior in your building. If your behaviors are over 80%, you have to look at it just like we do academics. You have a tier one problem and it's always good to review tier one and what that looks like, because even if you've been doing PBIS for a while and you have tier one system in place.
Sometimes it gets stale, so we're gonna be talking about that as well. But I wanna say too, if you're not doing PBIS in general, and that's not something that you do, this will still apply because it really goes with any tier one behavior system. . You can modify this to whatever you use in your building.
Your district uses. I'm in Ohio, and PBIS is technically required. We're supposed to be doing it. , every school that I've been in , does a type of PBIS, a little bit differently. So that's what we're going to be talking about today.
But tier one, I think sometimes we forget how important it is if we have kids who are [00:02:00] misbehaving and the importance of going back. And reteaching. So what is Tier one PBIS? , it's that universal support for all students when we're thinking about behavior. So again, and we have to think about the triangle when we're thinking about tier one.
80% of students should be on track with tier one PBIS by doing the things we're talking about today, which are going to be teaching school-wide expectations, , having appropriate consequences and positive reinforcement. Then 80% should be on track with behavior. And so if you are, implementing, if you're implementing PBIS, how it should be implemented, you should have fewer referrals each year, more consistent classrooms and less burnout from teachers, because hopefully the behaviors in your building .
Are improving. And I have to say in the building I was previously in, , , I really got to witness how well PBIS worked when I was an assistant principal. The principal before me had come [00:03:00] from a building with PBIS, and so she brought it into the building that we were in together and she really did a nice job implementing it.
Getting it started with all the things we're gonna talk about today, but then it continued and when I took over just by continuing, PBIS, having those clear expectations and really implementing consequences that were appropriate for students, we were able to drop our behavior by 40% in one school year.
And so we, and we just keep seeing it decline. , and so that was really exciting to be able to do so when PBIS is done effectively, it does work. Now, I will say one thing that people often complain about PBIS, and this is the negative I hear about PBIS, but really I think it's just not understanding it correctly, is that people talk about, if we're constantly focused on positive reinforcement, one, students aren't going to be motivated on their own.
, and we'll talk about that a little bit. But two, the other thing is. That I hear often from [00:04:00] teachers is, oh, we can't give consequences because , we're focused on the positive and that's just not true. We're doing kids a disservice if we're not giving them consequences. So with PBIS, we still want kids to be motivated on their own.
We still want to make sure we're giving consequences. We're just trying to keep everything from a positive standpoint. Okay. So I just wanted to address that before we get started. , first. I wanna talk about what to do if you don't have a tier one system and what you should have in a tier one system.
So first you wanna make sure you have three to five simple school-wide expectations, and these school-wide expectations should be something like ours. Were sore because we were the falcons. So we soared, we were safe, outstanding, accountable, respectful.
I've seen a lot that are, , be respectful, be responsible, be kind, whatever that is. It doesn't have to necessarily be an acronym. But choose three to five consistent expectations. Then you're going to create a [00:05:00] behavior matrix that takes those three expectations and breaks it down for each area.
So what does it mean to be safe, kind, and respectful in the cafeteria? What does it mean to be safe, kind, and respectful in the at recess on the bus, and you break it down in each area for each expectation. And you really wanna break it down, talk about what it means, have an idea of how you would teach that expectation, and you break it down for kids like that as well.
When you're teaching them, , you constantly teach the expectations. You model them, you practice them, you keep practicing them throughout the year. , that is the basis of PBIS. That's where that positive comes in. You're focusing on here's what to do instead of the negative of here's what not to do.
That's not what you're focusing on when you're thinking about expectations. It's, this is what I expect. I expect you to use walking feet. I expect you to sit in your chair instead of. Don't run, don't stand on the back of your chair legs, whatever it is, you're keeping it in the [00:06:00] positive narrative when it comes to behavior.
So it's not that you always have to do the positive thing and you can't have a consequence, it's just we're focusing on teaching expectations in a positive way. Teaching everything. So it's very clear instead of old school of just telling kids what not to do. Okay? So that's really the difference between PBIS.
, then you wanna reinforce those expectations with positive. So if they are following that expectation, you reinforce. Now, one thing that our building, , when we had a member of the SST eight team come. And work with us that she said that was so helpful is we gave tickets.
So if kids were following expectations, we gave them a ticket and then they would actually put those tickets in a drawing and could pick prizes off of a prize card. Now, she said at the beginning of the year, you wanna have lots of tickets because you're reinforcing that positive behavior as you're teaching it a lot at the beginning of the year.
As you go throughout the year, you don't [00:07:00] need to give as many tickets. They should now be motivated. They should start to know this is the expectation. You need to just do it. You're not going to get a ticket every time you're doing the right thing. Now it's going to be more random because we know that you know the expectations.
So that's another thing with the motivation piece is we wanna make sure that at. The beginning when we're teaching them these expectations, we're giving lots of tickets. Then we taper those off. The other thing I've seen is with grade levels, it depends, right? Kindergartners, those kindergarten teachers were amazing with PBIS.
They would give tons of tickets at the beginning because they're teaching kids how to behave at school, and then they would wean that off. Fifth grade teachers didn't give tickets like that at the beginning. It was different, right? Because fifth graders are expected to know the behaviors better.
We're still going to teach them, but it's not going to be like we , reinforce the same way we do in kindergarten. and then the other piece of PBIS that I think that is not talked about enough is there has to be consistent, [00:08:00] appropriate consequences.
So part of it is if they're not following the expectation, one, they don't get the reinforcer. But if you've already talked to them, maybe it's a, maybe first you give them a warning, but after you've given them the warning, then they could get a timeout. Then they could miss something for five minutes, right?
Like you create an appropriate consequence based on the behavior, based on the student's age. And based on what expectation they didn't meet. So I just wanna reinforce that you still with the positive, have those consistent consequences that students get when they're not following expectations. , , the other thing I wanna say is you don't need to wait for district wide launch.
To start PBIS. You could do it in your building. Now, in our building, they had started PBIS in the district, but our building really stuck with it. And like I said, that principal who actually came in before me. Really got the ball going on it and we were ahead of the game. And, so, ,, you don't have to wait for your district to get [00:09:00] on board or everybody to be on the same page for you to do it.
So that's just something I wanted to bring up now, what to do if you're tier one system feel stale. So let's say you have all of those things I just talked about in place. Okay. So you already have 'em in place, which I will say this was our building that I was in a couple years ago.
Everything was going well. We didn't have a lot of behavior issues, but we could tell that it was starting to feel stale. And the problem with it feeling stale is that people might think that we don't need to be doing it if it's stale. They're thinking, okay, kids are being good. I don't need to teach expectations.
I don't need to reinforce. And then what will happen over time is you'll lose that system and behaviors will start to increase. And so. We knew that it was starting to feel like, okay, we've done this for so long, we need something different. So we started to think about as A-P-B-I-S tier one team, how do we do a refresh?
And I'm just gonna give you some signs that you need a refresh one. , maybe the expectations aren't posted [00:10:00] anymore or they're posted, but nobody looks at them, nobody refers to them. It could be that staff are inconsistent with follow through, , with consequences, or they forget to give them the tickets or whatever your positive reinforcer is.
Maybe the incentives feel meaningless or outdated. So we had this where we had the ticket system and we were thinking, , it felt a little bit outdated. What else do we need to do to get kids excited? Especially in a K five building, if you've had fifth graders who have been doing it since kindergarten, I mean, that's six years of the same incentive system.
And plus they're getting older, they're kind of like,, nah, it doesn't really matter to me anymore. So we knew we had to refresh the system. Some easy refresh strategies are to just revisit and revise the behavior matrix with staff and students.
And we did this because there were some things on the original matrix that, we're done even before I got there. That for me coming in, I'm like, this isn't very clear. And so after having some conversation over time. We [00:11:00] revise the matrix a little bit. Also, we would do a reteach week where we re would remind teachers, it's PBIS expectation week.
Please reteach expectations. So pick an area in the school and reteach at some point during that day, reteach, recess expectations, hallway expectations, all of that. also we had to think about incentives, updating them with student input. And that's exactly what we did our. Technology teacher was also on the PBIS team, so he did a survey with fifth grade to see some incentives they want.
Now I have to say, of course they put like Nintendo and crazy things, PlayStation that they wanted. But they also gave us some really good ideas that we could update some of that. And then, we really started to use our behavior data over time, better to target the problems, locations. I was able to actually hire another recess monitor.
It helped. Reduce recess behaviors because we just had more supervision on the playground. , we were able to do some groups in the office to [00:12:00] help support specific behaviors. We just implemented a lot of things as we got better at targeting problems with the data. , , so
that is what to do if your tier one systems feel stale. Now, if you're feeling overwhelmed, like maybe you don't have it in place and I talked about what you need, or you do have it in place and it's stale, just remember you're not behind. You're just ready to do something different,
you don't have to build it all yourself. I did all of the PBIS with a team. And I have all the templates that you need. I have a free toolkit for tier one PBIS that I'll share with you. But the biggest thing is just getting clarity around those expectations around how you wanna teach them, and then having consistency around implementing those positive reinforcers and implementing consequences when needed.
So utilize staff to be there with you to support this. You need a team of teachers on board with you. So don't feel overwhelmed if you're not doing any of this. Don't feel overwhelmed. If you are [00:13:00] doing all of it and you feel like it's not working anymore or it's stale, just take tiny pieces at a time.
The other thing you could always do, if you've been doing it for a while, go to p bs apps.com and they have the tiered fidelity inventory in Ohio. I know that we use the tiered fidelity inventory and you can get awards for your PBIS. Like we get the bronze award if we have. 80% implementation on tier one.
You get the silver if you have 80% implementation on tier one and two, and then you get the gold. If you have 80% on tier one and tier one, two, and three. And so you could go to PBIS apps and . Download that tiered fidelity inventory and that'll give you an action plan. I also have a simplified action plan in my toolkit because I know sometimes with the tiered fidelity inventory, as good as that is when you're starting out, teachers can feel overwhelmed and like they're not doing a good job because you don't score very well on it in the beginning because you're not doing those things yet.
So just something to [00:14:00] think about. But I want you to download the free PBIS Tier one toolkit if you need a refresh. , or If you're not implementing all of the things I talked about in the first part of the episode, okay. I have an editable behavior matrix lesson plan, template, incentive ideas, reflection forms.
So download that if you need the help. But I really encourage you as you start the year to think about your PBIS. Think about your tier one behavior system for your school. How are you making those expectations clear for students, for staff? How are you following through and being consistent on those positive reinforcers and those consequences?
And just remember, you don't need a perfect system, you just need one that's clear and consistent. and if you have any questions about how I did PBIS, feel free to reach out to me at barb@barbflowerscoaching.com.
Also, follow me on TikTok at the eight to four principle. Alright, I hope you found this helpful. I hope that you implement some of these things for your PBIS [00:15:00] tier one systems. And I will see you in the next episode.