Dear Parents,
Our school is participating in an important initiative called Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports (PBIS).
What is Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports?
PBIS is a process for creating safer and more effective schools. It is a systems approach to enhance 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 our school?
We have adopted a unified set of school wide expectations. Simply put, these define our expectations for behavior in our school. You will see them posted throughout the building, and your child will be learning them during his or her first days at school. Our unified school wide expectations, found in every classroom and non-classroom setting in the school, are as follows:
SCHOOL WIDE TIGER PRIDE
Be safe: Walk to your location, use proper voice level, & keep body parts to self.
Be kind: Use manners, do something to help others, & use positive comments.
Own your actions: Think before you act and be honest in your words.
As part of our PBIS process, teachers and other staff members use evidence-based practices to increase student learning and decrease classroom disruptions. To keep students focused on the rules 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.
Within the next month or so, you will receive more information about our PBIS program and its progress. If you have questions about PBIS, please feel free to contact your child’s teacher. We look forward to a wonderful year of teaching your children.
Sincerely,
Nicole D’Ambrosio and Gina Violi
PBIS Coaches