What is Positive Behavior Interventions and Support?

Our school is participating in an important district initiative. It is called Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS). PBIS is a process for creating safer and more effective schools. It is a systems approach to enhancing 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 Katherine Finchy?

We have adopted a unified set of rules. Similar to the CMS Code of Student Conduct, these rules define our expectations for behavior in our school. You will see these rules posted throughout Katherine Finchy and your child will be learning them during his or her first days at school. Our unified rules, found in every classroom and non-classroom setting in the school, are as follows:

Rule #1: Be Respectful

Rule #2: Be Responsible

Rule #3: Be Safe

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 following the rules in a positive way, 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.

In order to reward the positive behavior our Finchy Falcons display, we use a program called PBIS Rewards where students earn points for going above and beyond. Students can use these points to purchase items from our school store, enter raffles for prize giveaways, and more! This program does not replace our discipline or consequences; however, it does help to ensure all of our students are staying on track and being acknowledged for being fantastic Falcons!

If you have questions about Positive Behavior Support, please feel free to contact your child’s teacher or one of our administrators. We look forward to a wonderful year of teaching your child at Katherine Finchy!