An Educator's Guide to Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Inteventions and Supports. Jason E. Harlacher
scale of 1–3) and impact (such as office referrals).
Problem Solving for Systems Versus Students
Within the context of the PSM, SWPBIS teams can examine problems on a systems level as well as problems on a student level. Systems-level problem solving examines the system as a whole, whereas student-level problem solving focuses on groups of students or individual students. A matrix illustrates how school teams can consider implementation and impact data on both of those levels (see table 1.7). We discuss specific questions and answers for each tier in their respective chapters.
Table 1.7: Problem-Solving Questions Between the Tiers
Summary
SWPBIS is a schoolwide framework designed to improve school climate and discipline while also setting the foundation for academic and social-emotional outcomes (Sailor et al., 2009). The model is based on proactively teaching students schoolwide expectations and is housed in behavioral and instructional principles. The model enlists four key elements to ensure its effectiveness and sustainability—(1) outcomes, (2) practices, (3) systems, and (4) data—and educators use the PSM to solve problems and drive the connection among the key elements. We explore the details of each tier separately within the next several chapters and provide examples of SWPBIS for each of the elements.
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Tier One
Tier One consists of universal supports provided to every student in the building and is the foundation of SWPBIS (George et al., 2009). Tier One is the behavioral and social-emotional learning curriculum that educators provide to each student. Every student has access to the curriculum and teachers actively instruct the curriculum using instructional principles and behavior theory. When students receive additional supports above and beyond Tier One, they still continue to receive Tier One supports (additional supports supplement Tier One, they don’t supplant it). If there are gaps within Tier One, the additional tiers will be less effective, so it’s important that teams build an effective Tier One before designing and implementing the upper tiers (Greenwood et al., 2008). We summarize Tier One specifics in table 2.1.
Table 2.1: Tier One Summary
| Tier One Is … | Tier One Is Not … |
| Universal supports for all students | Just for a few students nor is it removed when students receive additional support |
| The active teaching and reinforcement of schoolwide expectations | Hoping students learn the schoolwide expectations on their own |
| Use of active feedback and encouragement for students to display the expectations | Ignoring students when they display the expectations because “they should just do them” |
| Use of a range of strategies to discourage undesired behavior | The sole use of punishment when students misbehave, nor is it reactionary and punishment based |
| The foundational piece of the framework | Something that can be skipped |
| Used and supported by all staff | Only used by a few staff |
We have organized this chapter along the four key elements within the context of Tier One of SWPBIS, beginning with identifying outcomes. We then present the practices for Tier One before discussing the systems essential to it. We then discuss commonly used data within Tier One, and we end the chapter by discussing the application of the PSM at Tier One for systems and students. Throughout the chapter, we provide examples of the elements in practice for Tier One and provide extensive case summaries of an elementary school and of a secondary school in chapter 6 to illustrate clear examples of SWPBIS across all three tiers.
Outcomes
Within this section, we share outcomes that schools may identify for Tier One when using SWPBIS. Educators can identify outcomes for fidelity of implementation and for impact of Tier One. Outcomes provide the overall purpose of Tier One for the school and represent what the school wants to achieve with implementation of the model.
The school should ensure that the Tier One elements are implemented with fidelity. After all, if Tier One isn’t being implemented, it’s difficult to expect to obtain any outcomes of impact. Schools will regularly check their implementation of Tier One to ensure they are implementing its key elements well. We commonly measure these elements by using a published fidelity measure with a designated fidelity criterion. (We discuss these measures later in the Data section, page 52.)
When considering the impact of Tier One, it is difficult to identify common outcomes across schools because each school will contextualize SWPBIS for its sites and identify outcomes that are specific to it. However, one common goal is to create a healthy system in which most students’ needs are met through universal instructional supports alone. As such, schools using SWPBIS will examine their disciplinary data and determine if their SWPBIS system is healthy and effective in meeting the needs of most of the students. One marker of a healthy SWPBIS system is one in which at least 80 percent of students have zero to one office discipline referrals for major behaviors, no more than 15 percent have between two and five referrals, and no more than 5 percent have six or more referrals (Horner, Sugai, et al., 2005). If a school’s data do not approximate these percentages, then efforts go toward improving the system as a whole to achieve such percentages.
Schools using SWPBIS are not limited to disciplinary data for outcomes. They can also review various data such as truancy, attendance, academic achievement, perceptions of safety, and the number of suspensions and expulsions, particularly between student subgroups (such as racial or ethnic groups, gender, or students with disabilities) and decide what outcomes or goals make sense for its site. For example, a school may discover that students with disabilities are suspended twice as often as students without disabilities, leading to a goal of creating more equity with suspension practices. Additionally, schools using SWPBIS may survey their staff or community members (such as parents or guardians) to gather information on concerns about school climate and discipline as well as identifying relevant outcomes.
Schools using SWPBIS will identify long-term and short-term outcomes for Tier One. Long-term outcomes are significant and distal outcomes regarding the use of SWPBIS that take time to achieve (for example, over the course of one or more school years), such as improvement in school climate. Short-term outcomes are immediate outcomes that are often achieved within the context of the school year, such as a reduction in referrals during lunchtime. Long-term outcomes (like improving school climate) are decided early on, but various short-term outcomes (like reducing office referrals from the hallway) will arise as the school implements and monitors the model.
Having determined the outcomes they wish to achieve with SWPBIS, schools can then turn to the exact practices they’ll implement for Tier One in order to reach those outcomes.
Practices
The practices for Tier One include identifying and teaching three to five common school-wide expectations to students, along with implementing methods to reward students for displaying the expectations and to decrease problem behavior (we also refer to problem behavior as undesired or unwanted behavior; George et al., 2009; Horner, Sugai, et al., 2005). We discuss each of the following practices of Tier One next.
1. Identifying schoolwide expectations
2. Teaching expectations
3. Reinforcing expectations
4. Responding to undesired behavior
Identifying Schoolwide Expectations
At the foundation of Tier One are a handful of schoolwide expectations that are taught to all students (George et al., 2009; Horner et al., 2005). Expectations are general descriptions of desired behavior