The beauty of the PLC process is that the more our educators learn about best practices and implement those practices, the more our students will learn and grow. Over the past couple of years, we started to see an uptick in unwanted behaviors in our school. I sent out an email asking teachers if they wanted to be part of a team that would first research best practices, then help to implement a process to teach our students the behaviors that we wanted to see.

The great thing about reaching out to my entire staff was that I had several people who had previous experiences of implementing the PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention and Support) process at other schools.

We met as a team and started with the following objectives:

• What is PBIS and what is our Purpose for implementing a PBIS system?
• Decide together the behavioral expectations for each area of the building (bus, café, restrooms, halls, etc).
• Teams will ultimately come up with behavioral expectations for their classes (teams should do this yearly to remind students and teach the new teachers).
• We will work together on the different responsibilities of the staff—custodians, aides, secretaries, teachers, counselors, and administration—to make sure that we are teaching the students the expectations and behaviors which we desire.
• We will work on how behaviors are handled—from the classroom to the counselors to the administration and others—to make sure that students are held accountable.
• We will work to grow our recognition system to reinforce positive behaviors.
• We will meet monthly with a team of staff with a representative from each team to monitor our progress through the PBIS process.

When we created this process, we started with the above objectives then started to answer the following questions.

1. What core values do we want our students to exhibit? (Respect, Kindness, Responsibility)
2. What behaviors do we expect from our students that reflect and honor our core values?
3. How are these behaviors going to be taught?
4. How often are they going to be re-taught?
5. Understand the difference between classroom-managed behaviors and office-managed behaviors.
6. How will we recognize and reward appropriate behaviors?

We created a spreadsheet to document and track student behaviors. The seven steps below are what we track on the PBIS spreadsheet.

1. Acknowledgement/warning (“the look,” verbal or non-verbal, proximity, etc.)
2. Private conversation and refocus sheet
3. Parent phone call (must be a call not an email)
4. Detention (parent needs to be notified)
5. Team conference (parent(s) needs to be notified)
6. Team conference with counselors working on a behavior plan (parent needs to be notified)
7. Admin. office referral sheet:
   • Do not turn in a referral without the spreadsheet being marked and attaching refocus sheet if there were prior minor offenses
   • Admintration notifies parent(s)
   • Possible consequences include detention, Wednesday school, in school suspension, SAP alternative to suspension, suspension, expulsion, etc.

The administrative team reviews the spreadsheet weekly and works with the teams to determine if students need to immediately talk to a counselor, teacher, or administrator. This catches many problems before they get out of hand. New teachers find this extremely helpful because they feel that they are being supported by the administration.

We implemented the PBIS process at our school by using the PLC process of collective inquiry, researching and implementing best practices, collaborating, and learning from each other. The PLC process allowed our staff to identify an area of concern, learn about best practices to address the concern, and implement a systematic process to teach and monitor the expectations. We moved from admiring a problem to taking meaningful steps to solve the problem. This is why the PLC process is so important in all schools.