A Conversation with Walsh

So what did PBIS look like at my school when I was principal?

And this is going back 12 or 13 years, but we did adopt PBIS as a school-wide approach to teaching and reinforcing expectations.

And at the time, Washington State PBIS was a pretty big deal.

and in the Pacific Northwest in general is where PBIS originated, and rewards were not a part of it.

This is a really crucial piece that I think is getting lost today, because the version of PBIS that has spread across the profession now, and is going very poorly in my estimation, has very little to do with what we were doing back then and a lot to do with rewards, which is kind of a later addition.

The original research had almost nothing to do with rewards and was all about teaching and practicing school-wide expectations.

And I think when it comes to how it worked in my school, I mean, hopefully we did it right.

I have to say a big part of my understanding of PBIS was that it did not work miracles, right?

Like we were not looking for it to accomplish some miraculous transformation in our school.

And I think that's often where these things go wrong is when we try to use them to solve much bigger problems, or we try to use them to replace 10 other things, or we tried to use them as infrastructure for solving problems that they were just not meant to solve.

So I will say when we adopted PBIS, we did not have a lot of behavior problems that we were looking to address, but we did see an opportunity to get more on the same page as a staff about our expectations for hallway behavior, for playground and cafeteria behavior.

And honestly, I think that's where a lot of the impetus came from among our staff is maybe people were frustrated.

they had particular expectations for their students and how they behaved in the hallway that their colleagues did not have.

So I think for us it was largely about getting on the same page as adults and then teaching those aligned expectations to students.

It had nothing to do with rewards and prizes and points and reinforcement and extrinsic motivation and all the things that I think are kind of ruining PBIS today.

What we did was basically some school-wide assemblies, some discussions as a staff about what our expectations were.

We asked each teacher to teach expectations, and I think we had kind of a school-wide tour where different staff members would teach expectations for different locations, like the hallways, the playground, the cafeteria, things like that.

And I think that was effective, but again...

I think it's important to have modest expectations for anything.

We weren't looking for it to do a whole school turnaround.

Like we just didn't need it to do that much or expect it to do that much.

And when I see things going wrong, I think that is often what's wrong is that we expect one system or one approach to solve a million problems.

So let me know what you think.

Let me know what experience you're having with PBIS.

If rewards are a part of it, if teaching expectations and practicing them and getting adults on the same page is part of it.

And if PBIS is being asked to do too much heavy lifting, let me know.