Here's Why PBIS Can't Work Without Progressive Discipline and Consequences

Here's why PBIS can't keep schools safe by itself without progressive discipline.

Now, PBIS started as a way of teaching expectations, modeling expectations for behavior, reinforcing those expectations.

But of course, in order to uphold those expectations, you also have to have consequences.

And the idea has somehow slipped in over the past decade that you can replace consequences with rewards, which sounds great.

It sounds fantastic to be able to do away with consequences, which are icky, and replace them with rewards, which, hey, who doesn't love a reward?

Well, the problem with rewards is they do work for kids who don't really have the intrinsic motivation that it takes to do the right thing on their own.

So you can put in a behavior plan for a kid who is not doing the right thing.

They're getting into trouble.

You can put rewards into place and help build their intrinsic motivation by temporarily extrinsically motivating them.

But if you try to do that all the time for everybody, including everybody who's already intrinsically motivated by giving them rewards for expected behavior, what ends up happening is you undermine intrinsic motivation.

And we have known this for decades.

This is like extremely well established.

So we should have seen this coming.

And we should have seen it coming that if you also at the same time take away consequences, well, kids are going to get wise.

See, the thing about consequences is they work because they're predictable.

And a lot of people have maybe personal baggage with consequences that were not predictable, that, you know, if they personally were on the receiving end of unpredictable and scary consequences, they might not think consequences are a good thing.

But if consequences are predictable, they play an incredibly powerful role and are incredibly effective in getting kids to do the right thing, to behave themselves at school, to be safe, to treat other people with respect.

If you know you're going to get in trouble if you do something that's not okay, you're going to do the right thing almost all of the time.

And of course, we're going to have a few students who really struggle with behavior, no matter how consistent we are, no matter how much we try to support them with behavior plans and things like that.

We're always going to have some kids who struggle with behavior.

But that should not allow us to fall into the trap of thinking, hey, because this kid struggles, nobody ever needs consequences.

Consequences are just a terrible thing that doesn't work.

That's not true.

And the best evidence I can point you to is the chaos in the schools that have eliminated consequences and tried to replace them with rewards.

Rewards are not a substitute for consequences.

And rewards actually work the best when they're somewhat unpredictable.

So the psychology here is different between rewards and consequences.

If you intermittently and kind of unpredictably reward desired behaviors, that is the best way to increase those desired behaviors.

And again, you have to be careful.

You have to fade off the reward over time as intrinsic motivation kicks in because we don't want to be in a position where the kid is permanently dependent on a reward, that extrinsic motivation.

So it's not to say we can't use extrinsic motivation on a short-term basis to get kids into a place where they are intrinsically motivated.

but this idea that you can just permanently manage behavior for all kids with rewards is just not true and you know that if you're in a school that is trying that right now and for some reason this has become an epidemic like millions and millions of students are in schools where there are no consequences there is this idea that consequences are some sort of toxic negative horrible terrible no good very bad thing and rewards are good.

And it is kind of the other way around, right?

You can be, as Alfie Cohen said, punished by rewards if they rob you of your intrinsic motivation and just kind of pay you for expected behavior.

Like that is not a good situation for our students to be in.

If we want school environments to be orderly and learning focused, if we want kids to do the right thing, and if we want schools to be safe, we have to be very careful about rewards and we have to have predictable, consistent consequences.

Let me know what you think.