If, by helping my partner schools approach student discipline through a PBIS framework, I was creating a system where a small group of people established behavioral expectations without involving the entire school community and without centralizing the voices of students and families of color, then there was no way that I could say with integrity that the values I was helping schools teach and enforce school-wide at all represented the value system to which every student subscribe
Category Archives: PBIS
Using PBIS data to dismantle racism
Your PBIS systems are whatever your school makes of them. Implemented uncritically, PBIS risks reinforcing systemic racism. However, schools that are using PBIS data systems have a powerful tool for uncovering and dismantling oppressive discipline practices. By using your PBIS data to answer School Leadership for Social Justice’s 10 Questions, you’ll spend more time helping children and youth learn and grow and less time enforcing expectations that may be causing BIPOC students and families harm.
Self-care is a professional responsibility
Self-care is not a luxury to indulge when the work gets done. Caring for ourselves is our duty.
Digital Check-in / Check-out is coming back on 24 Sept 2020 at 3:30pm PT.
CICO works because the intervention is about strengthening relationships with students and communicating with young people effectively. And, while many schools have done CICO well with in-person learning, CICO for digital learning spaces can be equally effective.
Distance Learning as a Window of Opportunity
The work of addressing conscious and unconscious bias begins with taking time to deeply explore my own identity and then make space to truly listen to others who do not share my identities. This is never to mean disregarding my own knowledge, skills, and dispositions that grew out of my identity-shaped experiences. It is the critical practice of understanding that people can experience the exact same situation differently based on an array of ways in which an individual can identify.
Afloat
PBIS doesn’t need to disappear into the murky waters. In fact, not only can it transition, I argue that because of the benefit of offering a predictable and acknowledgement-rich environment, we can almost not afford to let it sink. I have come to realize that we have an ethical obligation to preserve any effort that calls upon our core values, because our core values anchor and shape the human experience. We need that. We need a more human experience, maybe now more than ever.
Beyond the PBIS store
To be honest, a PBIS Store is a lot like the ‘store’ at a Chuck-E-Cheeze. The point might be to encourage positive behavior, but instead we end up with a system that reduces our relationships to transactions that hold far less value for children and youth of any age. And you don’t really need it to implement PBIS anyway.