In this episode, we’ve tracked down some hilarious teacher stories from around the internet about the goofy things students say and do in school. From fart jokes, to the 1990s as the “old days,” to a student bringing in a live goat, this podcast will have you in stitches. The guests this month are our very own PBISApps trainer Nadia Sampson and Customer Support Manager Diertra Lomeli. Give it a listen and enjoy your winter break!

We’re back with another episode of Mythbusters where we explore some of the critiques about PBIS. Along with our guests, we’ll declare the criticisms true or busted! The myth we’ll explore today is: Rewards don’t work to improve student outcomes. Joining us in our conversation are Erica Bauer, Joya Mitchell, and Jaymz Keller Jr.

Erica is a school counselor and the Green Local School District’s PBIS coordinator.

Joya is the Student Services Director at Green Local Schools. She’s been an educator for over 20 years working in both special education and as an assistant principal before transitioning to her current position.

Jaymz W. Keller Jr is the store manager at the local Starbucks in Green, OH.

Erica, Joya, and Jaymz, have established a staff recognition system for Green Local School District like no other we’ve seen. Their partnership was only made possible because of the district’s focus on building strong relationships and supporting everyone in their larger schoolwide community. Listen to how they leveraged the power of recognition to uplift their staff, encourage students, and engage the entire town of Green, OH in their PBIS implementation.

For more information about the resources shared in this episode, check out the following links:

Tiered Fidelity Inventory

5 Ways to Reward Students the Right Way

Are Schoolwide Tickets the Secret to Better Classrooms? Here’s the Truth

Find your state-level PBIS coordinator

There’s a feeling you get when you walk into a school. You get a sense for the kind of place it is when you look at the people’s faces, or the way the light that comes through the windows. It’s even in the colors and art on the walls in the hallway. This intangible thing is your school’s climate and it’s something you co-create with your schoolwide community.

In this episode of Expert Instruction, we’re joined by three educators who know how to create that positive school climate we all want to experience: Dr. Ginny Joseph, Kathy Stauffer, and Sun Saeteurn.

Ginny is a PBIS and Mental Health Coordinator for the Orange County Department of Education in Costa Mesa, CA. She supports schools and district in their efforts to implement a multi-tiered framework for inclusive behavior supports. Ginny is passionate about creating safe learning spaces by engaging the entire schoolwide community.

Kathy comes to us from the Saddleback Valley Unified School District in Mission Viejo, CA where she trains and supports school teams in their implementation of multi-tiered systems of support. In her work, she focuses on fostering respectful, responsible, and inclusive communities.

Sun has been the principal at Monroe Middle School in Eugene, OR for the last six years. Before that, he was a high school assistant principal and a middle school teacher. Everywhere he goes, no matter what his role, Sun creates supportive spaces by engaging students, staff, and the larger community and building strong relationships.

For more information about the resources shared in this episode, check out the following links:

School Climate Survey

Tiered Fidelity Inventory

Turquoise or Blue? How One Test Uncovers the Hidden Assumptions in Our Classrooms

Proven Ways to Make Schoolwide Feedback work

Start With Why: How to Put Purpose Back in Your Work

When educators are in the classroom day after day, year after year, the focus on fresh authentic, genuine PBIS implementation gets harder. In this episode, we’re talking about how to adapt, evolve, and continuously improve your efforts over the long term. Joining us in conversation are the three co-directors of the Center on PBIS.

Dr. Brandi Simonsen is a professor of Special Education in the Department of Educational Psychology at University of Connecticut. She is also the co-principle investigator of the National Multi-Tiered System of Supports Research Network. She's an advocate for supporting educator implementation across a continuum of settings.

Dr. Kent McIntosh is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Special Education at the University of Oregon and the Director at PBISApps. His current research focuses on increasing racial equity in school discipline, and sustainability of systems for social, emotional, and behavior support in schools.

Dr. Heather George is a professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies at the University of South Florida, the director of the Florida Center for Inclusive Communities and the co-director of Florida's Statewide PBIS Project. She's a longtime colleague of ours in this implementation work, and she's a continued advocate for supporting system level implementation to support all students wherever they learn.

Our experts offer some timeless tips for continually improving your PBIS. These include focusing on building genuine relationships with your students right at the start of the school year and building relationships with families. In fostering meaningful bonds with students, educators approach PBIS in the classroom from a more holistic, respected position with students that is less about compliance and more about connection and kindness. We also share what it looks like to make an intentional effort to build an inclusive classroom that feels safe and welcoming to everyone.

Resources

• PBIS Implementation Blueprint

• Tiered Fidelity Inventory

• Crisis Recovery

In this episode, we’re looking back at every podcast we had over the past school year and sharing our favorite episodes and lessons learned. We’ve interviewed 16 guests across nine episodes. Every conversation gave us something to think about and find ways to infuse it in our work moving forward. Today, we wanted to highlight just five of those episodes and encourage you to take another listen over these summer months.

To travel back in time to any of these episodes mentioned today, check out the following links:

Ep. 32: The Fundamentals of Schoolwide Teams

Ep. 34: Conferences as Professional Development

Ep. 36: Culturally Sustaining Practices

Ep. 38: Mythbusters — There are Some Students Skewing Our Schoolwide Data

PBISApps Community

Let us know you want all the details about our free PBISApps Community events by signing up with your email address. If you already know you’ll want to come to our August event, register today so you’ll be all set up when the school year starts!

By the end of the school year, you have a lot of data at your fingertips. There are two important actions to take. The first is to share it with your schoolwide community as part of your annual PBIS evaluation. The second is to plan how you’ll build on your success next year.

In this episode, we’re talking about what it takes to evaluate PBIS implementation and use data to create an action plan at the end of the year. Joining us in our conversation are Diane LaMaster, Michele Cook, and Kim Barker.

Diane LaMaster is a technical assistance coordinator with the Midwest PBIS Network. Diane brings with her decades of experience in various roles including as a special education teacher, behavior interventionist, and a district coach.

Michele Cook has been a special educator, PE teacher, PBIS coach, building principal, and executive director of student support services in the Gresham-Barlow School District in Gresham, OR. Now she works part time to support multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) implementation in the district.

Kim Barker is a long-time educator from Gresham-Barlow School District, too. This year marks her 21st year with the district where she now works as an administrator for Deep Creek Damascus K-8 School.

During our conversation, we explored the way data serve as historical references for where implementation has been and where it will go in the future.

For more information about the resources shared in this episode, check out the following links:

• Tiered Fidelity Inventory
• Self-Assessment Survey
• SWIS Suite

Have you heard this before in your teams: If we removed these students from our schoolwide data, our trends would look better. In this episode, we’re tackling the myth that some students’ behavior data skew our schoolwide data. Joining us in this conversation are Rayann Silva and Mari Meador from the University of Washington’s School Mental Health Assessment Research and Training (SMART) Center.

Rayann has done it all in education. From classroom teacher to district administrator, to state/regional school mental health training and technical assistance provider, she centers social-emotional well-being in every role she holds. In her current work, she supports education agencies and school districts to deliver evidence-based strategies that improve social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes for all.

As an implementation coach, Mari supports schools in their implementation efforts. She has been a PBIS state facilitator, an assistant coordinator for the Northwest PBIS Network, and a school-based counselor and mental health associate. Mari is a forever advocate for system-level change, culturally responsive practices, and social-emotional learning.

Together, we talked about the unintended consequences of excluding some students from schoolwide data, and what it truly means to include every student’s experience in our schoolwide decisions.

For more information about the resources shared in this episode, check out the following links:

Role of social worker at all three tiers from Washington State Association of School Psychologists Behavioral Health Coalition

There are two primary questions every team should ask related to their PBIS implementation:

• Are we doing what we said we would do? (Fidelity)
• How does our implementation affect the people in our school? (Outcomes)

Because PBIS is an evidence-based framework, you know there are data to help you answer these questions. Which brings us to today’s topic: How do you choose a system to store and monitor the fidelity and outcome data you collect? Joining us today to help us answer that question are Diertra Lomeli and Seth May.

Diertra is the PBISApps Customer Support Manager. She leads the team of people who connect with our users, set up every account, invoice every subscription, and problem-solve every bug as it comes in. Diertra is also a member of several project teams dreaming up new app features to address emerging needs related to data-driven decision making in PBIS implementation.

Seth is the PBISApps IT Director. He started as a developer creating the very first version of the Schoolwide Information System (SWIS). Now, he leads a team of developers and IT professionals to create the applications schools use everyday.

For more information about the resources mentioned in this episode, check out the following links:

• More information about SWIS
• More information about PBIS Assessment
• PBIS Assessment Coordinator Form to sign up for PBIS Assessment
• Options to integrate your student information system with SWIS
• Sign up for more information about the new PBISApps Community

For PBIS implementation to feel authentic to your school’s culture, it’s important to ask your larger schoolwide community for their feedback about the systems and practices you’ve put in place AND to use that feedback to improve your implementation.

In this episode, Dr. Ambra Green joins us to talk about how you can implement the foundational features of PBIS to create culturally sustaining, truly inclusive spaces.

Ambra is an Associate Professor of Special Education at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is a national scholar with publications and research focused on students of color with and at-risk for disabilities, inequitable school practices, behavior disorders, PBIS, and the use of evidence-based practices. Ambra currently serves as a member of the Center on PBIS Equity workgroup and provides technical assistance at the school, district, and state levels.

During our conversation, the three of us talked about how to know when there's a mismatch between your implementation and the lived experiences in your schoolwide community, the way two-way conversations are critical to the process of creating culturally sustaining implementation, and to engage everyone in those conversations requires trust you need to develop over time.

For more information about the resources shared in this episode, check out the following links:

• Tiered Fidelity Inventory (TFI)
• State and Local PBIS Coordinator Lookup
• National Center on Intensive Intervention
• PBIS Cultural Responsiveness Field Guide‍

Today, we’re bringing you another installment in our mythbuster series. In October, we tackled the myth that PBIS is only about rewards. Spoiler alert: Rewards are part of it, but there’s more to it than the myth suggests. In this episode, we’re exploring the myth: There are no consequences in PBIS. Back again to help us bust this myth is Dr. Kent McIntosh.

Kent is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Special Education at the University of Oregon and the Director at PBISApps. He is also Co-Director of the Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. His current research focuses on increasing racial equity in school discipline, and sustainability of systems for social, emotional, and behavior support in schools.

Together, we talked about the types of consequences we deliver in schools. We really honed in on how our options ought to be instructional whenever possible and removing students from instruction shouldn’t be our option B, C, or even D.

For more information about the resources shared in the episode, check out the following links:

• Tiered Fidelity Inventory
• Consequence Matrix
• Referral Category Definitions
• Practice Guide – Supporting and Responding to Behavior: Evidence-based Classroom Strategies for Teachers