What is your role?
I think I've got the best job in the education system. I am a Program Coordinator for Inclusion. I get to work across all year groups and all learning areas. The role involves thinking about how we universally design learning activities, personalise student support, and adapt the environment to ensure that the school works for kids rather than the other way around. For inclusive education to be successful, we need to systematically change how we do things to meet kids' needs.
What thoughts and feelings did you have about PBS coming into this role?
Before coming into the role, I was working with kids with disabilities in a general education setting, running literacy and numeracy interventions. I was working with lots of neurodivergent kids, or kids who had experienced a lot of trauma, and kids who had experienced lots of school failure. Intuitively, I figured out that simply telling kids what to do and giving them an incentive to do the right thing, which could be a reward or a consequence, just didn't work for those kids. It just didn't work.
Over time, I learned that the work pivoted on building a positive culture and positive connections with kids. I learned that I had to make expectations clear because I couldn’t assume kids knew what to do. I would really pump the kids full of the positives; that's the bit that helped them trust me, to help them feel successful and to influence behaviour.
Before I'd even dived into what PBS was, I'd figured out what worked and didn't. I'd figured out that all kids just want to be successful. I could see that the archaic idea that some kids just not motivated to do well was just not true—I've never seen it. I'm open to being proved wrong, but I've never seen a kid who doesn't want to be successful. I've never seen a family that doesn't want the best for their kids.
When you first came into contact with PBS, how did it feel to see it in a school setting or to see how teachers approached it?
Early in my career, I saw a TED Talk by educator Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, who once heard a colleague say, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don't like.'"
At the same time, I was watching some of my colleagues beat their heads against the wall, type-casting kids in a certain way and just pushing them out of the classroom. It's maddening to watch because you know that the answer's pretty simple in lots of ways. When you presume that kids want to do well, make the expectations clear, are curious about what is driving behaviour, and work to solve the problems rather than the behaviour, you just end up in a better place.
Seeing the things I'd figured out intuitively in a PBS framework was heartening because I could see how to replicate the little bits of success I had in my classroom. This structure is one that can teach people, and it can be recreated in lots of different classrooms and schools.
The other important aspect of PBS is the imperative to intensify supports when behaviour persists or increases. Behaviours of concern are the signals that something is off. Kids who are persistently showing concerning behaviours need intensified support. Within our PBS approach, we run a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS). This differs slightly from simply a Response to Intervention (RTI) model. MTSS looks at the behavioural, academic, social and emotional domains as inextricable.
When there is a signal through a behaviour that something is off, we need to look at those three domains, use data to “diagnose” the barriers and challenges and intensify the supports as needed. When some kids are there, throwing chairs in the classrooms, it's actually a signal that they can't read the text that they're being given, or it's a signal that there is some complex mental health stuff happening in their family, or it's a signal that they can't regulate. They need some quiet, and they need some help to do that. We need additional information to understand what the behaviour is signalling including asking the student specifically in a collaborative, affirming way. We need a framework like this that brings kids in and intensifies support rather than pushing them out and making them someone else's problem. This is what keeps me coming to work every day.
Before I did the work in schools, I was working in supported accommodation for families and kids experiencing homelessness or complex mental health issues or addiction. All those adults and kids had been let down and pushed out of the system at some point. They'd been told, "Well, that's wrong, and you're bad, and that is not welcome, so you need to be elsewhere."
The bit about my job that I love is that all kids belong. All means all, especially the challenging students. We are figuring out a way to make classrooms and the school environment work for all kids. If we were to follow a more traditional approach, they would just be excluded. I have heard teachers in other contexts say, "You just keep suspending and suspending until they become the parent's problem." That philosophy just makes my blood run cold because those kids need the most support and the most holding in.
Who else has influenced your thinking?
Ross Greene is a US psychologist who practices a collaborative, proactive solutions (CPS) model. His trauma-informed model promotes the idea that challenging kids behave challengingly because they lack the skills not to be challenging. The behaviour we see is the signal; it is the fever of something going on, and those kids have a lot of lagging skills for many varied reasons. They need us to step towards them, not push them away.
What is your school's Positive Behaviour Approach?
Well, our implementation of a Positive Behaviour Approach is, fundamentally, a proactive and preventative measure where we focus most of our support in Tier One for all kids. Most of what we do happens in Tier One, where we ensure our environment is safe and inclusive. We make sure that our classrooms are accessible, predictable and sensorily adaptive. We make sure that there are friendly and warm relationships between staff and kids, between kids and kids, and that we are building a culture where all kids belong.
At our school, we make sure the expectations we have of students are clear and explicitly taught. School is an unusual context with sometimes unusual or unexpected rules that sometimes kids don't properly understand. We assume that all kids want to do the right thing, so when we see kids displaying some behaviour that might not represent the expected behaviour, we first have a calm, quiet and friendly chat. We stay curious.
I can't count how many times I've noticed a kid doing something that is perceived as mean or wrong. When I call them in, get to know them, and explain why that bit is important to do or not to do, they walk away feeling seen, heard, and presumed competent. It just gets a much better result.
There are some kids within a Positive Behaviour Approach who will continue to show some of those behaviours of concern even with a solid Tier 1 for all kids. For those kids, we intensify some support and have more targeted interventions. There might be a group program on respectful relationships or a targeted intervention to explain why online safety matters. Most kids within that targeted support and universal support manage fine.
There are about 3 to 5% of kids who also need some more kind of intensive support. In our PBA approach, we don’t think about intensifying the consequences, although there are consequences. Of course, logical outcomes to behaviour are important because that's part of learning and reflection, but the focus is on what supports need to be intensified. We assume that all kids want to do well, and when they are not, we are providing them support they need to do well.
You're describing is a real departure from the traditional school model. How does it change the experience of schools for teachers who aren't working in a specialist area? How do other students respond? What do people say?
It's a really good question because it's challenging for many people. Much of my work involves having conversations to build understanding for teachers and students. I do a lot of explaining why this person's behaviour looks different and why the response also looks different.
In my experience, there's far more need for communication and spending time with those people than there would be if we simply suspend them. Suspending feels like some sort of justice has been done, and people don't need that explained. They're like, "Oh, well, that was like ... job done. I don't need an explanation."
Never have I been asked to explain why someone has been suspended or what support will be in place for them. Never. But I'm often questioned about why a student hasn't been suspended and why this looks different for this person.
One of the problems is that we are constantly holding kids to expectations that, for whatever reason, they cannot meet just yet, not never, but just not yet. Of course, we want to build skills, and we want to empower kids to be able to function well in their community. But we are setting them up to fail by saying, "These are the rigid expectations, and this is what you must meet."
For many students, school can be very stressful.
In many schools I have previously worked at, a lot of what we would provide a “punishment” for were stress responses- a signal of dysregulation. This is “bottom-up” brainstem behaviour. This response is usually because we’ve presented an expectation that they are having trouble meeting. In these moments, it pays to remain curious about which expectations are difficult to meet and how we might collaboratively work with these students when they are calm. That way, we can collaborate and figure out what they need together.
It sounds like the Positive Behaviour Approach upskills a student population in thinking about people's behaviour and responding to people in a way that deescalates or includes them. There can be knock-on effects on their own families, communities, sporting groups, and workmates. They are going to be meeting people who are neurodiverse. They can potentially leave schools with a broader set of communication and people skills that greatly benefit the broader community.
A hundred per cent. We have a young person in one of our year groups whose neurological condition is super complex. We do so much work with the students in his classes and the kids in his peer group. We coach them on co-regulation, and we coach them on distraction, tactical ignoring and redirection. We coach them in the philosophy that everyone wants to be a good friend. They learn that when they see a challenging behaviour, it signals that their friend is having difficulty and needs their support and understanding.
Even though they are young people building their own sense of self, their willingness to think inclusively and kindly is pretty extraordinary. We see that kids are better at doing that than most adults.
There are so many reasons why a PBA is a much-needed rethink of how we create an inclusive school environment that allows all students to thrive. Early, timely support can change the course of a person's life. We can steer people from the justice system into becoming more integrated community members. This makes moral and legal sense. It stacks up from a physical and mental health perspective. It is a smarter, more effective use of resources. That said, change takes time and a lot of conversations, but they are conversations of the best kind.