An Educator's Guide to Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Inteventions and Supports. Jason E. Harlacher

and priorities from district leadership, having clearly defined outcomes assists schools in determining which practices to adopt and which ones not to adopt. In short, any school that uses SWPBIS needs to define its purpose and outcomes for using the model.

       Practices: Supporting Student Behavior

      As school teams identify the outcomes they want to achieve and the data they need to gather, they also decide upon the practices needed to achieve those outcomes. The practices refer to the strategies and methods used to improve student behavior and prevent undesired behavior. This is the instructional piece of SWPBIS that is organized into tiers. Tier One is universal support provided to all students, and it’s designed to foster prosocial behavior and decrease occurrences of inappropriate behavior. In practice, it consists of identifying schoolwide expectations, teaching them to all students, and providing a high rate of reinforcement for meeting these expectations. It also includes establishing a continuum of procedures for managing undesired behavior.

      At Tier Two, students continue to take part in the Tier One practices but are also provided more intensive support based on a common need through additional instruction and reinforcement of the schoolwide expectations (Hawken, Adolphson, MacLeod, & Schumann, 2009). Designed to be provided quickly and efficiently, Tier Two consists of a range of interventions that may include social skills instruction, frequent check-ins with school staff, or before- and after-school programs.

      At Tier Three, teachers provide students with individualized and intensive instruction in addition to the prosocial climate and supports (Scott, Anderson, Mancil, & Alter, 2009). The interventions reduce the severity of problem behaviors and enhance prosocial behaviors, and they are multifaceted. The coordination and delivery of Tier Three often entails academic and behavioral supports and is function based (Crone & Horner, 2003). This can include school-based supports, school-home components, and community supports.

       Systems: Supporting Staff Behavior

      To ensure that practices are implemented well and that the staff can gather the necessary data to inform outcomes, school teams also consider the systems and procedures they need to adjust or put into place to support the staff.

      Systems change is often one of the more complex aspects of the SWPBIS elements because it typically involves adjustments that are more difficult to see, and it requires administrative leadership and strong buy-in to change many moving parts that have become engrained habits within the school (Bohanon & Wu, 2014). For example, schools may need to adopt new processes and programs for office discipline referral data recording, entry, and management that allow staff to have meaningful information, which enables them to determine the effectiveness of a practice. Changing this one aspect of the SWPBIS system to better assess outcomes will require a thoughtful data-revision process. The team will:

      ▴ Reassess what data are collected for each office discipline referral form

      ▴ Design the form and consider how teachers can feasibly complete it (such as a half sheet that recess attendants can carry and has less information than a full sheet, or checkboxes rather than blanks to maximize efficiency)

      ▴ Determine which information other staff and parents receive, who communicates office referral to other staff and parents, and how the communication occurs

      ▴ Determine the program for data entry and management

      ▴ Decide logistics for who will input the data into the program and when the data will be entered

      ▴ Determine which team will review the data and how often

      ▴ Assess the impact of the changes and monitor whether the referral procedures are being followed accurately

      There are numerous considerations for just one tiny aspect of SWPBIS. Another example could involve an administrator providing time in the master calendar for schoolwide teaching of expectations following a school break. This often involves adjusting multiple schedules as well as dealing with protecting instructional time for teachers to meet certain academic mandates. For the individual chapters on the tiers (chapters 2, 3, and 4), we discuss the specific systems that need to be in place. Here is a summary.

      At Tier One, school teams put systems in place that include establishing a representative team to guide implementation, securing funding and resources, training and coaching staff to obtain and maintain their buy-in for SWPBIS and ensure that they understand Tier One, and having clear data procedures that include ongoing use of data to screen students and to monitor implementation. At Tier Two, similar systems include establishing personnel and a team to oversee Tier Two supports; dedicating roles for staff to support Tier Two; training and coaching; and communicating with students, families, and staff on those supports; as well as ongoing use of data to support decision making related to implementation and impact. At Tier Three, systems include a specialized behavior support team; access to behavioral expertise; procedures for identifying students who need additional support; and communicating with families, students, and staff; as well as ongoing use of data to support decision making related to the implementation and impact of Tier Three (Horner et al., 2010).

       Data: Supporting Decision Making

      Once school teams identify the outcomes that they want to achieve, they then identify the data needed to measure progress toward those outcomes. School teams will identify specific sources of data, which we discuss in subsequent chapters, but school teams use data to answer two questions for all aspects of SWPBIS: (1) Are practices implemented with fidelity and (2) What is the impact of those practices? Implementation is the act of applying a certain practice, whereas implementation fidelity is the extent to which a practice is implemented as intended (also referred to simply as fidelity; Hosp, 2008; Wolery, 2011). Impact (synonyms include outcome or effect) is the benefit of that practice. To have the necessary data to answer questions about implementation and impact, school teams gather four types of data—(1) fidelity, (2) screening, (3) diagnostic, and (4) progress monitoring.

      Are Practices Implemented With Fidelity?

      Fidelity data gauge the extent to which practices are being implemented as intended. There are a variety of methods for measuring fidelity, but often observations of the practices, questionnaires about the practices, or checklists of the components of a practice help to document and check fidelity (Kovaleski, Marco-Fies, & Boneshefski, n.d.; Newton, Horner, et al., 2009; Newton, Todd, et al., 2009). By measuring (and ensuring a high degree of) fidelity, educators can be confident that a lack of desired outcomes is the result of an ineffective practice (in other words, even though the practice was implemented accurately, it still didn’t reach the desired outcome). Accordingly, they can also be confident that when a desired outcome is reached, it is because educators implement the practice with fidelity. If educators do not measure fidelity, they are lacking information as to the extent to which educators were using the practice correctly and they may misattribute failure to reach the outcome to the practice itself when fidelity is actually the culprit (Harlacher et al., 2014). Additionally, sometimes low fidelity might tell a team that a practice is not a good fit for a particular context, and the team can discuss whether certain modifications to the practice (retraining, providing additional resources, and so on) will achieve desired outcomes or whether it should consider a new practice or intervention. Fidelity measures are used for each solution implemented and for each level of support (Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three). Fidelity measures calculate the overall implementation of the tiers of SWPBIS and implementation of individual interventions.

      To provide an analogy for the importance of measuring fidelity, consider a person who wants to lose weight. This person sets a goal to lose eight pounds in one month by attending yoga four times per week. After one month, this person has lost four pounds. Without knowing if the person followed the exercise plan, it’s difficult to determine which is at fault—the fidelity or the plan. If the person did yoga four times per week and still did not reach the goal, we can assume the plan was not effective. However, if the person only did yoga two times per week, then we can’t know if the exercise plan would have worked or not—it wasn’t followed. Conversely,