Everything you need to improve behavior on your campus and create the culture your community deserves.
All across the country, we are all trying to achieve our goals in schools while navigating through an increasingly chaotic ecosystem.
What is the root of this chaos? Student behavior distractions. We need to plan to manage these behavior concerns before our schools are defined by them.
You are certainly familiar with student behavior distractions but you may be asking yourself what is behavior management. How is it different than classroom management?
What is Behavior Management?
It’s all the actions, policies, and initiatives in place at your school to promote positive behaviors in your school. Keep in mind that you are unlikely to eliminate negative behaviors simply by promoting positive ones.
The goal is prevention, improvement, and mitigation – not elimination. In fact, elimination is a term that will set your plan up for failure. Coaches often take on this mantra when making predictions in the media or community: undersell and overdeliver.
The key components of your plan need to be set around realistic goals focused on prevention and improvement as the buy-in from your stakeholders will ultimately determine your level of success.
Behavior can impact all of your stakeholders but it’s important to understand how disruptions can impact the main goal of your organization; student learning.
Start in the classroom and work out from there. Behaviors can derail more than single classes if they aren’t managed well.
Now expand those situations out to the entire school.
Imagine what kind of supports are necessary for teachers to do the best job they can for our students, then get started building that support system.
As Charmaine Williams said on The Flywheel Effect, “Take care of your teachers. If you do that then they'll take care of the students.”
The effectiveness of your Behavior Management plan will directly impact your teacher's ability to perform their duties in the classroom.
So how do you improve behavior management on your campus? Well, it’s best to start with what you think behavior should look like on your campus.
As a school leader, you are tasked with creating an environment that is conducive to success for our youngest students.
The academic, social, and emotional foundation they set in your building will be the building blocks on which they begin to shape into the people they are destined to become.
That's why creating school-wide expectations and establishing a behavior rubric based on those expectations is a critical part of creating a safe and effective learning environment for students.
But doing this from scratch can be a challenge. That’s why we put together a database of behavior rubric examples to guide your work.
No matter if you need to create an elementary behavior rubric or if you lead a secondary school, we have you covered with great examples of schools all around the country that are structuring rubrics to fit the unique needs of their campuses and their students.
Let’s take a look at the different styles that our partner schools are trailblazing to success:
Many schools choose to use an acronym specific to their school to organize the rubric in a way that is easy to follow and utilize for everyone.
A great example of this can be found in Del Valle Elementary where Jay Maines and his team have based their program around SOAR:
SOAR is the school’s PBIS motto, and using it in their behavior rubric enables the whole community to have real conversations about what safety, ownership, achievement, and respect mean in each setting.
If your school utilizes the three-tiered framework of PBIS you may want to structure your rubric in a way that ties directly to that framework like Horatio Elementary School.
Brettny Mitchell and her team at Horatio have an average behavior ratio of 14:1, which means there are 14 positive behaviors for every negative behavior this year. This comes from their total points recorded, which is 125,000 over the previous five months!
Northgate Middle School, which is a part of North Kansas City Schools has an extensive behavior rubric that combines PBIS, trauma-informed teaching, and Portrait of a Graduate.
A portrait of a graduate is a document or statement that outlines the qualities, skills, and characteristics that a school or institution hopes to instill in its graduates.
It provides a clear vision of what it means to be a successful alumnus of that institution. This is very similar to an approach that Wirt High School took, as they base their rubric on the skills and traits necessary for success after graduation.
Margaret Allen Middle School, which is located in Metro Nashville Public Schools, follows the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for its behavior rubric.
Each habit is a separate category:
To learn more about how they built the categories across the 7 habits framework you should check out our podcast with their Community Achieves Site Coordinator, Kanetha Callahan.
Parchment North Elementary is a Leader in Me school, which means they focus on building life and leadership skills that lay the foundation for long-term academic achievement. This work also fosters a school culture rooted in trust.
Caddo Hills has three rubric items that students receive and lose points for. Those three items are commonly referred to as the Three R’s:
The beauty here is in the simplicity as a longer rubric is harder to use for everyone and that will obviously hurt buy-in – and the ultimate success of an initiative.
Freedom Crossing Academy successfully implemented a school-wide social-emotional learning program by embedding SEL skills within their school’s PBIS behavior rubric.
The school’s mission is “Falcons Take F.L.I.G.H.T.” and they have included these six characteristics into their behavior rubric. FLIGHT stands for Focus, Leadership, Imagination, Grit, Heart, and Team. When a student exhibits one of these characteristics, the school reinforces it by awarding points.
Student behavior is an age-old problem in schools. But what once was a mild inconvenience, hurdle, or distraction, now seems to be the biggest problem in schools.
Unfortunately, our students had some critical skill development put on pause. That’s a significant contributor to why our in-school and out-of-school suspension rates have skyrocketed.
There isn’t much use in re-living the last few years but it can help to frame the state of behavior in schools at the moment and why we need to focus our efforts on behavior management strategies to improve conditions in our schools.
Let’s take a look at a few of those strategies that can serve as your foundation:
Emphasize the importance of routines to your staff. The class should have a rhythm or flow to it that is expected and known by students.
Invest some time early in the year to teach kids how to do school. It may seem redundant or obvious, but it will pay dividends and save you time throughout the semester.
Praise the behaviors you want to see more of. Thank students for having materials out and ready on the bell. Thank students for using appropriate procedures. Praise will be noticed and internalized.
As a school leader, you can do this all day long. The goal should be to not walk by a student without creating a positive interaction. A simple “thank you” for following our school-wide expectations accompanied by a “good morning” goes a long way in creating fidelity in your systems.
Your staff’s response to minor infractions is important. Does a staff member intervening correct the behavior or escalate the behavior? I suggest considering resources around the 5 Rs.
Consequences matter. We want consequences to apply directly to the situation if at all possible. The consequence is to deter future offenses.
I want consequences to help repair the situation or relationship. Providing Restorative Practices training to your staff can help with all of those.
“It is imperative that it changes so that we can help our students succeed. The only way for this to happen is for the relationship between community and school to be restored to what it once was in years past. For accountability for student success be an equal share between parents and school. We are pushing a massive boulder up a hill now and every day. No one is helping us.”
Assistant Principal, Tennessee
Interventions can offer support for students who are not successful within your normal support structures. Tier 2 behavior interventions target students who are deemed at risk of developing more serious behavior challenges and aim to prevent them.
These can be formal plans like Dr. Anthony Tyrkala discussed with us on The Flywheel Effect or very specific strategies that need to be developed when your original plan falls short.
They could also be informal strategies to squash disruptive behavior that you can train your staff to implement and minimize those negative behaviors.
Let’s dig into a few to get you started:
Check-In/Check-Out is a Tier 2 behavior intervention in which students are assigned a mentor in the school building.
Students meet with their mentors every morning to review their goals and discuss behavior strategies.
Then, at the end of the day, they meet with their mentor again and review feedback the student received throughout their day from teachers and staff.
The communication of behaviors, the good/bad/ugly as I call it, is necessary to create a supportive learning environment.
When students have behavior needs in school, parents are often brought in to identify if they observe similar behaviors at home.
When the school team shares their observations and replacement behaviors being taught, a home and school plan can increase the likelihood of positive behaviors.
Often, disruptive behaviors occur in class due to a lack of self-regulation. At times, students are overstimulated or bored and they act out in a way to gain attention.
The Take a Break intervention in Tier 2 aims to mitigate this.
In Take a Break, your PBIS team develops approved mechanisms for students to decompress, pause, and regulate their emotions and behaviors.
To reduce class disruption, your team can also conceive of signals for teachers to use that signal to a student they need to apply this intervention.
That being said, the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” also applies here. If you really want to reduce severe behaviors you’ll need to improve your universal support structures like our partner Creekside Middle School has.
Relationships and discipline seem like words that don’t necessarily go together. But veteran educators will tell you that relationships are the key to positive school culture.
How do you maintain positive relationships? You need to have both classroom discipline strategies and positive behavioral intervention strategies in your building to create an environment where your school culture can thrive.
This seems backward. You may think that if you instill discipline your students will resent you. The opposite is actually true.
Discipline doesn’t foster resentment, it creates respect. This is a similar misconception to the one surrounding positive reinforcement and bribery.
If you can maintain discipline in your school, your students will respect you. That respect gives you the power to create positive relationships and instill positive results. Kim Wood of Placer County Schools gave a great explanation at a recent event we hosted when she said the difference in positive reinforcement and bribery comes down to who is in control.
Not only will you foster respect this way, but the pieces you decide to use to build your system could have a hugely positive impact on your students.
Consider the power of a token economy. When done correctly it can not only provide incentives to improve behavior but could be the vehicle you need to teach your students real-world financial literacy skills.
You also need to consider the necessity to progress monitor your results so you can make decisions that are data-driven like our partner school Darby Junior High has.
As you review your plans or draft new ones, always remember your goal when designing behavior management protocols: what conditions must be met in order for learning to happen?
Whether you are discussing token economy examples or trying to decide if culture impacts behavior or if behavior dictates culture always keep student learning at the center of the debate.
Keep your plan centered around that. Keep the main thing, the main thing! That’s how you really get the most out of your behavior management plan.
Explore 100+ ideas from schools like yours.
Explore school-wide behavior expectations from other schools.
The best Houses reflect your school’s unique culture. Browse examples from real schools and start brainstorming your House system!
Track behavior, motivate students, and promote a positive culture — all in one easy platform.
Can students learn in chaos? Can teachers teach amidst that same chaos? Can principals lead instruction initiatives in a chaotic environment?
All across the country, we are all trying to achieve our goals in schools while navigating through an increasingly chaotic ecosystem.
What is the root of this chaos? Student behavior distractions. We need to plan to manage these behavior concerns before our schools are defined by them.
You are certainly familiar with student behavior distractions but you may be asking yourself what is behavior management. How is it different than classroom management?
What is Behavior Management?
It’s all the actions, policies, and initiatives in place at your school to promote positive behaviors in your school. Keep in mind that you are unlikely to eliminate negative behaviors simply by promoting positive ones.
The goal is prevention, improvement, and mitigation – not elimination. In fact, elimination is a term that will set your plan up for failure. Coaches often take on this mantra when making predictions in the media or community: undersell and overdeliver.
The key components of your plan need to be set around realistic goals focused on prevention and improvement as the buy-in from your stakeholders will ultimately determine your level of success.
Behavior can impact all of your stakeholders but it’s important to understand how disruptions can impact the main goal of your organization; student learning.
Start in the classroom and work out from there. Behaviors can derail more than single classes if they aren’t managed well.
Now expand those situations out to the entire school.
Imagine what kind of supports are necessary for teachers to do the best job they can for our students, then get started building that support system.
As Charmaine Williams said on The Flywheel Effect, “Take care of your teachers. If you do that then they'll take care of the students.”
The effectiveness of your Behavior Management plan will directly impact your teacher's ability to perform their duties in the classroom.
So how do you improve behavior management on your campus? Well, it’s best to start with what you think behavior should look like on your campus.
As a school leader, you are tasked with creating an environment that is conducive to success for our youngest students.
The academic, social, and emotional foundation they set in your building will be the building blocks on which they begin to shape into the people they are destined to become.
That's why creating school-wide expectations and establishing a behavior rubric based on those expectations is a critical part of creating a safe and effective learning environment for students.
But doing this from scratch can be a challenge. That’s why we put together a database of behavior rubric examples to guide your work.
No matter if you need to create an elementary behavior rubric or if you lead a secondary school, we have you covered with great examples of schools all around the country that are structuring rubrics to fit the unique needs of their campuses and their students.
Let’s take a look at the different styles that our partner schools are trailblazing to success:
Many schools choose to use an acronym specific to their school to organize the rubric in a way that is easy to follow and utilize for everyone.
A great example of this can be found in Del Valle Elementary where Jay Maines and his team have based their program around SOAR:
SOAR is the school’s PBIS motto, and using it in their behavior rubric enables the whole community to have real conversations about what safety, ownership, achievement, and respect mean in each setting.
If your school utilizes the three-tiered framework of PBIS you may want to structure your rubric in a way that ties directly to that framework like Horatio Elementary School.
Brettny Mitchell and her team at Horatio have an average behavior ratio of 14:1, which means there are 14 positive behaviors for every negative behavior this year. This comes from their total points recorded, which is 125,000 over the previous five months!
Northgate Middle School, which is a part of North Kansas City Schools has an extensive behavior rubric that combines PBIS, trauma-informed teaching, and Portrait of a Graduate.
A portrait of a graduate is a document or statement that outlines the qualities, skills, and characteristics that a school or institution hopes to instill in its graduates.
It provides a clear vision of what it means to be a successful alumnus of that institution. This is very similar to an approach that Wirt High School took, as they base their rubric on the skills and traits necessary for success after graduation.
Margaret Allen Middle School, which is located in Metro Nashville Public Schools, follows the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for its behavior rubric.
Each habit is a separate category:
To learn more about how they built the categories across the 7 habits framework you should check out our podcast with their Community Achieves Site Coordinator, Kanetha Callahan.
Parchment North Elementary is a Leader in Me school, which means they focus on building life and leadership skills that lay the foundation for long-term academic achievement. This work also fosters a school culture rooted in trust.
Caddo Hills has three rubric items that students receive and lose points for. Those three items are commonly referred to as the Three R’s:
The beauty here is in the simplicity as a longer rubric is harder to use for everyone and that will obviously hurt buy-in – and the ultimate success of an initiative.
Freedom Crossing Academy successfully implemented a school-wide social-emotional learning program by embedding SEL skills within their school’s PBIS behavior rubric.
The school’s mission is “Falcons Take F.L.I.G.H.T.” and they have included these six characteristics into their behavior rubric. FLIGHT stands for Focus, Leadership, Imagination, Grit, Heart, and Team. When a student exhibits one of these characteristics, the school reinforces it by awarding points.
Student behavior is an age-old problem in schools. But what once was a mild inconvenience, hurdle, or distraction, now seems to be the biggest problem in schools.
Unfortunately, our students had some critical skill development put on pause. That’s a significant contributor to why our in-school and out-of-school suspension rates have skyrocketed.
There isn’t much use in re-living the last few years but it can help to frame the state of behavior in schools at the moment and why we need to focus our efforts on behavior management strategies to improve conditions in our schools.
Let’s take a look at a few of those strategies that can serve as your foundation:
Emphasize the importance of routines to your staff. The class should have a rhythm or flow to it that is expected and known by students.
Invest some time early in the year to teach kids how to do school. It may seem redundant or obvious, but it will pay dividends and save you time throughout the semester.
Praise the behaviors you want to see more of. Thank students for having materials out and ready on the bell. Thank students for using appropriate procedures. Praise will be noticed and internalized.
As a school leader, you can do this all day long. The goal should be to not walk by a student without creating a positive interaction. A simple “thank you” for following our school-wide expectations accompanied by a “good morning” goes a long way in creating fidelity in your systems.
Your staff’s response to minor infractions is important. Does a staff member intervening correct the behavior or escalate the behavior? I suggest considering resources around the 5 Rs.
Consequences matter. We want consequences to apply directly to the situation if at all possible. The consequence is to deter future offenses.
I want consequences to help repair the situation or relationship. Providing Restorative Practices training to your staff can help with all of those.
“It is imperative that it changes so that we can help our students succeed. The only way for this to happen is for the relationship between community and school to be restored to what it once was in years past. For accountability for student success be an equal share between parents and school. We are pushing a massive boulder up a hill now and every day. No one is helping us.”
Assistant Principal, Tennessee
Interventions can offer support for students who are not successful within your normal support structures. Tier 2 behavior interventions target students who are deemed at risk of developing more serious behavior challenges and aim to prevent them.
These can be formal plans like Dr. Anthony Tyrkala discussed with us on The Flywheel Effect or very specific strategies that need to be developed when your original plan falls short.
They could also be informal strategies to squash disruptive behavior that you can train your staff to implement and minimize those negative behaviors.
Let’s dig into a few to get you started:
Check-In/Check-Out is a Tier 2 behavior intervention in which students are assigned a mentor in the school building.
Students meet with their mentors every morning to review their goals and discuss behavior strategies.
Then, at the end of the day, they meet with their mentor again and review feedback the student received throughout their day from teachers and staff.
The communication of behaviors, the good/bad/ugly as I call it, is necessary to create a supportive learning environment.
When students have behavior needs in school, parents are often brought in to identify if they observe similar behaviors at home.
When the school team shares their observations and replacement behaviors being taught, a home and school plan can increase the likelihood of positive behaviors.
Often, disruptive behaviors occur in class due to a lack of self-regulation. At times, students are overstimulated or bored and they act out in a way to gain attention.
The Take a Break intervention in Tier 2 aims to mitigate this.
In Take a Break, your PBIS team develops approved mechanisms for students to decompress, pause, and regulate their emotions and behaviors.
To reduce class disruption, your team can also conceive of signals for teachers to use that signal to a student they need to apply this intervention.
That being said, the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” also applies here. If you really want to reduce severe behaviors you’ll need to improve your universal support structures like our partner Creekside Middle School has.
Relationships and discipline seem like words that don’t necessarily go together. But veteran educators will tell you that relationships are the key to positive school culture.
How do you maintain positive relationships? You need to have both classroom discipline strategies and positive behavioral intervention strategies in your building to create an environment where your school culture can thrive.
This seems backward. You may think that if you instill discipline your students will resent you. The opposite is actually true.
Discipline doesn’t foster resentment, it creates respect. This is a similar misconception to the one surrounding positive reinforcement and bribery.
If you can maintain discipline in your school, your students will respect you. That respect gives you the power to create positive relationships and instill positive results. Kim Wood of Placer County Schools gave a great explanation at a recent event we hosted when she said the difference in positive reinforcement and bribery comes down to who is in control.
Not only will you foster respect this way, but the pieces you decide to use to build your system could have a hugely positive impact on your students.
Consider the power of a token economy. When done correctly it can not only provide incentives to improve behavior but could be the vehicle you need to teach your students real-world financial literacy skills.
You also need to consider the necessity to progress monitor your results so you can make decisions that are data-driven like our partner school Darby Junior High has.
As you review your plans or draft new ones, always remember your goal when designing behavior management protocols: what conditions must be met in order for learning to happen?
Whether you are discussing token economy examples or trying to decide if culture impacts behavior or if behavior dictates culture always keep student learning at the center of the debate.
Keep your plan centered around that. Keep the main thing, the main thing! That’s how you really get the most out of your behavior management plan.
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Explore 100+ ideas from schools like yours.
Explore school-wide behavior expectations from other schools.
The best Houses reflect your school’s unique culture. Browse examples from real schools and start brainstorming your House system!
Track behavior, motivate students, and promote a positive culture — all in one easy platform.
All across the country, we are all trying to achieve our goals in schools while navigating through an increasingly chaotic ecosystem.
What is the root of this chaos? Student behavior distractions. We need to plan to manage these behavior concerns before our schools are defined by them.
You are certainly familiar with student behavior distractions but you may be asking yourself what is behavior management. How is it different than classroom management?
What is Behavior Management?
It’s all the actions, policies, and initiatives in place at your school to promote positive behaviors in your school. Keep in mind that you are unlikely to eliminate negative behaviors simply by promoting positive ones.
The goal is prevention, improvement, and mitigation – not elimination. In fact, elimination is a term that will set your plan up for failure. Coaches often take on this mantra when making predictions in the media or community: undersell and overdeliver.
The key components of your plan need to be set around realistic goals focused on prevention and improvement as the buy-in from your stakeholders will ultimately determine your level of success.
Behavior can impact all of your stakeholders but it’s important to understand how disruptions can impact the main goal of your organization; student learning.
Start in the classroom and work out from there. Behaviors can derail more than single classes if they aren’t managed well.
Now expand those situations out to the entire school.
Imagine what kind of supports are necessary for teachers to do the best job they can for our students, then get started building that support system.
As Charmaine Williams said on The Flywheel Effect, “Take care of your teachers. If you do that then they'll take care of the students.”
The effectiveness of your Behavior Management plan will directly impact your teacher's ability to perform their duties in the classroom.
So how do you improve behavior management on your campus? Well, it’s best to start with what you think behavior should look like on your campus.
As a school leader, you are tasked with creating an environment that is conducive to success for our youngest students.
The academic, social, and emotional foundation they set in your building will be the building blocks on which they begin to shape into the people they are destined to become.
That's why creating school-wide expectations and establishing a behavior rubric based on those expectations is a critical part of creating a safe and effective learning environment for students.
But doing this from scratch can be a challenge. That’s why we put together a database of behavior rubric examples to guide your work.
No matter if you need to create an elementary behavior rubric or if you lead a secondary school, we have you covered with great examples of schools all around the country that are structuring rubrics to fit the unique needs of their campuses and their students.
Let’s take a look at the different styles that our partner schools are trailblazing to success:
Many schools choose to use an acronym specific to their school to organize the rubric in a way that is easy to follow and utilize for everyone.
A great example of this can be found in Del Valle Elementary where Jay Maines and his team have based their program around SOAR:
SOAR is the school’s PBIS motto, and using it in their behavior rubric enables the whole community to have real conversations about what safety, ownership, achievement, and respect mean in each setting.
If your school utilizes the three-tiered framework of PBIS you may want to structure your rubric in a way that ties directly to that framework like Horatio Elementary School.
Brettny Mitchell and her team at Horatio have an average behavior ratio of 14:1, which means there are 14 positive behaviors for every negative behavior this year. This comes from their total points recorded, which is 125,000 over the previous five months!
Northgate Middle School, which is a part of North Kansas City Schools has an extensive behavior rubric that combines PBIS, trauma-informed teaching, and Portrait of a Graduate.
A portrait of a graduate is a document or statement that outlines the qualities, skills, and characteristics that a school or institution hopes to instill in its graduates.
It provides a clear vision of what it means to be a successful alumnus of that institution. This is very similar to an approach that Wirt High School took, as they base their rubric on the skills and traits necessary for success after graduation.
Margaret Allen Middle School, which is located in Metro Nashville Public Schools, follows the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for its behavior rubric.
Each habit is a separate category:
To learn more about how they built the categories across the 7 habits framework you should check out our podcast with their Community Achieves Site Coordinator, Kanetha Callahan.
Parchment North Elementary is a Leader in Me school, which means they focus on building life and leadership skills that lay the foundation for long-term academic achievement. This work also fosters a school culture rooted in trust.
Caddo Hills has three rubric items that students receive and lose points for. Those three items are commonly referred to as the Three R’s:
The beauty here is in the simplicity as a longer rubric is harder to use for everyone and that will obviously hurt buy-in – and the ultimate success of an initiative.
Freedom Crossing Academy successfully implemented a school-wide social-emotional learning program by embedding SEL skills within their school’s PBIS behavior rubric.
The school’s mission is “Falcons Take F.L.I.G.H.T.” and they have included these six characteristics into their behavior rubric. FLIGHT stands for Focus, Leadership, Imagination, Grit, Heart, and Team. When a student exhibits one of these characteristics, the school reinforces it by awarding points.
Student behavior is an age-old problem in schools. But what once was a mild inconvenience, hurdle, or distraction, now seems to be the biggest problem in schools.
Unfortunately, our students had some critical skill development put on pause. That’s a significant contributor to why our in-school and out-of-school suspension rates have skyrocketed.
There isn’t much use in re-living the last few years but it can help to frame the state of behavior in schools at the moment and why we need to focus our efforts on behavior management strategies to improve conditions in our schools.
Let’s take a look at a few of those strategies that can serve as your foundation:
Emphasize the importance of routines to your staff. The class should have a rhythm or flow to it that is expected and known by students.
Invest some time early in the year to teach kids how to do school. It may seem redundant or obvious, but it will pay dividends and save you time throughout the semester.
Praise the behaviors you want to see more of. Thank students for having materials out and ready on the bell. Thank students for using appropriate procedures. Praise will be noticed and internalized.
As a school leader, you can do this all day long. The goal should be to not walk by a student without creating a positive interaction. A simple “thank you” for following our school-wide expectations accompanied by a “good morning” goes a long way in creating fidelity in your systems.
Your staff’s response to minor infractions is important. Does a staff member intervening correct the behavior or escalate the behavior? I suggest considering resources around the 5 Rs.
Consequences matter. We want consequences to apply directly to the situation if at all possible. The consequence is to deter future offenses.
I want consequences to help repair the situation or relationship. Providing Restorative Practices training to your staff can help with all of those.
“It is imperative that it changes so that we can help our students succeed. The only way for this to happen is for the relationship between community and school to be restored to what it once was in years past. For accountability for student success be an equal share between parents and school. We are pushing a massive boulder up a hill now and every day. No one is helping us.”
Assistant Principal, Tennessee
Interventions can offer support for students who are not successful within your normal support structures. Tier 2 behavior interventions target students who are deemed at risk of developing more serious behavior challenges and aim to prevent them.
These can be formal plans like Dr. Anthony Tyrkala discussed with us on The Flywheel Effect or very specific strategies that need to be developed when your original plan falls short.
They could also be informal strategies to squash disruptive behavior that you can train your staff to implement and minimize those negative behaviors.
Let’s dig into a few to get you started:
Check-In/Check-Out is a Tier 2 behavior intervention in which students are assigned a mentor in the school building.
Students meet with their mentors every morning to review their goals and discuss behavior strategies.
Then, at the end of the day, they meet with their mentor again and review feedback the student received throughout their day from teachers and staff.
The communication of behaviors, the good/bad/ugly as I call it, is necessary to create a supportive learning environment.
When students have behavior needs in school, parents are often brought in to identify if they observe similar behaviors at home.
When the school team shares their observations and replacement behaviors being taught, a home and school plan can increase the likelihood of positive behaviors.
Often, disruptive behaviors occur in class due to a lack of self-regulation. At times, students are overstimulated or bored and they act out in a way to gain attention.
The Take a Break intervention in Tier 2 aims to mitigate this.
In Take a Break, your PBIS team develops approved mechanisms for students to decompress, pause, and regulate their emotions and behaviors.
To reduce class disruption, your team can also conceive of signals for teachers to use that signal to a student they need to apply this intervention.
That being said, the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” also applies here. If you really want to reduce severe behaviors you’ll need to improve your universal support structures like our partner Creekside Middle School has.
Relationships and discipline seem like words that don’t necessarily go together. But veteran educators will tell you that relationships are the key to positive school culture.
How do you maintain positive relationships? You need to have both classroom discipline strategies and positive behavioral intervention strategies in your building to create an environment where your school culture can thrive.
This seems backward. You may think that if you instill discipline your students will resent you. The opposite is actually true.
Discipline doesn’t foster resentment, it creates respect. This is a similar misconception to the one surrounding positive reinforcement and bribery.
If you can maintain discipline in your school, your students will respect you. That respect gives you the power to create positive relationships and instill positive results. Kim Wood of Placer County Schools gave a great explanation at a recent event we hosted when she said the difference in positive reinforcement and bribery comes down to who is in control.
Not only will you foster respect this way, but the pieces you decide to use to build your system could have a hugely positive impact on your students.
Consider the power of a token economy. When done correctly it can not only provide incentives to improve behavior but could be the vehicle you need to teach your students real-world financial literacy skills.
You also need to consider the necessity to progress monitor your results so you can make decisions that are data-driven like our partner school Darby Junior High has.
As you review your plans or draft new ones, always remember your goal when designing behavior management protocols: what conditions must be met in order for learning to happen?
Whether you are discussing token economy examples or trying to decide if culture impacts behavior or if behavior dictates culture always keep student learning at the center of the debate.
Keep your plan centered around that. Keep the main thing, the main thing! That’s how you really get the most out of your behavior management plan.
Explore 100+ ideas from schools like yours.
Explore school-wide behavior expectations from other schools.
The best Houses reflect your school’s unique culture. Browse examples from real schools and start brainstorming your House system!
Track behavior, motivate students, and promote a positive culture — all in one easy platform.
All across the country, we are all trying to achieve our goals in schools while navigating through an increasingly chaotic ecosystem.
What is the root of this chaos? Student behavior distractions. We need to plan to manage these behavior concerns before our schools are defined by them.
You are certainly familiar with student behavior distractions but you may be asking yourself what is behavior management. How is it different than classroom management?
What is Behavior Management?
It’s all the actions, policies, and initiatives in place at your school to promote positive behaviors in your school. Keep in mind that you are unlikely to eliminate negative behaviors simply by promoting positive ones.
The goal is prevention, improvement, and mitigation – not elimination. In fact, elimination is a term that will set your plan up for failure. Coaches often take on this mantra when making predictions in the media or community: undersell and overdeliver.
The key components of your plan need to be set around realistic goals focused on prevention and improvement as the buy-in from your stakeholders will ultimately determine your level of success.
Behavior can impact all of your stakeholders but it’s important to understand how disruptions can impact the main goal of your organization; student learning.
Start in the classroom and work out from there. Behaviors can derail more than single classes if they aren’t managed well.
Now expand those situations out to the entire school.
Imagine what kind of supports are necessary for teachers to do the best job they can for our students, then get started building that support system.
As Charmaine Williams said on The Flywheel Effect, “Take care of your teachers. If you do that then they'll take care of the students.”
The effectiveness of your Behavior Management plan will directly impact your teacher's ability to perform their duties in the classroom.
So how do you improve behavior management on your campus? Well, it’s best to start with what you think behavior should look like on your campus.
As a school leader, you are tasked with creating an environment that is conducive to success for our youngest students.
The academic, social, and emotional foundation they set in your building will be the building blocks on which they begin to shape into the people they are destined to become.
That's why creating school-wide expectations and establishing a behavior rubric based on those expectations is a critical part of creating a safe and effective learning environment for students.
But doing this from scratch can be a challenge. That’s why we put together a database of behavior rubric examples to guide your work.
No matter if you need to create an elementary behavior rubric or if you lead a secondary school, we have you covered with great examples of schools all around the country that are structuring rubrics to fit the unique needs of their campuses and their students.
Let’s take a look at the different styles that our partner schools are trailblazing to success:
Many schools choose to use an acronym specific to their school to organize the rubric in a way that is easy to follow and utilize for everyone.
A great example of this can be found in Del Valle Elementary where Jay Maines and his team have based their program around SOAR:
SOAR is the school’s PBIS motto, and using it in their behavior rubric enables the whole community to have real conversations about what safety, ownership, achievement, and respect mean in each setting.
If your school utilizes the three-tiered framework of PBIS you may want to structure your rubric in a way that ties directly to that framework like Horatio Elementary School.
Brettny Mitchell and her team at Horatio have an average behavior ratio of 14:1, which means there are 14 positive behaviors for every negative behavior this year. This comes from their total points recorded, which is 125,000 over the previous five months!
Northgate Middle School, which is a part of North Kansas City Schools has an extensive behavior rubric that combines PBIS, trauma-informed teaching, and Portrait of a Graduate.
A portrait of a graduate is a document or statement that outlines the qualities, skills, and characteristics that a school or institution hopes to instill in its graduates.
It provides a clear vision of what it means to be a successful alumnus of that institution. This is very similar to an approach that Wirt High School took, as they base their rubric on the skills and traits necessary for success after graduation.
Margaret Allen Middle School, which is located in Metro Nashville Public Schools, follows the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for its behavior rubric.
Each habit is a separate category:
To learn more about how they built the categories across the 7 habits framework you should check out our podcast with their Community Achieves Site Coordinator, Kanetha Callahan.
Parchment North Elementary is a Leader in Me school, which means they focus on building life and leadership skills that lay the foundation for long-term academic achievement. This work also fosters a school culture rooted in trust.
Caddo Hills has three rubric items that students receive and lose points for. Those three items are commonly referred to as the Three R’s:
The beauty here is in the simplicity as a longer rubric is harder to use for everyone and that will obviously hurt buy-in – and the ultimate success of an initiative.
Freedom Crossing Academy successfully implemented a school-wide social-emotional learning program by embedding SEL skills within their school’s PBIS behavior rubric.
The school’s mission is “Falcons Take F.L.I.G.H.T.” and they have included these six characteristics into their behavior rubric. FLIGHT stands for Focus, Leadership, Imagination, Grit, Heart, and Team. When a student exhibits one of these characteristics, the school reinforces it by awarding points.
Student behavior is an age-old problem in schools. But what once was a mild inconvenience, hurdle, or distraction, now seems to be the biggest problem in schools.
Unfortunately, our students had some critical skill development put on pause. That’s a significant contributor to why our in-school and out-of-school suspension rates have skyrocketed.
There isn’t much use in re-living the last few years but it can help to frame the state of behavior in schools at the moment and why we need to focus our efforts on behavior management strategies to improve conditions in our schools.
Let’s take a look at a few of those strategies that can serve as your foundation:
Emphasize the importance of routines to your staff. The class should have a rhythm or flow to it that is expected and known by students.
Invest some time early in the year to teach kids how to do school. It may seem redundant or obvious, but it will pay dividends and save you time throughout the semester.
Praise the behaviors you want to see more of. Thank students for having materials out and ready on the bell. Thank students for using appropriate procedures. Praise will be noticed and internalized.
As a school leader, you can do this all day long. The goal should be to not walk by a student without creating a positive interaction. A simple “thank you” for following our school-wide expectations accompanied by a “good morning” goes a long way in creating fidelity in your systems.
Your staff’s response to minor infractions is important. Does a staff member intervening correct the behavior or escalate the behavior? I suggest considering resources around the 5 Rs.
Consequences matter. We want consequences to apply directly to the situation if at all possible. The consequence is to deter future offenses.
I want consequences to help repair the situation or relationship. Providing Restorative Practices training to your staff can help with all of those.
“It is imperative that it changes so that we can help our students succeed. The only way for this to happen is for the relationship between community and school to be restored to what it once was in years past. For accountability for student success be an equal share between parents and school. We are pushing a massive boulder up a hill now and every day. No one is helping us.”
Assistant Principal, Tennessee
Interventions can offer support for students who are not successful within your normal support structures. Tier 2 behavior interventions target students who are deemed at risk of developing more serious behavior challenges and aim to prevent them.
These can be formal plans like Dr. Anthony Tyrkala discussed with us on The Flywheel Effect or very specific strategies that need to be developed when your original plan falls short.
They could also be informal strategies to squash disruptive behavior that you can train your staff to implement and minimize those negative behaviors.
Let’s dig into a few to get you started:
Check-In/Check-Out is a Tier 2 behavior intervention in which students are assigned a mentor in the school building.
Students meet with their mentors every morning to review their goals and discuss behavior strategies.
Then, at the end of the day, they meet with their mentor again and review feedback the student received throughout their day from teachers and staff.
The communication of behaviors, the good/bad/ugly as I call it, is necessary to create a supportive learning environment.
When students have behavior needs in school, parents are often brought in to identify if they observe similar behaviors at home.
When the school team shares their observations and replacement behaviors being taught, a home and school plan can increase the likelihood of positive behaviors.
Often, disruptive behaviors occur in class due to a lack of self-regulation. At times, students are overstimulated or bored and they act out in a way to gain attention.
The Take a Break intervention in Tier 2 aims to mitigate this.
In Take a Break, your PBIS team develops approved mechanisms for students to decompress, pause, and regulate their emotions and behaviors.
To reduce class disruption, your team can also conceive of signals for teachers to use that signal to a student they need to apply this intervention.
That being said, the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” also applies here. If you really want to reduce severe behaviors you’ll need to improve your universal support structures like our partner Creekside Middle School has.
Relationships and discipline seem like words that don’t necessarily go together. But veteran educators will tell you that relationships are the key to positive school culture.
How do you maintain positive relationships? You need to have both classroom discipline strategies and positive behavioral intervention strategies in your building to create an environment where your school culture can thrive.
This seems backward. You may think that if you instill discipline your students will resent you. The opposite is actually true.
Discipline doesn’t foster resentment, it creates respect. This is a similar misconception to the one surrounding positive reinforcement and bribery.
If you can maintain discipline in your school, your students will respect you. That respect gives you the power to create positive relationships and instill positive results. Kim Wood of Placer County Schools gave a great explanation at a recent event we hosted when she said the difference in positive reinforcement and bribery comes down to who is in control.
Not only will you foster respect this way, but the pieces you decide to use to build your system could have a hugely positive impact on your students.
Consider the power of a token economy. When done correctly it can not only provide incentives to improve behavior but could be the vehicle you need to teach your students real-world financial literacy skills.
You also need to consider the necessity to progress monitor your results so you can make decisions that are data-driven like our partner school Darby Junior High has.
As you review your plans or draft new ones, always remember your goal when designing behavior management protocols: what conditions must be met in order for learning to happen?
Whether you are discussing token economy examples or trying to decide if culture impacts behavior or if behavior dictates culture always keep student learning at the center of the debate.
Keep your plan centered around that. Keep the main thing, the main thing! That’s how you really get the most out of your behavior management plan.
All across the country, we are all trying to achieve our goals in schools while navigating through an increasingly chaotic ecosystem.
What is the root of this chaos? Student behavior distractions. We need to plan to manage these behavior concerns before our schools are defined by them.
You are certainly familiar with student behavior distractions but you may be asking yourself what is behavior management. How is it different than classroom management?
What is Behavior Management?
It’s all the actions, policies, and initiatives in place at your school to promote positive behaviors in your school. Keep in mind that you are unlikely to eliminate negative behaviors simply by promoting positive ones.
The goal is prevention, improvement, and mitigation – not elimination. In fact, elimination is a term that will set your plan up for failure. Coaches often take on this mantra when making predictions in the media or community: undersell and overdeliver.
The key components of your plan need to be set around realistic goals focused on prevention and improvement as the buy-in from your stakeholders will ultimately determine your level of success.
Behavior can impact all of your stakeholders but it’s important to understand how disruptions can impact the main goal of your organization; student learning.
Start in the classroom and work out from there. Behaviors can derail more than single classes if they aren’t managed well.
Now expand those situations out to the entire school.
Imagine what kind of supports are necessary for teachers to do the best job they can for our students, then get started building that support system.
As Charmaine Williams said on The Flywheel Effect, “Take care of your teachers. If you do that then they'll take care of the students.”
The effectiveness of your Behavior Management plan will directly impact your teacher's ability to perform their duties in the classroom.
So how do you improve behavior management on your campus? Well, it’s best to start with what you think behavior should look like on your campus.
As a school leader, you are tasked with creating an environment that is conducive to success for our youngest students.
The academic, social, and emotional foundation they set in your building will be the building blocks on which they begin to shape into the people they are destined to become.
That's why creating school-wide expectations and establishing a behavior rubric based on those expectations is a critical part of creating a safe and effective learning environment for students.
But doing this from scratch can be a challenge. That’s why we put together a database of behavior rubric examples to guide your work.
No matter if you need to create an elementary behavior rubric or if you lead a secondary school, we have you covered with great examples of schools all around the country that are structuring rubrics to fit the unique needs of their campuses and their students.
Let’s take a look at the different styles that our partner schools are trailblazing to success:
Many schools choose to use an acronym specific to their school to organize the rubric in a way that is easy to follow and utilize for everyone.
A great example of this can be found in Del Valle Elementary where Jay Maines and his team have based their program around SOAR:
SOAR is the school’s PBIS motto, and using it in their behavior rubric enables the whole community to have real conversations about what safety, ownership, achievement, and respect mean in each setting.
If your school utilizes the three-tiered framework of PBIS you may want to structure your rubric in a way that ties directly to that framework like Horatio Elementary School.
Brettny Mitchell and her team at Horatio have an average behavior ratio of 14:1, which means there are 14 positive behaviors for every negative behavior this year. This comes from their total points recorded, which is 125,000 over the previous five months!
Northgate Middle School, which is a part of North Kansas City Schools has an extensive behavior rubric that combines PBIS, trauma-informed teaching, and Portrait of a Graduate.
A portrait of a graduate is a document or statement that outlines the qualities, skills, and characteristics that a school or institution hopes to instill in its graduates.
It provides a clear vision of what it means to be a successful alumnus of that institution. This is very similar to an approach that Wirt High School took, as they base their rubric on the skills and traits necessary for success after graduation.
Margaret Allen Middle School, which is located in Metro Nashville Public Schools, follows the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for its behavior rubric.
Each habit is a separate category:
To learn more about how they built the categories across the 7 habits framework you should check out our podcast with their Community Achieves Site Coordinator, Kanetha Callahan.
Parchment North Elementary is a Leader in Me school, which means they focus on building life and leadership skills that lay the foundation for long-term academic achievement. This work also fosters a school culture rooted in trust.
Caddo Hills has three rubric items that students receive and lose points for. Those three items are commonly referred to as the Three R’s:
The beauty here is in the simplicity as a longer rubric is harder to use for everyone and that will obviously hurt buy-in – and the ultimate success of an initiative.
Freedom Crossing Academy successfully implemented a school-wide social-emotional learning program by embedding SEL skills within their school’s PBIS behavior rubric.
The school’s mission is “Falcons Take F.L.I.G.H.T.” and they have included these six characteristics into their behavior rubric. FLIGHT stands for Focus, Leadership, Imagination, Grit, Heart, and Team. When a student exhibits one of these characteristics, the school reinforces it by awarding points.
Student behavior is an age-old problem in schools. But what once was a mild inconvenience, hurdle, or distraction, now seems to be the biggest problem in schools.
Unfortunately, our students had some critical skill development put on pause. That’s a significant contributor to why our in-school and out-of-school suspension rates have skyrocketed.
There isn’t much use in re-living the last few years but it can help to frame the state of behavior in schools at the moment and why we need to focus our efforts on behavior management strategies to improve conditions in our schools.
Let’s take a look at a few of those strategies that can serve as your foundation:
Emphasize the importance of routines to your staff. The class should have a rhythm or flow to it that is expected and known by students.
Invest some time early in the year to teach kids how to do school. It may seem redundant or obvious, but it will pay dividends and save you time throughout the semester.
Praise the behaviors you want to see more of. Thank students for having materials out and ready on the bell. Thank students for using appropriate procedures. Praise will be noticed and internalized.
As a school leader, you can do this all day long. The goal should be to not walk by a student without creating a positive interaction. A simple “thank you” for following our school-wide expectations accompanied by a “good morning” goes a long way in creating fidelity in your systems.
Your staff’s response to minor infractions is important. Does a staff member intervening correct the behavior or escalate the behavior? I suggest considering resources around the 5 Rs.
Consequences matter. We want consequences to apply directly to the situation if at all possible. The consequence is to deter future offenses.
I want consequences to help repair the situation or relationship. Providing Restorative Practices training to your staff can help with all of those.
“It is imperative that it changes so that we can help our students succeed. The only way for this to happen is for the relationship between community and school to be restored to what it once was in years past. For accountability for student success be an equal share between parents and school. We are pushing a massive boulder up a hill now and every day. No one is helping us.”
Assistant Principal, Tennessee
Interventions can offer support for students who are not successful within your normal support structures. Tier 2 behavior interventions target students who are deemed at risk of developing more serious behavior challenges and aim to prevent them.
These can be formal plans like Dr. Anthony Tyrkala discussed with us on The Flywheel Effect or very specific strategies that need to be developed when your original plan falls short.
They could also be informal strategies to squash disruptive behavior that you can train your staff to implement and minimize those negative behaviors.
Let’s dig into a few to get you started:
Check-In/Check-Out is a Tier 2 behavior intervention in which students are assigned a mentor in the school building.
Students meet with their mentors every morning to review their goals and discuss behavior strategies.
Then, at the end of the day, they meet with their mentor again and review feedback the student received throughout their day from teachers and staff.
The communication of behaviors, the good/bad/ugly as I call it, is necessary to create a supportive learning environment.
When students have behavior needs in school, parents are often brought in to identify if they observe similar behaviors at home.
When the school team shares their observations and replacement behaviors being taught, a home and school plan can increase the likelihood of positive behaviors.
Often, disruptive behaviors occur in class due to a lack of self-regulation. At times, students are overstimulated or bored and they act out in a way to gain attention.
The Take a Break intervention in Tier 2 aims to mitigate this.
In Take a Break, your PBIS team develops approved mechanisms for students to decompress, pause, and regulate their emotions and behaviors.
To reduce class disruption, your team can also conceive of signals for teachers to use that signal to a student they need to apply this intervention.
That being said, the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” also applies here. If you really want to reduce severe behaviors you’ll need to improve your universal support structures like our partner Creekside Middle School has.
Relationships and discipline seem like words that don’t necessarily go together. But veteran educators will tell you that relationships are the key to positive school culture.
How do you maintain positive relationships? You need to have both classroom discipline strategies and positive behavioral intervention strategies in your building to create an environment where your school culture can thrive.
This seems backward. You may think that if you instill discipline your students will resent you. The opposite is actually true.
Discipline doesn’t foster resentment, it creates respect. This is a similar misconception to the one surrounding positive reinforcement and bribery.
If you can maintain discipline in your school, your students will respect you. That respect gives you the power to create positive relationships and instill positive results. Kim Wood of Placer County Schools gave a great explanation at a recent event we hosted when she said the difference in positive reinforcement and bribery comes down to who is in control.
Not only will you foster respect this way, but the pieces you decide to use to build your system could have a hugely positive impact on your students.
Consider the power of a token economy. When done correctly it can not only provide incentives to improve behavior but could be the vehicle you need to teach your students real-world financial literacy skills.
You also need to consider the necessity to progress monitor your results so you can make decisions that are data-driven like our partner school Darby Junior High has.
As you review your plans or draft new ones, always remember your goal when designing behavior management protocols: what conditions must be met in order for learning to happen?
Whether you are discussing token economy examples or trying to decide if culture impacts behavior or if behavior dictates culture always keep student learning at the center of the debate.
Keep your plan centered around that. Keep the main thing, the main thing! That’s how you really get the most out of your behavior management plan.
You know what they teamwork makes the dream work. These articles have been written by the wonderful members of our team.
Explore 100+ ideas from schools like yours.
Explore school-wide behavior expectations from other schools.
The best Houses reflect your school’s unique culture. Browse examples from real schools and start brainstorming your House system!
Track behavior, motivate students, and promote a positive culture — all in one easy platform.
Can students learn in chaos? Can teachers teach amidst that same chaos? Can principals lead instruction initiatives in a chaotic environment?
All across the country, we are all trying to achieve our goals in schools while navigating through an increasingly chaotic ecosystem.
What is the root of this chaos? Student behavior distractions. We need to plan to manage these behavior concerns before our schools are defined by them.
You are certainly familiar with student behavior distractions but you may be asking yourself what is behavior management. How is it different than classroom management?
What is Behavior Management?
It’s all the actions, policies, and initiatives in place at your school to promote positive behaviors in your school. Keep in mind that you are unlikely to eliminate negative behaviors simply by promoting positive ones.
The goal is prevention, improvement, and mitigation – not elimination. In fact, elimination is a term that will set your plan up for failure. Coaches often take on this mantra when making predictions in the media or community: undersell and overdeliver.
The key components of your plan need to be set around realistic goals focused on prevention and improvement as the buy-in from your stakeholders will ultimately determine your level of success.
Behavior can impact all of your stakeholders but it’s important to understand how disruptions can impact the main goal of your organization; student learning.
Start in the classroom and work out from there. Behaviors can derail more than single classes if they aren’t managed well.
Now expand those situations out to the entire school.
Imagine what kind of supports are necessary for teachers to do the best job they can for our students, then get started building that support system.
As Charmaine Williams said on The Flywheel Effect, “Take care of your teachers. If you do that then they'll take care of the students.”
The effectiveness of your Behavior Management plan will directly impact your teacher's ability to perform their duties in the classroom.
So how do you improve behavior management on your campus? Well, it’s best to start with what you think behavior should look like on your campus.
As a school leader, you are tasked with creating an environment that is conducive to success for our youngest students.
The academic, social, and emotional foundation they set in your building will be the building blocks on which they begin to shape into the people they are destined to become.
That's why creating school-wide expectations and establishing a behavior rubric based on those expectations is a critical part of creating a safe and effective learning environment for students.
But doing this from scratch can be a challenge. That’s why we put together a database of behavior rubric examples to guide your work.
No matter if you need to create an elementary behavior rubric or if you lead a secondary school, we have you covered with great examples of schools all around the country that are structuring rubrics to fit the unique needs of their campuses and their students.
Let’s take a look at the different styles that our partner schools are trailblazing to success:
Many schools choose to use an acronym specific to their school to organize the rubric in a way that is easy to follow and utilize for everyone.
A great example of this can be found in Del Valle Elementary where Jay Maines and his team have based their program around SOAR:
SOAR is the school’s PBIS motto, and using it in their behavior rubric enables the whole community to have real conversations about what safety, ownership, achievement, and respect mean in each setting.
If your school utilizes the three-tiered framework of PBIS you may want to structure your rubric in a way that ties directly to that framework like Horatio Elementary School.
Brettny Mitchell and her team at Horatio have an average behavior ratio of 14:1, which means there are 14 positive behaviors for every negative behavior this year. This comes from their total points recorded, which is 125,000 over the previous five months!
Northgate Middle School, which is a part of North Kansas City Schools has an extensive behavior rubric that combines PBIS, trauma-informed teaching, and Portrait of a Graduate.
A portrait of a graduate is a document or statement that outlines the qualities, skills, and characteristics that a school or institution hopes to instill in its graduates.
It provides a clear vision of what it means to be a successful alumnus of that institution. This is very similar to an approach that Wirt High School took, as they base their rubric on the skills and traits necessary for success after graduation.
Margaret Allen Middle School, which is located in Metro Nashville Public Schools, follows the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for its behavior rubric.
Each habit is a separate category:
To learn more about how they built the categories across the 7 habits framework you should check out our podcast with their Community Achieves Site Coordinator, Kanetha Callahan.
Parchment North Elementary is a Leader in Me school, which means they focus on building life and leadership skills that lay the foundation for long-term academic achievement. This work also fosters a school culture rooted in trust.
Caddo Hills has three rubric items that students receive and lose points for. Those three items are commonly referred to as the Three R’s:
The beauty here is in the simplicity as a longer rubric is harder to use for everyone and that will obviously hurt buy-in – and the ultimate success of an initiative.
Freedom Crossing Academy successfully implemented a school-wide social-emotional learning program by embedding SEL skills within their school’s PBIS behavior rubric.
The school’s mission is “Falcons Take F.L.I.G.H.T.” and they have included these six characteristics into their behavior rubric. FLIGHT stands for Focus, Leadership, Imagination, Grit, Heart, and Team. When a student exhibits one of these characteristics, the school reinforces it by awarding points.
Student behavior is an age-old problem in schools. But what once was a mild inconvenience, hurdle, or distraction, now seems to be the biggest problem in schools.
Unfortunately, our students had some critical skill development put on pause. That’s a significant contributor to why our in-school and out-of-school suspension rates have skyrocketed.
There isn’t much use in re-living the last few years but it can help to frame the state of behavior in schools at the moment and why we need to focus our efforts on behavior management strategies to improve conditions in our schools.
Let’s take a look at a few of those strategies that can serve as your foundation:
Emphasize the importance of routines to your staff. The class should have a rhythm or flow to it that is expected and known by students.
Invest some time early in the year to teach kids how to do school. It may seem redundant or obvious, but it will pay dividends and save you time throughout the semester.
Praise the behaviors you want to see more of. Thank students for having materials out and ready on the bell. Thank students for using appropriate procedures. Praise will be noticed and internalized.
As a school leader, you can do this all day long. The goal should be to not walk by a student without creating a positive interaction. A simple “thank you” for following our school-wide expectations accompanied by a “good morning” goes a long way in creating fidelity in your systems.
Your staff’s response to minor infractions is important. Does a staff member intervening correct the behavior or escalate the behavior? I suggest considering resources around the 5 Rs.
Consequences matter. We want consequences to apply directly to the situation if at all possible. The consequence is to deter future offenses.
I want consequences to help repair the situation or relationship. Providing Restorative Practices training to your staff can help with all of those.
“It is imperative that it changes so that we can help our students succeed. The only way for this to happen is for the relationship between community and school to be restored to what it once was in years past. For accountability for student success be an equal share between parents and school. We are pushing a massive boulder up a hill now and every day. No one is helping us.”
Assistant Principal, Tennessee
Interventions can offer support for students who are not successful within your normal support structures. Tier 2 behavior interventions target students who are deemed at risk of developing more serious behavior challenges and aim to prevent them.
These can be formal plans like Dr. Anthony Tyrkala discussed with us on The Flywheel Effect or very specific strategies that need to be developed when your original plan falls short.
They could also be informal strategies to squash disruptive behavior that you can train your staff to implement and minimize those negative behaviors.
Let’s dig into a few to get you started:
Check-In/Check-Out is a Tier 2 behavior intervention in which students are assigned a mentor in the school building.
Students meet with their mentors every morning to review their goals and discuss behavior strategies.
Then, at the end of the day, they meet with their mentor again and review feedback the student received throughout their day from teachers and staff.
The communication of behaviors, the good/bad/ugly as I call it, is necessary to create a supportive learning environment.
When students have behavior needs in school, parents are often brought in to identify if they observe similar behaviors at home.
When the school team shares their observations and replacement behaviors being taught, a home and school plan can increase the likelihood of positive behaviors.
Often, disruptive behaviors occur in class due to a lack of self-regulation. At times, students are overstimulated or bored and they act out in a way to gain attention.
The Take a Break intervention in Tier 2 aims to mitigate this.
In Take a Break, your PBIS team develops approved mechanisms for students to decompress, pause, and regulate their emotions and behaviors.
To reduce class disruption, your team can also conceive of signals for teachers to use that signal to a student they need to apply this intervention.
That being said, the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” also applies here. If you really want to reduce severe behaviors you’ll need to improve your universal support structures like our partner Creekside Middle School has.
Relationships and discipline seem like words that don’t necessarily go together. But veteran educators will tell you that relationships are the key to positive school culture.
How do you maintain positive relationships? You need to have both classroom discipline strategies and positive behavioral intervention strategies in your building to create an environment where your school culture can thrive.
This seems backward. You may think that if you instill discipline your students will resent you. The opposite is actually true.
Discipline doesn’t foster resentment, it creates respect. This is a similar misconception to the one surrounding positive reinforcement and bribery.
If you can maintain discipline in your school, your students will respect you. That respect gives you the power to create positive relationships and instill positive results. Kim Wood of Placer County Schools gave a great explanation at a recent event we hosted when she said the difference in positive reinforcement and bribery comes down to who is in control.
Not only will you foster respect this way, but the pieces you decide to use to build your system could have a hugely positive impact on your students.
Consider the power of a token economy. When done correctly it can not only provide incentives to improve behavior but could be the vehicle you need to teach your students real-world financial literacy skills.
You also need to consider the necessity to progress monitor your results so you can make decisions that are data-driven like our partner school Darby Junior High has.
As you review your plans or draft new ones, always remember your goal when designing behavior management protocols: what conditions must be met in order for learning to happen?
Whether you are discussing token economy examples or trying to decide if culture impacts behavior or if behavior dictates culture always keep student learning at the center of the debate.
Keep your plan centered around that. Keep the main thing, the main thing! That’s how you really get the most out of your behavior management plan.
Explore 100+ ideas from schools like yours.
Explore school-wide behavior expectations from other schools.
The best Houses reflect your school’s unique culture. Browse examples from real schools and start brainstorming your House system!
Track behavior, motivate students, and promote a positive culture — all in one easy platform.
Can students learn in chaos? Can teachers teach amidst that same chaos? Can principals lead instruction initiatives in a chaotic environment?
All across the country, we are all trying to achieve our goals in schools while navigating through an increasingly chaotic ecosystem.
What is the root of this chaos? Student behavior distractions. We need to plan to manage these behavior concerns before our schools are defined by them.
You are certainly familiar with student behavior distractions but you may be asking yourself what is behavior management. How is it different than classroom management?
What is Behavior Management?
It’s all the actions, policies, and initiatives in place at your school to promote positive behaviors in your school. Keep in mind that you are unlikely to eliminate negative behaviors simply by promoting positive ones.
The goal is prevention, improvement, and mitigation – not elimination. In fact, elimination is a term that will set your plan up for failure. Coaches often take on this mantra when making predictions in the media or community: undersell and overdeliver.
The key components of your plan need to be set around realistic goals focused on prevention and improvement as the buy-in from your stakeholders will ultimately determine your level of success.
Behavior can impact all of your stakeholders but it’s important to understand how disruptions can impact the main goal of your organization; student learning.
Start in the classroom and work out from there. Behaviors can derail more than single classes if they aren’t managed well.
Now expand those situations out to the entire school.
Imagine what kind of supports are necessary for teachers to do the best job they can for our students, then get started building that support system.
As Charmaine Williams said on The Flywheel Effect, “Take care of your teachers. If you do that then they'll take care of the students.”
The effectiveness of your Behavior Management plan will directly impact your teacher's ability to perform their duties in the classroom.
So how do you improve behavior management on your campus? Well, it’s best to start with what you think behavior should look like on your campus.
As a school leader, you are tasked with creating an environment that is conducive to success for our youngest students.
The academic, social, and emotional foundation they set in your building will be the building blocks on which they begin to shape into the people they are destined to become.
That's why creating school-wide expectations and establishing a behavior rubric based on those expectations is a critical part of creating a safe and effective learning environment for students.
But doing this from scratch can be a challenge. That’s why we put together a database of behavior rubric examples to guide your work.
No matter if you need to create an elementary behavior rubric or if you lead a secondary school, we have you covered with great examples of schools all around the country that are structuring rubrics to fit the unique needs of their campuses and their students.
Let’s take a look at the different styles that our partner schools are trailblazing to success:
Many schools choose to use an acronym specific to their school to organize the rubric in a way that is easy to follow and utilize for everyone.
A great example of this can be found in Del Valle Elementary where Jay Maines and his team have based their program around SOAR:
SOAR is the school’s PBIS motto, and using it in their behavior rubric enables the whole community to have real conversations about what safety, ownership, achievement, and respect mean in each setting.
If your school utilizes the three-tiered framework of PBIS you may want to structure your rubric in a way that ties directly to that framework like Horatio Elementary School.
Brettny Mitchell and her team at Horatio have an average behavior ratio of 14:1, which means there are 14 positive behaviors for every negative behavior this year. This comes from their total points recorded, which is 125,000 over the previous five months!
Northgate Middle School, which is a part of North Kansas City Schools has an extensive behavior rubric that combines PBIS, trauma-informed teaching, and Portrait of a Graduate.
A portrait of a graduate is a document or statement that outlines the qualities, skills, and characteristics that a school or institution hopes to instill in its graduates.
It provides a clear vision of what it means to be a successful alumnus of that institution. This is very similar to an approach that Wirt High School took, as they base their rubric on the skills and traits necessary for success after graduation.
Margaret Allen Middle School, which is located in Metro Nashville Public Schools, follows the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for its behavior rubric.
Each habit is a separate category:
To learn more about how they built the categories across the 7 habits framework you should check out our podcast with their Community Achieves Site Coordinator, Kanetha Callahan.
Parchment North Elementary is a Leader in Me school, which means they focus on building life and leadership skills that lay the foundation for long-term academic achievement. This work also fosters a school culture rooted in trust.
Caddo Hills has three rubric items that students receive and lose points for. Those three items are commonly referred to as the Three R’s:
The beauty here is in the simplicity as a longer rubric is harder to use for everyone and that will obviously hurt buy-in – and the ultimate success of an initiative.
Freedom Crossing Academy successfully implemented a school-wide social-emotional learning program by embedding SEL skills within their school’s PBIS behavior rubric.
The school’s mission is “Falcons Take F.L.I.G.H.T.” and they have included these six characteristics into their behavior rubric. FLIGHT stands for Focus, Leadership, Imagination, Grit, Heart, and Team. When a student exhibits one of these characteristics, the school reinforces it by awarding points.
Student behavior is an age-old problem in schools. But what once was a mild inconvenience, hurdle, or distraction, now seems to be the biggest problem in schools.
Unfortunately, our students had some critical skill development put on pause. That’s a significant contributor to why our in-school and out-of-school suspension rates have skyrocketed.
There isn’t much use in re-living the last few years but it can help to frame the state of behavior in schools at the moment and why we need to focus our efforts on behavior management strategies to improve conditions in our schools.
Let’s take a look at a few of those strategies that can serve as your foundation:
Emphasize the importance of routines to your staff. The class should have a rhythm or flow to it that is expected and known by students.
Invest some time early in the year to teach kids how to do school. It may seem redundant or obvious, but it will pay dividends and save you time throughout the semester.
Praise the behaviors you want to see more of. Thank students for having materials out and ready on the bell. Thank students for using appropriate procedures. Praise will be noticed and internalized.
As a school leader, you can do this all day long. The goal should be to not walk by a student without creating a positive interaction. A simple “thank you” for following our school-wide expectations accompanied by a “good morning” goes a long way in creating fidelity in your systems.
Your staff’s response to minor infractions is important. Does a staff member intervening correct the behavior or escalate the behavior? I suggest considering resources around the 5 Rs.
Consequences matter. We want consequences to apply directly to the situation if at all possible. The consequence is to deter future offenses.
I want consequences to help repair the situation or relationship. Providing Restorative Practices training to your staff can help with all of those.
“It is imperative that it changes so that we can help our students succeed. The only way for this to happen is for the relationship between community and school to be restored to what it once was in years past. For accountability for student success be an equal share between parents and school. We are pushing a massive boulder up a hill now and every day. No one is helping us.”
Assistant Principal, Tennessee
Interventions can offer support for students who are not successful within your normal support structures. Tier 2 behavior interventions target students who are deemed at risk of developing more serious behavior challenges and aim to prevent them.
These can be formal plans like Dr. Anthony Tyrkala discussed with us on The Flywheel Effect or very specific strategies that need to be developed when your original plan falls short.
They could also be informal strategies to squash disruptive behavior that you can train your staff to implement and minimize those negative behaviors.
Let’s dig into a few to get you started:
Check-In/Check-Out is a Tier 2 behavior intervention in which students are assigned a mentor in the school building.
Students meet with their mentors every morning to review their goals and discuss behavior strategies.
Then, at the end of the day, they meet with their mentor again and review feedback the student received throughout their day from teachers and staff.
The communication of behaviors, the good/bad/ugly as I call it, is necessary to create a supportive learning environment.
When students have behavior needs in school, parents are often brought in to identify if they observe similar behaviors at home.
When the school team shares their observations and replacement behaviors being taught, a home and school plan can increase the likelihood of positive behaviors.
Often, disruptive behaviors occur in class due to a lack of self-regulation. At times, students are overstimulated or bored and they act out in a way to gain attention.
The Take a Break intervention in Tier 2 aims to mitigate this.
In Take a Break, your PBIS team develops approved mechanisms for students to decompress, pause, and regulate their emotions and behaviors.
To reduce class disruption, your team can also conceive of signals for teachers to use that signal to a student they need to apply this intervention.
That being said, the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” also applies here. If you really want to reduce severe behaviors you’ll need to improve your universal support structures like our partner Creekside Middle School has.
Relationships and discipline seem like words that don’t necessarily go together. But veteran educators will tell you that relationships are the key to positive school culture.
How do you maintain positive relationships? You need to have both classroom discipline strategies and positive behavioral intervention strategies in your building to create an environment where your school culture can thrive.
This seems backward. You may think that if you instill discipline your students will resent you. The opposite is actually true.
Discipline doesn’t foster resentment, it creates respect. This is a similar misconception to the one surrounding positive reinforcement and bribery.
If you can maintain discipline in your school, your students will respect you. That respect gives you the power to create positive relationships and instill positive results. Kim Wood of Placer County Schools gave a great explanation at a recent event we hosted when she said the difference in positive reinforcement and bribery comes down to who is in control.
Not only will you foster respect this way, but the pieces you decide to use to build your system could have a hugely positive impact on your students.
Consider the power of a token economy. When done correctly it can not only provide incentives to improve behavior but could be the vehicle you need to teach your students real-world financial literacy skills.
You also need to consider the necessity to progress monitor your results so you can make decisions that are data-driven like our partner school Darby Junior High has.
As you review your plans or draft new ones, always remember your goal when designing behavior management protocols: what conditions must be met in order for learning to happen?
Whether you are discussing token economy examples or trying to decide if culture impacts behavior or if behavior dictates culture always keep student learning at the center of the debate.
Keep your plan centered around that. Keep the main thing, the main thing! That’s how you really get the most out of your behavior management plan.
All the behavior resources you need to create the positive culture your school community deserves.
