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School-wide Positive Behavior Support

SECTION I: DESCRIBING SCHOOL-WIDE POSITIVE BEHAVIOR SUPPORT: CHALLENGES, SOLUTIONS, AND FEATURES

What Challenges Do Schools Face in Addressing Their Education Mission?

The mission of schools is to maximize opportunities for students to achieve three primary and inter-related expectations that enable participation, contributions, and success in schools and larger communities:

• Academic Skill Competence,
• Social Skill Competence, and
• Lifestyle skills competence.

Achieving these expectations, however, is hampered by many competing social and behavioral factors. Current data suggest that while extreme violence is stabilizing (and historically low) the rate of disruptive problem behavior is escalating (U.S. Surgeon General, 2000). The single most common request for assistance from teachers is related to behavior and classroom management (Elam, Rose, & Gallup, 1999).

Schools struggle with addressing problem behavior for a variety of reasons:

• Students are more different from each other than similar.
• Multiple initiatives compete and overlap.
• School climates are reactive and controlling.
• School organizational structures and processes are inefficient and ineffective.
• Public demand is high for greater academic accountability and achievement.
• Occurrences of antisocial behavior in school (e.g., aggression, substance use, dropping out, attendance, and insubordination/noncompliance) are more severe and complex.
• Limited capacity exists to educate students with disabilities.
• Media that portrays role models are violent and antisocial.

School attempts to respond to these challenges often result in an over-reliance on the use of aversive and exclusionary consequences. For example, teachers respond to student displays of chronic problem behavior by increasing their use of verbal reprimands, exclusionary consequences (e.g., in school detention and out-of-school suspensions), and loss of privileges. If student behavior does not improve, school systems increase their reactive responses by establishing zero tolerance policies, increasing surveillance, posting security personnel, and excluding students from school.

This over-reliance on reactive management practices is a predictable outcome because teachers, parents, and administrators experience immediate reductions or removals of the problem behavior when they use strong aversive consequences. Having experienced reductions and relief from student problem behavior, they are more likely to use reactive management practices when future student problem behavior occurs, which can be described from a classic negative reinforcement perspective. Unfortunately, these reductions are temporary and problem behaviors typically reoccur, sometimes at higher rates and more intensive levels. Justification for the increased use of reactive management strategies is based on the erroneous assumption that the student is "inherently bad," will "learn a ‘better way’ of behaving next time," and will "never again" engage in the problem behavior.

Although the use of aversive consequences can inhibit the occurrence of problem behavior in students who already are relatively successful at school, these procedures tend to be the least effective for students with the most severe problem behaviors. In addition, a number of negative side effects are associated with the exclusive use of reactive approaches to discipline (Shores, Jack, Gunter, Ellis, DeBriere & Wehby, 1993; Sugai & Horner, 1999; Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1994; Tolan & Guerra, 1994):

• A punishing climate can be a setting event for problem behaviors (Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1994).
• A school climate relying on punishing consequences can provoke problem behaviors (Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1994), for example, increases in antisocial behavior, breakdown of student-teacher relations, degradation of school/social climate, and/ordecreases in academic achievement.

The science of human behavior has taught us that students are not "born with bad behavior," and that they do not learn better ways of behaving when presented aversive consequences for their problem behaviors (Alberto & Troutman, 2001; Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1994; Walker et al., 1996). In addition, successfully addressing problem behavior requires an increased emphasis on proactive approaches in which expected and more socially acceptable behaviors are directly taught, regularly practiced in the natural environment and followed by frequent positive reinforcement.

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