Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast (PBISApps)

In this episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we’re continuing the conversation from last month’s episode about vulnerable decision points (VDP). Drs. Maria Reina Santiago-Rosaria and Sean Austin are back to share how we can disrupt our decision making in those moments.Today we’re talking about neutralizing routines: brief, step-by-step processes to make our quick decisions more deliberate. During our conversation, we recognized the overlaps between these routines and those we explored in previous episodes related to de-escalation. While both require us to become more present in the moment, neutralizing routines are specifically designed to disrupt our implicit bias—those stereotypes we carry around without even knowing it.María is a researcher at the University of Oregon who focuses on racial equity in school discipline, measuring teacher expectations of students, and supporting students who receive special education services as they transition from middle to high school. Sean is also a researcher at the University of Oregon who focuses on positive behavior support, implementation science, and professional development.The two of them share how they’ve seen these routines implemented, how to know when those routines are working, and how all of this serves the larger goal of making your discipline decisions more equitable for all students.

In this episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we continue the conversation we started in November about culturally responsive practices in PBIS implementation. We are joined by three experts to explore the role of including student, family, and community voices in your implementation. 

• Dr. Jennifer Rose is a psychologist with Loyola Community and Family Services, a mental health clinic providing services for children and families in the Chicagoland area. In her advocacy work, she supports children impacted by exclusionary disciplinary policies as well as students with Individual Education Plans (IEPs). As a nationally certified school psychologist and licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Rose has provided psychological services in diverse settings including traditional k-12 buildings, juvenile corrections, alternative schools, psychiatric hospitals, and community mental health. 
• Melaney Leverson is a nationally certified school psychologist and a regional technical assistance coordinator working with schools in Wisconsin to implement PBIS and culturally responsive practices. She has also collaborated with state teams looking to embed culturally responsive practices in their state-level framework.
• Kent Smith is a school social worker with 22 years of expereince. He works for the Wisconsin Response to Intervention and PBIS Network. Throughout Wisconsin, he trains and supports schools implementing culturally responsive practices.

During our conversation, we talked about why including student, family, and community voices in PBIS implementation matters. We discussed the need to create spaces where folks not only share their perspectives, but also gain agency and ownership in the systems we are building. The work of including more voices in your implementation will involve questioning why your school's systems and practices are in place and what would happen if they were different. This episode has a lot of food for thought and it's sure to linger in your mind long after you finish listening.

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

• Wisconsin Response to Intervention and PBIS Network
• Culturally Responsive Field Guide
• PBIS Forum Presentation: Beginning to Embed Culturally Responsive Practices into Your School Universal Practices
• Roundtable Discussion: Embedding Culturally Responsive Practices in Tier 1
• True Colors personality profile

We’re back with the second installment of our Expert Instruction Mythbusters series. Today we’re exploring the myth: “PBIS is just about rewards and tokens.” Joining us in conversation is Dr. Kent McIntosh.

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

During our discussion, we explored the ways rewards are intricately linked with the schoolwide expectations you set. We talked about the purpose rewards play in your PBIS implementation and how they play an important role in establishing the equitable outcomes you hope to achieve.

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

• Tiered Fidelity Inventory (TFI) https://www.pbisapps.org/products/tfi

• Feedback and Input Survey https://www.pbisapps.org/resource/feedback-input-surveys-fis-manual

• School Climate Survey (SCS) https://www.pbisapps.org/products/scs

• Lesson Plan: Co-creating Classroom Expectations with Students (Elementary Schools) https://www.pbis.org/resource/lesson-plan-co-creating-classroom-expectations-with-students-elementary-schools

• Be+ App https://www.pbis.org/announcements/track-positive-reinforcement-with-our-be-app

A system-level feature of your PBIS implementation involves the professional development you offer to all staff.

Many of us take advantage of conferences to receive professional development, especially related to our PBIS implementation. We love a good conference. We also know lecture-style learning alone isn’t enough to sustain the outcomes we want to achieve. We wondered what it would look like to leverage our conference experience to supplement our on-going professional learning.

We called on some conference organizers for our favorite PBIS conferences to see what they had to say about this idea. Joining us in conversation are Dr. Jessica Swain-Bradway, Kelly Perales, and Dr. Stephanie Martinez.

Dr. Jessica Swain-Bradway is the executive director for Northwest PBIS Network – an organization providing professional development and support around PBIS & MTSS. She is also helps to organize the group’s annual PBIS conference. In her work, Jessica also focuses on equipping teachers with strategies for instruction, relationship-building, and designing effective learning environments.

Kelly Perales is the co-director of the Midwest PBIS Network and she's an implementer partner with the Center on PBIS. As an implementer partner, Kelly helps to organize the annual National PBIS Leadership Forum. Kelly leads schools implementing the Interconnected Systems Framework (ISF) by focusing specifically on the integration of mental health and educational systems. In addition to her work with schools, she researches the effects ISF has on family-school-community partnerships.

Dr. Stephanie Martinez provides training and technical assistance on the Florida PBIS Project at the University of South Florida. She is also a board member for the Association for Positive Behavior Support (APBS). As a tri-chair for the Training and Education Committee for APBS, Stephanie assists with planning the organization’s annual International Conference on Positive Behavior Support. She also helps coordinate the High School APBS Network.

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

Northwest PBIS Conference

National PBIS Leadership Forum

International Conference on Positive Behavior Support

Society for Prevention Research Annual Meeting

Council for Exceptional Children Convention and Expo

National Center for School Mental Health Annual Conference

California PBIS Conference

Southeastern School Behavioral Health Conference

At the end of any project, it feels right to pause and reflect. The end of the school year is no different. We’re all ready for a break and some relaxation, preferably by a pool, with something cold to sip. It’s also important to take a little time to reflect on everything you did over the course of the past school year. The process of looking back on your accomplishments isn’t selfish, it’s the key to improving the way you do anything in the future.

So, that’s what we’re doing today. We’re looking back on the last 10 episodes of this podcast and sharing our favorite highlights and lessons learned. We’ve interviewed 16 people this year and every single one of them left us some nugget of brilliance to think about long after the episode finished. We hope this episode reminds you of all the good stuff you’ve done this year and all the ways you can continue to support your students and each other in the years to come.

To dive into any of the episodes mentioned today, check out the following links:

• Ep. 12: Effects of Stress in the Classroom with Dr. Geovanna Rodriguez

• Ep. 18: The Fundamentals of Data-driven Decisions with Dr. Jessica Swain-Bradway and Dr. Billie Jo Rodriguez
• Ep. 16: Adding Student Voice to Leadership Teams with Zachary Patterson
• Ep. 15: Uplifting Student Voices in Implementation with Dr. Felicia Singleton and Marcus Jackson

Teachers across the country say the number of behaviors they manage in the classroom is up this year compared to before the pandemic. We know the first step to improving behavior trends schoolwide is to verify your Tier 1 systems and practices are fully in place. When you’ve verified they are and behavior trends continue to rise, what can you do? In this episode of Expert Instruction, learn how to increase schoolwide support by infusing it with a dose Tier 2 critical elements.

Joining the conversation are Dr. Billie Jo Rodriquez and Noah Van Horn.

• Billie Jo is a Northwest PBIS Network staff member, a senior lecturer at the University of Oregon, a nationally certified school psychologist, and a board-certified behavior analyst. She has over 20 years of experience supporting students with diverse needs and helping schools implement increasingly intensive function-based supports.
• Noah is a nationally certified school psychologist and PBIS coach for Springfield Public Schools in Springfield, OR. In addition to his work leading district initiatives to support PBIS, he is a lead trainer for district professional development on topics ranging from Tier1 practices to more intensive, individualized support.

In this episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we’re kicking off a two-part series about de-escalating the behaviors you see in your school. Today, we’re exploring the school-wide, classroom-wide systems and practices you can leverage to prevent problem behaviors from escalating in the first place.

Joining us today are two of the authors of a recently published practice brief from The Center on PBIS, Dr. Kathleen Strickland-Cohen and Alex Newson.

Kathleen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Utah and a Doctoral-level Board Certified Behavior Analyst. She has extensive experience conducting research and training both preservice teachers and in-service district and school personnel in behavior support implementation at Tiers 2 and 3. Her research interests include: designing inclusive educational environments, using efficient methods to train school professionals how to design individualized student behavior plans, and enhancing family-professional partnership within PBIS.

Alex Newson is a doctoral student in Special Education at the University of Oregon. She is a recipient of Project COLEAD, which is a leadership grant focusing on autism, evidence-based practices, diversity, and collaboration across universities. Her current research interests include equitable neuroinclusive research methodologies, collaborative trauma-informed teacher education programs for neurodivergent educators and service providers, and the promotion of autistic mental health in schools for students and staff. She has taught throughout in the Pacific Northwest as a certified Special Educator and educational assistant.

Oh, and we’re also welcoming our new co-host, Nadia Sampson! Nad is a veteran in the PBIS game and she’s ready to share her experience and her humor as we all learn more about the topics in each podcast episode.

For more information about some of the resources mentioned in this today, please check out these links:

• Practice Brief: Strategies for De-Escalating Student Behavior in the Classroom
• Expert Instruction Ep. 14: Relieving Staff Stress with System-level Solutions – Staff stress is a systemic issue best addressed with system-level solutions. We talked to two experts about how to do that in your school.
• 10 Strategies to Combat Stress in the Classroom – Check out this article for more information about the affects of chronic stress and the fight, flight, or freeze responses you might see in your classroom.

Every October, you can expect us to talk about the October Catch – a way for your school-wide teams to use referral data to identify students who might benefit from additional supports. The October Catch is the first step in a process to get students the resources they need when they need them. What comes next? How does a student’s name end up on a Tier 2 team’s meeting agenda? How do you know which intervention is a good fit?

In this episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we’re talking about Tier 2 teams and the foundations of decision making at the Tier 2 level. Joining us in this conversation are Drs. Erin Chaparro and Ginny Joseph.

Dr. Chaparro is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. For more than a decade, she has worked with districts and schools to implement multi-tiered systems of support for literacy and PBIS. She works with states across the country consulting on explicit instruction, PBIS, implementation science, and the education of English language learners. Among her many projects, Dr. Chaparro currently leads the development of an online training for Tier 2 data teams using a framework called Team-Initiated ProblemSolving (TIPS).

Dr. Ginny Joseph is the Coordinator of PBIS and Mental Health at Orange County Department of Education. She trains and supports school teams implementing a multi-tiered framework for behavior supports. Her experience ranges from function-based support planning, to using data to drive decisions, to planning behavioral support for small groups of students.

For more information about some of the resources mentioned in this episode, check out these links:

• An overview of the TIPS model
• TIPS Meeting Minutes Template
• Tiered Fidelity Inventory

In this episode of Expert Instruction, we're joined by Renee Mitchell, the visionary behind the I Am M.O.R.E. project. (M.O.R.E. stands for Making Ourselves Resilient Everyday.) I Am M.O.R.E. came out of Renee's work helping students at Roosevelt High School write their personal essays for scholarships and college applications. One year, of the four Portland students awarded $16,000 scholarships, three came from her class. That's when she realized something: there is power in students telling their own stories. By reframing their hardships as assets, and validating their experiences, her students began to say, "My story has meaning. By sharing myself, I can support and help someone else." Renee watched how the process of "owning their stories" transformed how her students moved through the world, with their shoulders back, believing their dreams were possible.

The I Am M.O.R.E. project is an important reminder of how we can all find our purpose...even from our lowest moments.

To find out about everything Renee is up to these days, check out these links for all the details.

• Renee's Website
• I Am M.O.R.E. Homepage: Check out videos of students sharing their stories, read more about the history behind the project, and connect with Renee and her youth leaders.
• Spreading the Black Joy Virus: Born out of the I Am M.O.R.E. spirit, this is a campaign Renee started to celebrate the resilience, creativity, and joy found within the Black community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

PBIS has its skeptics — folks who just aren’t so sure the framework is useful. It’s fair to question things and criticisms push us to think about how our implementation can be more inclusive. When you hear a critique or even a misperception, how do you respond?

We thought we’d help you out. Today’s episode of Expert Instruction is the first in our new series: PBIS Mythbusters.

Mythbusters was a television series where the two hosts, Adam and Jamie, would use science to test a myth and determine once and for all if it was true. If it wasn’t, they stamped the myth as officially busted. We’re taking our cue from that show by exploring some of the critiques about PBIS with experts from across the country. Together, we will figure out whether we can declare the statements true or busted!

The myth we’re talking about today is, “Students don’t need to be taught how to behave at school; they should just know.” Joining us in conversation is Dr. Jessica Daily and Mimi McGrath Kato.

• Mimi is a Senior Research Assistant here at the UO. In her research, she focuses on implementing prevention systems at the high school level and improving outcomes for students in those places. She brings with her more than 25 years of experience either working in or alongside high schools across the country.
• Jessica is the Professional Learning Administrator for Michigan’s MTSS Technical Assistance Center. Before working there, she spent time as a school psychologist, a PBIS district coach, a state-wide technical assistance provider, and up until about a month ago, the training team lead here at PBISApps.

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

• Feedback and Input Survey

This spring, we were fortunate enough to attend not one, not two, but three, in-person PBIS conferences. We know scheduling conflicts and budget constraints can get in the way of making it possible for everyone to register. So, this month we decided to take some time to share our conference experiences, the conversations we had, and the things we learned during our time at these events.

In our Teach by Design article, we’ve got a list of 12 tips and tricks we picked up from conference sessions devoted to social-emotional learning and mental health. In today’s Expert Instruction episode, we’re bringing together our PBISApps team to share some of the most pressing questions we answered at our vendor booth.

Joining the conversation is Katie Schulz, one of our Customer Support Specialists here at PBISApps. Katie is a 7-year veteran on our Customer Support Team. If you’ve ever had a question about how to use any of our apps, you’ve probably spoken to Katie.

Jessica Daily is our Training Team Lead who’s been with PBISApps for more than 6 years. You may have crossed paths with her when you attended one of our SWIS Facilitator Certification trainings or one of our application webinars. She is a self-proclaimed “data geek” who loves to teach others to use data to inform practices and support positive change in our educational systems.

Robin Spoerl is our Marketing and Design Manager. Everyone gets to experience his work when they land on the PBISApps website, because he designed it! He has edited every tutorial video and designed each piece of swag you’ve ever picked up at our vendor booth.

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

• Overview of CICO-SWIS
• Overview of I-SWIS
• Teach by Design article “5 Ways to Reward Students the Right Way”
• The Center on PBIS Homepage
• Midwest PBIS Homepage
• The Association for Positive Behavior Support Conference Website
• The Northwest PBIS Conference Website
• The National Training Institute on Effective Practices: Addressing Challenging Behavior Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve mentioned before the important role coaches play in your PBIS implementation. They help hold you and your team accountable, facilitate your meetings, walk you through intervention options, and guide you through the process of making the systems and practices match your unique context. Coaches are valuable members of any implementation effort, and yet, we haven’t spent much time exploring what it means to be a coach.

In this episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we’re talking with two coaches about what it’s been like to support schools and districts to sustain their implementation in spite of so much disruption. If you’re a coach, a team lead, or you want to hear about these roles from someone else’s perspective, this conversation is for you!

Joining us in that conversation are Drs. Lisa Powers and Kelsey Morris from the University of Missouri Center for Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support.

• Lisa wears many hats in her work, one of which is as a Senior Research Associate at the University of Missouri. She currently supports district-level leadership teams in their PBIS implementation. She has also been a special educator, PBIS facilitator, administrator, and professor. In everything she does, Lisa remains committed to learning with and from the communities she supports and doing whatever she can to make sure every child is successful in school.
• Kelsey is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Missouri and co-director of the University of Missouri Center for Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support. His work focuses primarily on PBIS, classroom management, data-based decision making, and district-wide PBIS implementation.

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

• Missouri Center on Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support
• Educator's Blueprint Podcast: Lisa's weekly podcast exploring topics currently impacting school systems, behavior, and instructional practices.
• Information about the Tiered Fidelity Inventory (TFI)
• Information about the District Systems Fidelity Inventory (DSFI)
• Evaluation Brief: Collecting Fidelity Data to Support and Sustain PBIS/MTSS in Schools
• Practice Brief: Creating a Classroom Teaching Matrix
• Upcoming Webinars for Using the TFI

The last year and a half brought a lot of lessons, maybe the most important of which is the way we build relationships with each other. Now is the perfect time to talk about going beyond welcoming students and start creating radically welcoming classrooms.

In this episode of Expert Instruction, our guest is Saki Malose, a research assistant from the University of Oregon’s College ofEducation. Saki is an experienced educator and scholar. In her current project, the Inclusive Skill-building Learning Approach (ISLA), Saki works as part of a team of researchers helping schools implement an instructional approach to exclusionary discipline practices like suspension and expulsion. She shares how she creates classrooms that welcome students and offers up the strategies she teaches so others can do the same. For more information about radically welcoming spaces, checkout Dr. Christopher Emdin’s conversation from the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Activate Series.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ep. 32: The Fundamentals of Schoolwide Teams

Ep. 34: Conferences as Professional Development

Ep. 36: Culturally Sustaining Practices

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

PBISApps Community

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

In this month’s Teach by Design post, we explored how to use effective classroom management practices as a way to prevent suspensions during distance learning. Sometimes, in spite of our best efforts to manage them, misbehaviors escalate. What is an alternative to exclusionary discipline like suspensions and expulsions? 

In this month’s Expert Instruction episode, we’re talking all about restorative practices.

We are joined by: 

• Dr. Rhonda Nese, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences and the principal investigator of a research project called ISLA: an instructional alternative to exclusionary discipline practices.
• Keith Hickman, the Executive Director of Collective Impact at the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) Graduate School.
• Saundra Hensel, the Behaviors Support Systems Coordinator from Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, KY. 
• Dr. Naomi Brahim, the Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Department Lead from Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, KY.

During our conversation, we explore what restorative practices are, how they work in typical school years as well as how they can work while students engage in distance learning. The experiences these four experts share go beyond the practices themselves and remind us, as Keith shared, that “Sure, it’s about a set of practices, but those practices are interventions and preventions by which we do something bigger, something larger, something more impactful.”

To dig deeper into the work these folks are doing, here are the websites and resources shared at the end of the episode:

• IIRP Graduate School Homepage
• Jefferson County Public Schools Restorative Practices
• Jefferson County Public Schools Restorative Practices Implementation Guide
• Jefferson County Public Schools Student Support and Behavior Intervention Handbook
• The Center on PBIS Homepage
• Key Elements of Policies to Address Discipline Disproportionality: A Guide for District & School Teams

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

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

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

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

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

Resources

• PBIS Implementation Blueprint

• Tiered Fidelity Inventory

• Crisis Recovery

In this month’s episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we’re diving further into the research and practices surrounding vulnerable decisions points (VDPs). Over in our Teach by Design article, we shared how you can find the VDPs contributing to the disproportionate outcomes you see in your data, but why do we even focus on VDPs in decision making in the first place? Joining us to help answer that question are Drs. María Reina Santiago-Rosario and Sean Austin.

In her research, María focuses on racial equity in school discipline, measuring teacher expectations of students, and supporting students who receive special education services as they transition from middle to high school. She understands what it takes to implement system-level changes and how to guide teams in classroom behavior management and strategic planning for equity in discipline.

In his work, Sean focuses on positive behavior support, implementation science, and professional development. Before completing his PhD, Sean worked for several years as a school psychologist supporting students with behavioral needs.

Speaking of Sean’s PhD, his dissertation revealed some interesting things about the common points in the school day that are most vulnerable to biased decisions. We talked to him about that! Then, we asked him and María what makes a VDP such a good starting point and how do we handle those challenging conversations to create the self-awareness necessary before launching into problem solving?

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

• Don’t Discipline Hangry – a Teach by Design article with more information about unconscious bias and VDPs.
• Ep. 6: Implicit Bias – an Expert Instruction episode with Dr. Erik Girvan talking about implicit bias and its affect on classroom decisions.
• Using Discipline Data within SWPBIS to Identify and Address Disproportionality: A Guide for School Teams– a guide from The Center on PBIS on how to data to address equity in your school
• Registration for the 2023 NWPBIS Conference

In this episode, we’re joined by three experts who share with us their experiences using PBIS to guide them through the crisis of the last year.

Jennifer Bouckaert is the District Supervisor of Culture and Climate at Southbridge Public Schools in Southbridge, MA. She is a licensed School Adjustment Counselor and has worked in Southbridge for about six years supporting PBIS implementation within the district.

Kitty Clemens is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and the Associate Director at Cedarhurst School. Cedarhurst is a therapeutic middle and high school serving students from all over Connecticut who have social, emotional and behavioral difficulties. Kitty has been at Cedarhurst for 18 years, originally running the clinical program and more recently in a general administrative role. She was involved with the initial PBIS implementation at Cedarhurst 12 years ago and has been a member of the PBIS team ever since.

Luke Borowski is the Behavior Program Manager at Cedarhurst School. Luke has been with Cedarhurst for 13 years and is a true believer in the benefits PBIS brings to both students and staff in his school. He has a master’s in special education, enjoys sports and outdoor activities, and spending time with his wife and two daughters.

Be sure to check out their school and district websites for more information about the good work these experts are doing in their schools.

Cedarhurst School Website

Southbridge Public Schools Website

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we’re talking about stress – specifically the stress so many adults in education feel right now. Our guests are Susan Barrett and Dr. Kimberly Yanek from the Center for Social Behavior Support at Old Dominion and the Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. Together, they will share tangible strategies for tackling problems at the system level that contribute to the stress so many in education feel right now. They’ve even got some solutions to start implementing today!

For more information about some of the resources mentioned in this episode, check out these links:

• The Burnout Epidemic by Jennifer Moss
• Guidance and resources for supporting schools during and after crisis from the TA Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports
• Resource mapping activity (aka Initiative Inventory)
• Practice Brief: Building a Culture of Staff Wellness Through Multi-Tiered System of Supports

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Climate Survey

Tiered Fidelity Inventory

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

Proven Ways to Make Schoolwide Feedback work

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

Our September issue of Teach by Design is all about the small changes teams can make to create big impacts on the way they conduct their virtual team meetings. When I first started researching the topic, I knew I needed to check in with Dr. Erin Chaparro. Erin runs a research project called TIPS EdTECH - a project to develop a suite of online tools to help teams in their mission to create more efficient, effective team meetings. I called her up a few weeks ago and out of that 30-minute conversation came ideas like changing the team meeting time, finding space to talk about more than work, and looking for new ways of collecting and using data. We ran out of time during our phone call, so I asked her to come back and join us on Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast.

In this episode, Dr. Chaparro shares her experience watching teams navigate the spring of 2020 as they moved their in-person meetings to virtual ones. She also tells us how these same teams prepared themselves for the 2020-21 school year knowing they would be immersed in distance learning for the foreseeable future. Check it out.

This month, we’re taking the opportunity to explore the ways schools embed school mental health within their existing PBIS framework through a process called the Interconnected Systems Framework (ISF). The ISF offers you a way to take advantage of the expertise within your larger schoolwide community, add it to the systems, practices, and data accessible on your PBIS teams, and get students the comprehensive support they need.

In this episode, we’re talking to two people who have done just that.

• Megan Schultz is the community coordinator for an organization called The 15th Night —"a youth-informed, community movement to end youth homelessness by connecting existing resources and finding innovative ways to keep kids in school and off the streets.” In her role, Megan helps schools and community organizations get connected through a system called the Rapid Access Network (RAN).
• Kelly Perales is the co-director of the Midwest PBIS Network and an implementer partner with the Center on PBIS. She leads schools implementing ISF, focusing on the integration of mental health and education systems. In addition to her work with schools, she researches the effects ISF has on family-school-community partnerships.

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

• Overview of ISF
• Advancing Education Effectiveness: Interconnecting School Mental Health and School-Wide PBIS, Volume 2: An Implementation Guide: A step-by-step guide for district and school teams implementing ISF.
• The 15th Night Homepage

You are teachers. Stress comes with the territory. However, the stress we’re under this year feels different. It’s more complex. There are multiple sources of pressure and there isn’t an end date on the horizon. It’s one thing to handle the stress that comes and goes in a typical year; handling chronic stress is something else entirely. The pandemic has compounded the effect stress has on your students, to the point where you’re likely to see more unwanted behavior crop up in your classroom this year.

In this month’s Teach by Design, we offered up some ideas for how to combat the stress levels in your classroom. In this episode of Expert Instruction, we’re diving a little further into the topic.

Today, we’re talking with Dr. Geovanna Rodriguez, an assistant professor of school psychology at the University of Oregon about how to manage the stress happening in your classroom this year—both your students’ and your own.

Find out how creating safe, predictable classrooms means creating a space where your students feel confident enough to leave their stress at the door. Dr. Rodriguez also shares how important it is to take care of ourselves and how her own perspective on “self-care” has changed over the last year and a half.

Today we launch the first episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast. In this episode, we wanted to explore one of the six back-to-basics strategies we listed in our August Teach by Design article. Specifically, how do you take the good teaching practices you already know and adapt them for distance learning? We talked to two of our PBISApps trainers to learn what they did to make their in-person trainings effective in online spaces.

No matter where you are on your implementation journey, at some point you’ll want to take a step back and ask yourselves, “Are we doing what we said we’d do and is that effort having the kind of impact we hoped it would have?” Answering those questions requires data. Once you’ve collected the data you need, the next step is to create a plan.

On today’s episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we invited two experts to share their action-planning strategies. Hear how they guide teams to use data, focus their problem solving, and build their best action plans ever.

Our guests today are Hannah Anderson and Luke Anderson. Hannah is the Director of Innovation, School Programs and Accountability for the Rocklin Unified School District (RUSD) in Rocklin, CA. She oversees state and federal programs and leads the district’s PBIS Leadership Team.

Luke Anderson is the Senior Director of Prevention Supports and Services for the Placer County Office of Education in Auburn, CA. He oversees the PBIS and Multi-Tiered System of Support regional initiatives – specifically, he specializes in using data to improve outcomes in school systems. He is a statewide SWIS Facilitator Trainer and a member of the California PBIS Coalition Leadership Team.

Check out these links for more information about some of the resources we discuss in the episode:

• An overview of PBIS Assessment
• School Climate Survey Manual
• Tiered Fidelity Inventory Manual

In this episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, our guest is Dr. Erik Girvan from the University of Oregon School of Law. Dr. Girvan's research focuses on how sterotypes, attitudes, and other biases might impact the decisions you make in schools. He joined us to talk specifically about implicit bias: the automatic, unconscious associations we make about people and their social roles. Addressing the way these biases make their way into our school policies and procedures is exactly the kind of work we need to do in order to create supportive environments.

During our discussion, we talked about how to know when our implicit biases are most likely to affect our decisions. These moments are called vulnerable decision points and they're most likely to happen when we are under pressure, stress, fatigue, or without much specific information. If that doesn't describe the reality we live in right now, I don't know what does. So, what do we do when life feels like one big vulnerable decision point? Dr. Girvan has some ideas to get you started.

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

• Using Discipline Data within SWPBIS to Identify and Address Disproportionality
• Links to Dr. Girvan's recent research and contact information

This month, we kick off our series about culturally responsive practices in PBIS implementation. In Teach by Design, we defined what we mean when we say a school is culturally responsive; we explored how to use data to determine the impact your existing systems and practices have on specific student groups; and we used Dr. Christopher Emdin’s idea of “content + context” to embed student identity in implementation.

When your school is culturally responsive, you hold all students to high expectations, and you use their cultures to enhance their learning. What do you do when your schoolwide expectations aren’t culturally responsive? How do you know when they are?

In this episode of Expert Instruction, we’re talked to Athena Vernon. Athena is a member of the Desert/Mountain SELPA Prevention and Intervention Team. She is a Prevention and Intervention Lead Specialist with over 15 years of experience in K-12 settings. During our conversation, we talked about the difference between a school’s culture and its climate and how embedding your students’ cultures into your schoolwide expectations benefits everyone in your school.

For more information about the work Athena and her colleagues are doing, check out the Prevention & Intervention team's page.

​May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Mental Health America is using this May to build upon last year's "Tools 2 Thrive" campaign by sharing “practical tools that everyone can use to improve their mental health and increase their resiliency regardless of their personal situation." Susan Barrett and Dr. Brandi Simonsen from The Center on PBIS jumped right on top of the theme and started a social media campaign called #SchoolWellnessPBIS on Facebook and Twitter. With online spaces flooded with resources around how to support mental health in schools, their goal was to curate a list of tips and resources for incorporating positive mental health strategies in the classroom. After sharing a few of their strategies in this month's Teach by Design article, we wanted to invite them to the podcast to talk a little about the inspiration behind the campaign and why they feel it's so important to talk about mental health in schools right now.

Our conversation includes ideas you can implement today to support students, teachers, and create a community focused not just on self-care, but collective care. As Susan shared, "How do we take care of each other? How do we slow down and build a sense of community...and ecosystem where everybody is thriving?" Sounds like a goal we can all get behind.

• Susan Barrett serves as a Director for the Center for Social Behavior Support (CSBS) at Old Dominion University and she is an Implementer Partner with The Center on PBIS. She assists with large-scale implementation of PBIS, partners with researchers to evaluate the impact of PBIS on students, school staff, and school communities, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Association of Positive Behavior Supports. She also co-leads a PBIS and mental health expansion effort called the Interconnected Systems Framework. In her research, Susan explores topics ranging from large-scale adoption of PBIS, to mental health, to the adoption of evidence-based practices in schools.

• Brandi Simonsen is a professor of Special Education with tenure in the Department of Educational Psychology at the Neag School of Education and the Co-Director of the Center for Behavioral Education and Research at the University of Connecticut. She is also the Co-Director of The Center on PBIS, a Co-Principal Investigator of the National Multi-Tiered System of Supports Research Network, a Senior Advisor to the National Center on Intensive Interventions (NCII), and an editorial board member for the Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. Her areas of interest and expertise include positive and proactive professional development supports for teachers, and applying PBIS in alternative education settings.

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

• Resources for Supporting Schools During and After Crisis
• Supporting PBIS Implementation Through Phases of Crisis Recovery
• Advancing Education Effectiveness: Interconnecting School Mental Health and School-Wide Positive Behavior Support
• Habits of Effective Classroom Practices

On today’s episode of Expert Instruction: The Teach by Design Podcast, we continue our exploration of how to add student perspectives to the decisions effecting schools every day. We’ve shared ideas for how to include students at the school level, but what about at the district level? What does it look like for students to be involved in decisions that effect not only the way their school operates, but how all schools operate within their area?Zachary Patterson knows.

Zachary is a senior at University City High School in San Diego, CA and the very first student board member on San Diego Unified School District’s school board. The fact that the district has a student member at all was Zachary’s idea. As a 7th grader, he proposed the board add a student seat. By October 2019, not only had they approved that proposal, but Zachary was elected to serve as the inaugural student member. On top of this position, he is also the founder and current president of the California Student Board Member Association – an organization dedicated to supporting and advancing the rights of students serving on California school boards.

We all have a reason compelling us to get up and go to work in the morning. Our personal purpose plays a big role in how engaged we are in the work we do. Defining your why is a hot topic of conversation these days, and it’s an important thing to do. Equally important is defining your school’s organizational purpose, but it’s not something we talk as much about.

In today’s episode of Expert Instruction, we’re answering the questions:

• What is a school-wide purpose statement?
• Why is a purpose statement important?
• How do you co-create a purpose statement with your larger school-wide community?

Our guest is Dr. Nikole Hollins-Sims. Nikole is an educational consultant, strategist, and most recently, technical assistance coordinator with the Midwest PBIS Network. Prior to joining up with the Midwest PBIS team, she served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Education at the Pennsylvania Department of Education as well as an educational consultant working for the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network. Nikole is a systems-level thinker who finds transforming educational ecosystems to be some of the most rewarding work she can do.

For more information about some of the resources mentioned in this episode, check out these links:

• Midwest PBIS Network Homepage
• Feedback and Input Survey Manual
• The 5 Whys (The article is about staff buy-in and the 5 Whys are described under the “Keep It Simple” header.)

After the annual PBIS Leadership Forum held this October, I caught up on some of the sessions I missed by watching the recordings. I came across a presentation called “Youth Speaking Up About Inequity: Their Experiences Through Their Own Voices” given by Dr. Felicia Singleton and Marcus Jackson. The two of them presented on the ways they have engaged and uplifted students’ voices in their county to address the systems contributing to the inequities students experienced. Specifically, San Diego County Office of Education hosted a series of student panels, moderated by university students, and attended by adults from around the region. During these Zoom sessions, students shared openly about the challenges they’ve faced as members of marginalized communities. Their commentary was honest, authentic, and brave, even when their truth was hard to hear as an adult.

We had to know more about what it was like to organize these discussions and about the impact they’ve had since. So, we invited them to join us today!

Dr. Felicia Singleton is the Director of System of Supports at San Diego County Office of Education. She works with schools and districts on the implementation of equity-centered, multi-tiered systems of support as well as restorative practices and social emotional learning.

Marcus Jackson is an Executive Consultant and Content Lead for the San Diego South County Special Education Local Plan Area’s (SELPA) Equity, Disproportionality, and Design team. He consults with districts about their climate and culture as well as the implementation and sustainability of their multi-tiered systems of support.

For more information about Felicia and Marcus’ work, check out these links:

• San Diego County Office of Education Student Support Services
• San Diego South County SELPA Equity, Disproportionality, and Design Team
• Student Experience Panel Playlist

After a weird year like we had in the 2020-21 school year, we wanted to take some time to showcase the things that went better than you thought they’d go. We reached out to our PBISApps community and asked you to submit your wins. Some stories appeared in our Teach by Design article this month; the rest you’ll hear in this episode.

We sat down with three schools from across the country to hear more about how this year didn’t stop them from creating community and building relationships in spite of the distance. ‍

• Horace Mann Elementary School, Oak Park, IL: Linda Chrystall shared how she modified their school’s Check-in Check-out point card to work better for students engaged in distance learning.

• Elkins Park School, Elkins Park, PA: Shareese Nelson, Stephen Suplick, and Brian Wallace gave us examples of all the ways they went above and beyond to encourage their students to feel connected as part of the larger school community.

• Thurston Middle School, Springfield, OR: Cindy Bonar, Andy Price, and Brandi Starck talked about the weekly show they started during the pandemic as a way to jumpstart relationships between students and staff.

We want to thank everyone who submitted success stories from this past year. We hope these experiences inspire you to try new things to create the kind of school where every student feels engaged, supported, and excited to learn.

This month’s Teach by Design article introduced the continuum of play and how to embed play-based learning in your classrooms. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at one specific type of play on the continuum. Today, we’re talking about free play.

Free play is that dedicated time in the day where your students get to move and explore in unstructured space free of any adult interference. In schools, most of us call it recess! Our students love it, and yet there never seems to be enough time dedicated to it. But what if we made more time for it? What are the benefits? How would it work logistically with the bell schedule? Most of this relates to early childhood and elementary school, but what could it look like in middle and high school?

In this episode, we’re talking about it all with Dr. Michelle Bauml and Nellie Huggins.

Michelle is a Professor of Education and an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at Texas Christian University (TCU). She is also a Play Consultant as part of the Let’s Inspire Innovation ‘N Kids (Liink) Project’s Research Team. The Liink Project is an organization dedicated to increasing student access to unstructured, outdoor recess time as a way of improving social, emotional, behavioral, and academic achievement in schools.

Nellie is a veteran in the field of early childhood education and an advocate for young children and their families. She has spent the last 22 years working in every early childhood setting and role possible – from infant care to preschool teacher, to preschool owner and director. Currently, she’s the Parent Outreach Coordinator for Early Childhood CARES at the University of Oregon – an organization providing early intervention and early childhood special education to infants, toddlers, and preschool age children in Lane County.

For more information on the resources shared in this episode, check out these links.

• The Liink Project homepage
• Early Childhood CARES homepage
• Time to Play: Recognizing the Benefits of Recess: The research findings around the percent of students who have dedicated time for recess in their day.
• Super Fun Transitions by Shawn Brown: An album of transition songs to use in early education settings as kids move from one activity to another.

Two system-level, foundational features of PBIS implementation relate to your schoolwide team — specifically who’s on it and how it operates. While research tells us team-based decision making is an effective practice, it can’t pinpoint exactly which practices contribute to that success. , That’s because what makes teams so great has a lot to do with how well they fit within the culture and context of their schoolwide community.

So what does a schoolwide PBIS team look like? How does it work? We invited our colleague Danielle Triplett to join us today to share some of her experiences working with teams in every role from team member to district-level coach.

Danielle is a Senior Research Assistant and member of our PBIS Apps training team. She is passionate about schools. In her work, she’s particularly interested in exploring how schools can improve educational equity, offer alternatives to exclusionary discipline, use data for decision-making, and implement multi-tiered systems of support for behavior and mental health.

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

• Tiered Fidelity Inventory
• Centering Equity in Data-based Decision Making: Considerations and Recommendations for Leadership Teams

Who’s ready for summer? Literally every hand in our office is up…maybe yours is, too. The end of the year is the perfect time to tie up loose ends, pack up your things, and look back on everything you accomplished. Reflection is an active process — one that keeps our work fresh and helps us improve from year to year — and it’s what we’re doing today.

In this episode, we’re looking back at every conversation we had over the past school year and sharing our favorite highlights and lessons learned. We’ve interviewed 21 guests across 10 episodes. Every conversation gave us something to think about and find ways to infuse it in our work moving forward. Today, we’re sharing five of those lessons with you.To travel back in time and dive into any of these episodes mentioned today, check out the following links:

• Ep. 21: Benefits & Examples of Creating a Schoolwide Purpose Statement
• Ep. 24: The Benefits of Play‍
• Ep. 26: Vulnerable Decision Points
• Ep. 27: Neutralizing Vulnerable Decision Points‍
• Ep. 29: Integrating Mental Health Supports in Your PBIS Framework

What does data-driven decision making mean to you? In this month’s Teach by Design, we showed you how researchers found it means something different depending on who you ask. What works for one school may not work for another, but we were also curious to know whether there were some components of a decision-making process that might be similar across most contexts.

In today’s episode of Expert Instruction, we’re exploring those decision-making fundamentals – the components of your decision-making model that make your team more efficient and your solutions more effective.

Joining us is Dr. Jessica Swain-Bradway and Dr. Billie Jo Rodriguez. Jessica is the executive director for Northwest PBIS Network – an organization providing professional development and support around PBIS & MTSS, including restorative practices, Interconnected Systems Framework, equity in discipline, early childhood PBIS, and more. Jessica’s work focuses on equipping teachers with strategies for instruction, relationship-building, and designing effective learning environments. She also has expertise aligning restorative practices, mental health practices, and academic RtI into the SWPBIS framework. 

Billie Jo is a Northwest PBIS staff member, a senior lecturer at the University of Oregon, a nationally certified school psychologist and a board-certified behavior analyst. She has over 20 years of experience supporting students with diverse needs and helping schools implement increasingly intensive function-based supports. She joins NWPBIS after seven years providing behavior support services as a school psychologist and positive behavior support coach in a diverse Oregon district.

For more information about some of the resources mentioned in this episode, check out these links:

• TIPS Meeting Minutes Template
• Culturally Responsive Field Guide
• Tiered Fidelity Inventory

Surprise! It’s our first bonus episode of Expert Instruction! We’ve been working as a team to bring some new labels and language to the Schoolwide Information System (SWIS). As part of that work, we revisited the category label definitions and gave them a refresh. As that project comes to completion, we realized the work overlapped with the conversations we’ve had over the last two months.

When you talk about solutions to disrupt vulnerable decision points, defining behavior — both what it looks like and the options available to address it — is on the list. We had to get the team together to share a little about what the process was like and how you can do it, too, in your school.

Joining us in conversation are Diertra Lomeli, Katie Schulz, and Seth May.

• Diertra is the Customer Support Team Manager at PBISApps. She leads the team of people who connect with our users, set up every account, invoice every subscription, and problem-solve every bug as it comes in.
• Katie is a Customer Support Specialist at PBISApps. When users have questions, concerns, or feedback about our applications, they get in touch with our customer support team, and often, they get in touch with Katie.
• Seth is the Director of IT at PBISApps. He started as a developer creating the very first version of SWIS. Now, he leads a team of developers and IT professionals to create the applications schools use every day.

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

• Updated SWIS Referral Category Definitions
• Details to Prep You for Changes Coming to SWIS
• Teach by Design: Disrupt Your Vulnerable Decisions With These Simple Solutions

This episode of Expert Instruction is the second in our 2-part series about de-escalation. Last episode, we spoke with Dr. Kathleen Strickland-Cohen and Alex Newsom about the school-wide strategies you can put in place to help prevent behaviors from escalating in the classroom. We know it would be impossible to prevent 100% of behaviors from getting bigger. So, what happens when those prevention strategies aren’t enough? What can you do to de-escalate a behavior before it becomes a crisis?

We invited Ami Flammini and Brian Meyer from the Midwest PBIS Network to help us answer those questions. They are co-authors (along with Kathleen, Alex, Katherine Meyer, Laura Kern, and Robert Putnam) on the new practice brief from The Center on PBIS called, Strategies for De-escalating Student Behavior in the Classroom. Today, they're are sharing how they've used these strategies to stop the escalation cycle and help students return to a place of calm.

Ami is a technical assistance director with the Midwest PBIS Network where she works to integrate trauma-informed practices within a multi-tiered support system. Ami has nearly 30 years of experience in education as a social worker and trainer, so she is intimately familiar with what it takes to create a positive school culture that supports everyone.

Brian is a co-director for the Midwest PBIS Network and a partner with The Center on PBIS. He bring with him experience in just about every educational setting. From general education, to higher education, to residential care, to state departments down to the local level, Brian has worked with them all. In his current work with the Midwest PBIS Network, Brian leads the curricular development of district leadership training, Tier 1, classroom management, and bullying prevention.

Dr. Kathleen Strickland-Cohen is also back for this episode. Kathleen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Utah and a Doctoral-level Board Certified Behavior Analyst. She has extensive experience conducting research and training both preservice teachers and in-service district and school personnel in behavior support implementation at Tiers 2 and 3. Her research interests include: designing inclusive educational environments, using efficient methods to train school professionals how to design individualized student behavior plans, and enhancing family-professional partnership within PBIS.

For more information about some of the resources mentioned in this episode, please check out these links:

• Practice Brief: Strategies for De-escalating Student Behavior in the Classroom
• Expert Instruction Ep. 22: School-wide Strategies for Preventing Escalated Behavior
• Teach by Design Article: Slow the Climb: 4 De-escalation Strategies to Keep Behavior from Going Downhill
• Midwest PBIS Network's Website