Running Head: Positive Behavior Support 1
Positive Behavior Support
Student’s Name
Affiliated Institution
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Positive behavior support is a practice that is aimed at encouraging learners change from
unwanted behavior without administering the traditional disciplinary practices. This practice
should be adopted to make schools more comfortable to teach and learn. Over a period of time,
schools have used strict disciplinary practices as well zero tolerance policies to disruptive
behaviors. These traditional practices have over the time been used and the learners have built
resistance. Use of the traditional practices brings about bad blood between the learners and the
discipline administrators making it difficult to teach as well as learn.
It is difficult for teachers to carry out their teaching duty in an indisciplined environment.
Discipline means the way a student carries him or herself in and out of the class room. To make
the learning environment friendly, there should be pre-correction of behaviors that may be
deemed as bad (Oswald, K, 2005). Timely correction will prevent the vices from spreading to
other learners. There should also be active supervision to make sure that the disruptive behaviors
are eliminated. In this case, students are grouped to ease monitoring in the hallways during the
lunch break and in the cafeteria. A reward for the positive behavior such as additional break time
acts as a great motivation to make students adhere to change in challenging behaviors.
To correct the challenging behavior, it is necessary to discuss the behavior with the
students ( Leedy A., 2004). The learners are made aware of the negative implications of the
disruptive behavior to the learning environment. To learn effectively, there must be orderly
environment. Order is not only encouraged in the classroom set up but also in the playgrounds,
cafeteria and the walkways. To promote the orderliness, students should be educated on the
prosocial behaviors that can be applied outside the classroom set up (Oswald, K, 2005).
Adapting to the prosocial behaviors helps the students to voluntarily follow the rules in every
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given section of the school. An example in this case is where a sign board indicates ‘no noise’
and every student voluntarily remains silent at that given point.
Implementing Positive behavior support becomes effective by practice (Leedy A., 2004).
All positive behaviors practiced time and again are adopted. In this case, the behaviors that are
deemed positive are rewarded. To achieve this, students are divided in groups. Once the students
are in groups, it means that supervision is easy. Students can supervise themselves as well. To
motivate the students in respective groups, some extra minutes are added to groups during the
lunch break for maintaining silence in the walkways.
In the classroom set up, positive rules should be enforced. The rules will make the
students well behaved while out of the classroom. Several workshops should be held to facilitate
positive behavior support (Leedy A., 2004). In the workshops, the learners are made to
understand that the order brought by the positive behavior is aimed to ensure their well being.
They should be explained that there are all positive intentions in making them benefit most in
their schools.
Caterpillar game is a well defined intervention that helps in approaching challenging
student behaviors. All the components in the caterpillar game are interconnected and the use of
this approach means use of all the components (Floress M.T, 2017). The most important
component in this case is the teacher praise criteria. In the criteria, there is emphasis on what is
to be done differently by the student as well as the teacher.
Positive behavior support can be applied in all learning institutions. There are challenging
behaviors in all the learning institutions. This ranges from the higher class learning institutions to
the lower class institutions. The most important item is conducting a comprehensive research to
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determine the challenging behaviors and come up with a simple mechanism of implementing the
findings. Implementation of the findings will assure a friendly and comfortable learning
environment to both the learners and the teachers.
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References
Floress, M. T., Rock, A. L., & Hailemariam, A. (2017). The caterpillar game: A classroom
management system. Psychology in the Schools, 54(4), 385-403.
Leedy, A., Bates, P., & Safran, S. P. (2004). Bridging the research-to-practice gap: Improving
hallway behavior using positive behavior supports. Behavioral Disorders, 29(2), 130-
139.
Oswald, K., Safran, S., & Johanson, G. (2005). Preventing trouble: Making schools safer places
using positive behavior supports. Education and Treatment of Children, 265-278.
