TiffanyRippy

Tiffany Rippy PBIS Implementation

Time Sheets I Annotated Bibliography I Mid Term I Final Reflection I Final Project I Website

Reflection September 13, 2011

For my internship, I wanted to document Congaree Elementary School’s first year becoming a PBIS school (Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports). In doing this I hope to capture the excitement of rewarding students for having positive behavior as well as show all major decisions and documents we as a committee created to become more successful through PBIS. When I first spoke with my mentor and principal, he was very excited with the possibilities of my final project. Considering we are the only school in our district implementing PBIS, I thought creating a website that include a PSA describing our first year would encourage and motivate other schools to begin their process. Again, since we are the only school in our district implementing PBIS, we had to look outside our district for advice on how to begin. This is not always as easy as it seems. Having a website devoted to our first year of PBIS, schools in our district and other district can easily access the important aspects of the first year through PBIS and have an idea of what kind of time and effort it takes as a school. In the site I hope to include:


 * PSA
 * Pictures
 * Video Clips
 * SWIS Reports
 * Documents created by our school

PBIS started for me over the summer. I attended a 2 day workshop held by another district. Here, we learned what we as a first year school could handle. This was a big ah ha for me and fellow teachers especially because we have in the past bitten off more than we could chew with other projects. Following the workshop, I attended 2 more days of work at our school preparing our expectation posters, creating our brave bucks and rewards, and deciding on a new discipline referral that conforms more to PBIS. We have concluded that every action made by students wants a reaction. In the case of negative behavior, we needed to mark what outcome was sought by the student. This document will be one that is included in the site I create.

We have kicked off the year well with explaining expectations for the students and giving the “brave bucks” for positive behavior. We have met one time since the school year has started. The majority of the time was spent giving feedback of the first few days and planning our first “Brave Fest”.

I have created a release form to send out to each student so I can have permission to use their pictures on the site I create. I also spent some time creating a pencil box. This is a decorated box that students can cash in their buck for a pencil.

All in all, I have really just been doing the small stuff to get this program up and running. I hope to in the next month get a layout of the site I want to create and start uploading documents that have already been created. I also hope to have pictures uploaded and some SWIS research done from our discipline notes.

Reflection September 27, 2011

As the last 2 weeks have past, we have started implementing our Tuesday Brave Fest events and tweaking them as necessary. We have noticed that some of these events take longer than others and that we need to modify and adjust to accommodate these times.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">As for the students, they are finally being rewarding for positive behavior. It is a great feeling seeing them excited to participate in these activities. So far, they have been able to cash in $1 into the Pencil Machine and $5 to take pictures with their pals. These pictures will be shown at the beginning and end of the morning news show. They have also paid and chosen which Brave Fest event they will take part in on Wednesday, September 28th. This has taken much time in our meetings and we hope that everything will go off without a hitch.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">This coming up Wednesday our group will have its first cohort meeting. This involves members of our committee from our school and other members from schools in our district. Here we hope to discuss more on Tier II students and how we can effectively use positive reinforcement to help them succeed. These are students that are probably not going to change their negative behavior for a Brave Buck. These students will have someone that they check in with in the morning and check out with in the afternoon. This is to keep the students responsible for their own behavior but with positive reinforcement. We will probably look into students who habitually do not do their homework first. We are focusing on what the reason for not doing their homework is and hopefully over coming that with help at school. We will then look at the students who have BIPs at our school, Behavior Intervention Plans, and discuss how we can use the check in/check out process effectively with them.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">As of now, we still have not purchased the SWIS program to track students discipline notes. I plan on asking if this is still in our plans in hopes to start looking at trends with discipline problems.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">**Reflection October 25, 2011**

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Everything seems to be moving along smoothly. We are planning for our second Brave Fest which will occur on November 2nd. We are getting Ned the Yo Yo man. He starts off the program with an assembly for the entire school showing them tricks with his different types of yo-yos. The students will then have a chance to buy the yo-yos and a DVD to teach them the tricks. After the assembly a select few students will go with Ned in a small group where he will teach them more tricks. Of course we will also have the other Brave Fest event, extra recess, arcade time, dodge ball, crafts, and a scavenger hunt. Each of the activities will last about 45 minutes.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">As for the positive behavior, it seems like many of the students are still responding better to this than to negative behavior. We are at a point however where teachers are slacking on giving out the Brave Bucks. Another concern some of the teachers have is the fact that the students are not getting the opportunity to spend their Brave Bucks as fast as they are getting them. We briefly discussed some ways to resolve this situation in the meeting this week. We are hoping that the students being a “teacher’s assistant” for 30 minutes will help resolve this problem. We are going to pass a sheet around on Monday and ask teachers to select a time when they would like to have an assistant.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">As for SWIS, I am guessing that we are not going to purchase this program, at least not this year. I was really looking forward to tracking student’s behavior through this program and hopefully finding out more information about the student. This will be something I look forward to exploring next year.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">This Wednesday will be our 2nd cohort meeting. In these 2 hours we will finalize our plan of action for the year and discuss what we do with Tier 2 students. These are students in which the school wide positive behavior does not work for. We are tossing around the idea of splitting the cohort into 2 groups, the group of teachers from Congaree and all the other teachers. This is in hopes that we can make these cohort days “working” days for us, Congaree teachers and the other teachers will be discussing the ends and outs of PBIS and the beginning stages. We feel that this time will then be used best for each set of teachers.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">I have updated my website [|www.trippy.me/pbis]. It is still in rough form but I am making progress one step at a time. I am still currently trying to get all the right video and pictures I need for my PSA I am working on. This is taking a bit more time than I thought. I think it is because I have many ideas of what I want the PSA to look like when I am finished.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Reflection November 8, 2011 **

Our second Brave Fest took place Wednesday, November 2nd. We had Ned the Yo-Yo guy, who is a fictional character, come and speak to the **ENTIRE** school about being a champion in school. In this presentation the presenter did tricks with yo-yos. She was absolutely hilarious and the students really enjoyed her. The message that she presented as well was awesome. She said Ned stood for Never give up, Encourage others, and Do your best. After the assembly, the students could pay $15 brave bucks and have a small group session on how to do the yo-yo tricks. “Ned” brought yo-yos with him for the students to practice with. The students also had a chance to purchase different types of Ned yo-yos and accessories. This is how they make their money since the entire presentation was free.

Since there was a limited amount of room for the small group session with Ned, we also involved other Braves Fest activities for the rest of the students. These activities happened later on in the day. We had all the same activities from the previous Brave Fest, except this time we had extra recess instead of inflatable’s. Some feedback we got throughout the school is the teachers are wanting some variety in our “other events”. Some suggestions given to mix things up are to do some gardening in the outdoor classroom, decorating cookies/home economics, rock climbing in the gym, and obstacle course outside. We will probably keep some of the same events like arts and crafts and arcade time. We also found that our Brave Fest time was a little too long and the students either seemed to get bored with their activity or they got into things they should not have (especially in the extra recess group). We meet as a committee again in 2 weeks and will discuss any changes for our December Brave Fest.

As for my website and my PSA, I am working on these throughout. I have been filming different aspects of our school to incorporate into my PSA. As suggested, I created a storyboard to organize my thoughts and have a layout of my design. You can find this here **.** My website [|www.trippy.me/pbis] is being updated periodically as well. For the next few weeks I will be adding the PSA to the site as well as more videos and pictures to Brave Fest events.

In our last cohort meeting we started setting up our plan of action for Tier II students. We have selected 5 students within our school that need additional assistance with positive behavior. These students will check in with an adult in the morning to remind them of the choices they should be making and check out with this same adult at the end of the day. If the student has a positive day and has met all their goals, then they will receive their incentive. Each of these plans, goals, and incentives are individualized. Each teacher and student has a copy of their plan as well as a contract made by the student.

**Reflection November 22nd, 2011**

With our Check-In/Check-Out process underway, I think appropriate progress is being made with certain students and not for others. One of our tier II students reward is, if at the end of the day, he has met his goal, so many points for his behavior, he can have computer time. This is like hitting the lottery for this student because he absolutely loves playing on the computer. Needless to say he is doing well with this system. On the other hand, my other student that is also on this tier has not made any improvements. While I was discussing this with my co-teacher, we believe it is because his incentive is not rewarding enough. We are hoping to modify this and make his behavior improve.

We planned our upcoming Brave Fest today in our committee meeting. This will take place on our next half day, December 7th. We changed some of the activities to make the students more excited about these events. Since it will be nearing Christmas time, we tried to theme it around this. One of our activities will be a Christmas movie and munchies (ex. candy cane, popcorn, hot chocolate). We modified our art time to cookie decorating. We are hoping the cookies will be in the shape of snow flakes and the students can decorate then eat their cookies. We also changed our arcade time to a scavenger hunt on our NEW Ipads! The last Brave Fest event will be an outside PE event because the boys never get tired of this. We are hoping that this will be our best Brave Fest yet. We still have some ideas on the back burner like working in the outdoor classroom in the Spring.

Another idea we came up with in our meeting today is to have a raffle on one of the last days before Christmas break. We will have 4 raffle containers out every day at lunch, one for each grade level. Students will be able to place as many Brave Bucks in their raffle basket for a chance to win a pizza party. There will be four winners per grade. We are hoping this will help the student’s behavior in hopes that they receive Brave Bucks. Especially keeping in mind that these are the days leading up to Christmas break!

As for my PSA and website, I have been working with these in pieces. I hope to have the PSA up on my website by next week so I can make changes with any suggestions given to me. I have made a few changes and addition to my website. View this at trippy.me/pbis.