What Is Positive Behavior Support?

What Is Positive Behavior Support?

Dawn: Teachers are faced with entire classrooms of children all sending different messages with their behavior, and it really helps to have a framework to support that.

Kristin: And that's why we're so excited to welcome Dr. Kathleen Artman Meeker here from the University of Washington. Kathleen, you and some of your colleagues have written the position statement for challenging behavior for DEC. We're so excited for you to be here and tell us about it.

Dr. Kathleen Artman Meeker: Thank you, I'm so excited to be here, too. Yes, my colleague Dr. Angel Fettig, Dr. Jessica Hardy, and I coauthored the paper for DEC.

Dawn: So Kathleen, what are positive behavior supports and what is important for teachers to know about the position statement?

Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great question. So, in many ways, positive behavior support is our field's best thinking about how we help children develop those really important social- emotional skills and help families, educators, programs think about supporting the adult behaviors that support children's behavior. So it's kind of – we like to think of it as a philosophy with feet.

Kristin: I love that. Philosophy with feet!

Kathleen: It's the big ideas. It's what we say the research tells us is really important for kids and families and educators, but then it takes it down to when I'm trying to buckle a toddler into a car seat or I'm trying to serve snack or I'm trying to lead a story time, what are the actual practices that help make that successful and help children develop?

Dawn: So if a teacher is doing PBS, what does it look like?

Kathleen: That's a great question. So, PBS is really about building on the positive things that are already happening in every classroom. So it's not about stopping challenging behavior, actually. It's really about increasing or building up the social behaviors that we see in kids, so the positive behaviors: helping, sharing, labeling my emotions. Those kind of things that I see, it's building those all up in young kids.

So it's a little different from what some of us may have experienced in our own elementary school or early childhood experiences, getting names on the board, maybe children being sent out in the hallway, those kinds of things. And some of the things that still are pretty common in some early childhood and early elementary programs, the behavior management systems where kids might flip a card for challenging behavior or move their clip to red. Those kinds of things, those strategies are really reactive and they may stop a behavior in the moment, but they don't teach a child anything new or different.

So how PBS is different is we flip that situation a little bit. Instead of noticing the challenging behavior and children flipping cards for challenging behavior, now we take that time to notice the positive things we want to see in the classroom. So it might be a teacher who has a "feeling proud and saying it loud" board on the wall, and she just tacks a little sticker or a little dot up there or a little note with a quick reminder of what happened in the classroom that day up on that board to recognize positive behaviors that happen in the classroom.

And so, this gives us a bigger picture view of behavior. It's a little bit more long-term. It's about building the skills we want to keep seeing, and over time, we get more and more of those behaviors. So, it's not about stopping the challenging behavior. It's not just I want a child to stop grabbing toys. It's that I want a child to learn to say, "Can I play?" or "My turn," or "Please stop." And I can teach that; that's an actual skill I can help build. So once we start thinking about challenging behaviors as what's the other skill I could teach instead, it's really empowering to the adults.

Kristin: Well, and a teacher is spending a lot of energy trying to stop these challenging behaviors. So, it's just kind of a different way to focus your energy in a more productive way that could have long-lasting effects, it sounds like. Yeah.

Dawn: You have me so motivated now.

Kristin: Right? I know. Thank you so much, Kathleen. Kathleen: Sure. Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

Kristin: Thank you. [ Music ]