From Merle Schwartz, CEP director of education and research
Before I came to CEP in August of 2002, I was a school psychologist in Maine, a learning & behavior specialist, and wrote the first graduate course at that time on PBIS for the University of Southern Maine. Before that, I was a special education teacher for many years. I mention this because, at that time, I had the connection on how PBIS could been done well—and how character education was a foundational missing piece in most schools. Understanding character education allowed me to evolve beyond PBIS.
Although the intent of PBIS (remember it is part of IDEA), was to be proactive and prosocial, it seems to have morphed back into standard behavior modification techniques. When I work with educators on this topic, and the need for the school to move beyond common “rule” to basic core ethical values, they quickly realize that PBIS does not help develop integrity. In many cases, when the reinforcers stop, the prosocial behavior stops as well.
For schools and states struggling for best practice implementation of PBIS, I try to help educators see PBIS and character education not as an “either-or,” but rather, view character education and core values as setting the foundation that then shapes PBIS so that students “do the right thing for the right reason.”
What follows is the original piece I wrote about PBIS that may be found in CEP’s wonderful Eleven Principles Sourcebook, guidebook 7 on intrinsic motivation:
In 1997, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was amended to include positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) as the recommended method for dealing with challenging behavior in children with disabilities. PBIS is an approach that assists students in learning prosocial behavior through, modeling, shaping, cueing, and dialoguing in an environment that is respectful of individual student needs. The PBIS process provides a better understanding of why challenging behavior occurs, i.e., what function the behavior serves, when it happens, what influences it, and what maintains it. In contrast, behavior management systems seek to control student behavior through external inducements that do not teach deficit skills nor develop greater self-awareness in students.
PBIS and character education are natural partners for improving the educational experience of children with significant behavioral and learning challenges.
Both honor the students’ learning needs by developing student autonomy, a sense of belonging, and competence. Throughout the PBIS process, teachers utilize the strategies of reflection, problem solving, restitution, and social skill training, as appropriate and based on the cognitive ability of the student.
In PBIS, extrinsic rewards and consequences are at times necessary to reduce the problem behavior while the student is learning the replacement social skills. For example, a teacher might help a student track their success in keeping their relationships with others nonagressive by having the student record a tally for each designated period of time they are prosocial in meeting their needs. A certain number of tallies may be traded for special time playing a game with a classmate. While the child is “earning” special time, they are also learning prosocial behavior. From a character education perspective, individual plans should be monitored closely so that as students begin to gain control of their emotions and find more appropriate means for communication, reinforcement moves away from extrinsic rewards and towards social rewards, ultimately emphasizing students’ intrinsic satisfaction in being a good citizen of the school and classroom. This is a much easier process in schools that fosters character development within a caring atmosphere.
Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so, Excellent post!
Hi Merle!
Thanks for writing what you did about PBIS & CE. I needed the support of a reputable person. I’ll explain. I am also a school psychologist and long-time member of CEP. I am teaching online for Walden University and the American College of Education. The course I’m facilitating right now for ACE is Classroom Management, and I am having to deal with the fact that Howard Knoff designed the course and is, as you know, a PBIS (PBSS) true believer. Like most school psychologists, he never lets the terms “character” or “moral development” roll off his lips, and is stuck in the special-ed/sch-psych mindset, he can’t see PBIS as lacking an adequate asset or caring community focus. What follows is an announcement I placed in my current ACE course before I found the reinforcement of your piece on PBIS and CE. Hopefully you don’t mind that I put it up as an announcement also. I thought you might find some of what I wrote about PBIS and CE familiar. We might want to write and publish something together. I’m writing a book or long article right now about reform through curricular relevance, both developmental and environmental. You may or may not be aware of my 1998 book, Character and Community Development. I don’t think it was ever put on the CEP list even though the big names endorsed it (Schaps, Wood, Ryan, etc.), but after trying unsuccessfully for a couple years to get inaccurate information about my questionnaires changed on the CEP website, I stopped asking for things. Jim Leming with whom I have presented on program evaluation asked also, but it just didn’t happen. — Now here is what I wrote in my classroom announcement:
Dr. Howard Knoff is the primary architect of this course, which focuses heavily on PBSS or “positive behavioral support systems” (also identified as SWPBS, PBS, and PBIS). He is a strong proponent and spokesperson. You might reasonably expect that we might be very similar in our views about how to cultivate good behavior in students and how to create positive school and classroom climates, but our views differ in some ways. I would describe our perspectives as complementary. I encourage you to look at PBSS and our views about it with a critical eye, which combines openness with skepticism. As you know, teachers have been driven down lots of faddish roads, some of which might have been productive had they not been asked to make a U-turn and travel down another.
PBSS is very behavioral in its origins and is in effect a school-wide application of “functional behavioral assessment” (FBA), a procedure well known to special educators, and based on select findings from the long tradition of applied behavioral analysis research. By select, I mean choosing as a centerpiece-ideology only the findings that show positive support works and rejecting findings that aversive methods work as well. It is a program designed by leaders in the field of school psychology, and humanitarians within special education who believe in inclusion and FBA. So it is perhaps not surprising that it is heavily behavioral and places more emphasis on intervention than prevention. Prevention is not neglected but is more implicit than explicit as reflected in the identification of social skill categories, and general references to the importance of (a) interacting positively with students, (b) creating a climate conducive to learning, and (c) instituting PBS through structural components of the school such as strategic plans and core committees. Its strength is its organizational structure and the way in which its elements are wired into the components of schools as systems. Its weakness is that it does not clarify how we want students to behave and what kind of people we want them to be. It is not enough to say that we will use (a) school committees, (b) connections with families, (c) positive relationships with students, (d) teaching of social skills, (e) interventions that are “tailor-made to meet the unique goals and needs of the individual,” (f) the creation of positive classroom climates, (g) “person-centered values,” etc. This is primarily a set of general goals plus a structure through which they can be pursued. The most specific statement I have found that concerns student outcomes is an anonymous elaboration of “person-centered values” as striving for “community involvement, social involvement, individual choice, developing self-respect, and commanding respect from others.” The Kansas Institute for PBS describes person-centered values as focusing on the student’s “. . . interests, strengths, preferences, communication methods, levels of ability, skills, limitations, and the supports needed to achieve [their] preferred lifestyle. . . [It is] based on the hypothesis that if an individual’s needed are met, problem behaviors will naturally decrease” (KIPBS, 2010, #3, critical features). The problem with PBS as I see it is not what it does; rather, it is what it does not do or what it leaves unspecified.
My perspective, which I share with others who have followed a different path from PBSS proponents in terms of research and theory, focuses on specific “assets” or “developmental assets” we want students to acquire. PBS in contrast is more about deficit prevention and intervention than asset development at least in the sense that assets are vaguely described as “prosocial behavior,” “interpersonal skills,” “problem-solving skills,” “social-emotional development,” “behavioral development,” “student culture,” “self-management,” etc. Absent are more explicit terms including “moral development,” “moral character,” “personal integrity,” “social integrity,” “caring community,” “teamwork,” “friendship,” “social consciousness,” “citizenship,” “social justice,” “kindness,” “intercultural understanding,” “cooperative learning,” “multiculturalism,” “class meetings,” “service learning,” “civic duty,” “empathy,” “conscience,” “independence,” “initiative,” “moral values,” “virtues,” “moral exemplars,” “mentoring,” “cross-grade buddying,” etc. One has to ask, “Why do PBSS proponents shy away from talking about moral development and moral character since research and theory in this domain is as robust as that in other developmental domains including social, which overlaps with moral?”
The article by Sailor, W., Stowe, M. J., Turnbull, H. R., Kleinhammer-Tramill, P. J. (2007) in my view is raising an important question about whether or not non-academic “social-behavioral” standards should be added to academic standards. The authors did not credit others of us who have addressed this need by proposing specifics. With respect to asset-building, which I have argued is largely missing in PBSS, it is in my view that they have proposed “making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” though that sounds a bit harsh. PBSS does not provide the best framework for adding non-academic standards because it does not identify specific assets and does not incorporate the research and theory in social and moral development that makes this possible. Research and theory in this area has expanded beyond contributions by Piaget, Kohlberg, and Damon to our understanding of moral judgment into the domain of moral-affect with an emphasis on empathy and conscience. Adding “social-behavioral” standards, or more appropriately, “social-moral” standards to the curriculum is not as novel an undertaking as Sailor et al. (2007) would leave the reader to believe.
Though usually not grounded in developmental theory, many states have identified character standards, and presidents from both parties have endorsed the idea of character standards, which are inextricably linked with social skill standards. Steven Boyd and I (Vessels & Boyd, 1996) laid out the public and constitutional supports for such endeavors, and I followed with a core curriculum for building character in a developmentally appropriate way (Vessels, 1998). Peter Benson and the Search Institute isolated through their many years of survey research specific internal assets including social skills and moral values that provide a foundation for adding “social-behavioral” standards to academic standards that is more comprehensive than that of PBSS. The state of Vermont moved in this direction with an under-elaborated category they called “vital assets,” and I have been engaged for awhile in an effort to blend all of these beginnings into a state-style curriculum that includes academic and non-academic standards that need to be achieved by our graduates to meet the present and future needs and challenges of our time as manifest in families, communities, organizations, societies, nations, cultures, and the global community.
PBS is a praiseworthy organizational prevention-intervention structure that needs to be combined with an asset-building program that is infused into all aspects of school life and inoculates students from becoming at-risk. It also needs to be validated through randomized controlled experimental and quasi-experimental studies that use intact schools and pre-post measures. Claims of being research-based are based on case studies of FBA and years of non-experimental, more narrowly focused “applied behavioral analysis” studies. I have searched for controlled experimental and quasi-experimental studies and have not found a single one even by its proponents.
Dear Gordon,
Wow, long post! Thanks for writing. We appreciate your clear explanation of the connection and disconnection between CE and PBIS. CEP has offered “hot topic” sessions on the subject at our last two national conferences, helping others look at how the two constructs can co-exist in a way that supports the development of the whole child. CEP also sees a clear link between CE and the developmental asset work of the Search Institute.
I’m not sure what you are referring to concerning inaccurate information about your questionnaires, but as I understand it, Jim Leming wrote the original assessment section for CEP’s website, and then CEP ran out of money to support the updates to the resource center database. If you have ideas for today, let me know, and I’ll see what we can do.
Merle is nolonger working at CEP, but she said she’d appreciate a direct contact if you want to e-mail her directly.
We’d love to have you back as an active member of CEP. Come to the Forum in San Francisco, Oct. 28-30, and join the conversation. Larry Nucci has put together a research strand for the conference and he will be giving a keynote speech on the facilitating moral development in the classroom.