Standard Reflection- E2

E2 – Exemplify collaboration within the school.

Wenesday afternoon I went to a staff meeting with all the teachers. We discussed a few of the things average to most class meetings, but we also discussed something special. PBIS, or, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, is a schoolwide initiative that seeks to create a more effective learning environment by helping teachers and students respond to eachother with understanding and kindness. This movement was prompted by the administrations recent professional development that showed them strategies at other schools that help create a better school environment. They used a school in Walla Walla, WA that had implemented a similar change and had found that suspension rates, explusions, and written referrals had dropped considerably.

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Many of the teachers at the meeting had some feedback they wanted to give regarding this new policy. Through this, the administration lead the conversation into the sweeping reform that would have to take place throughout the school. The change would happen slowly, not only at the administrative level, but at the teaching level as well. By adopting these changes, the hope would be that the students and staff would benefit from a better and more effective learning environment.

Standard E2 relates to this as teacher candidates we seek to become more involved in school activites, and what better activity than an initiative to make the school a better place. Teachers take on the responsibility to engage their school community; the peers they work with and the students they teach. By communicating these changes to the teachers, the administration hopes to instigate community involvement to improve their school. Each teacher is responsible for adopting and integrating the new PBIS method, and I, too, will strive to implement this in my teaching. In the meeting, we talked about how we could implement this new PBIS method in personal examples, and I think that within our group we communicated some extremely effective examples of how and when to utilize the new PBIS method to create an effective learning environment.