Students in alternative, residential, and correctional settings present challenges in the classroom and facility due to the complexity and intensity of their behaviors. In addition, the factors typically associated with these settings including crowding, inconsistency, and conflicting staff perspectives on education and discipline present…

Teachers report that the behaviors that they are forced to deal with on a daily basis are not typically violent or intense but are frequent and usurp great amounts of instructional time. Office discipline referrals provide a well-established method of tracking student behavior problems across the school, allowing for deeper analysis of contextual…

Dealing with difficult behavior is a matter of awareness of the factors involved in prediction, prevention, and instruction. This means three things: Teachers know, or can be assisted in thinking through the environmental events and contexts that are associated with higher probabilities of problem behavior. Second, teachers can actively manipulate…

Although the conceptual foundations of PBS at the universal level have been widely described and presented in the literature, secondary and tertiary interventions have been presented through very limited examples. This paper defines the key features of secondary and tertiary interventions and presents a decision-making process to guide schools…

Although the federal government recently mandated the use of functional behavior assessment (FBA) and positive behavioral interventions for students, this legislation has not defined the key features of FBA and has provided little guidance for how such procedures should be completed in a public school setting. As a result, recent evidence suggests…

One approach to student behavior that may be particularly useful in exclusionary settings is school-wide positive behavior supports (PBS). Increasingly, evidence shows that PBS is an effective approach to student behavior in regular public schools (Sugai & Horner, 2005). While the data on behavioral systems in exclusionary schools are…

Functional behavior assessment (FBA) is an integral component of a positive behavior support approach to preventing problem behavior across all students in the school. As primary prevention, FBA is a collaborative school-wide practice to predict common problems and to develop school-wide interventions. As secondary prevention, FBA involves simple…

This article presents an example of how school time was monitored to facilitate a cost analysis of school-wide systems of positive behavior support (PBS). The article provides descriptions of how (a) PBS efforts were initiated in the school, (b) time and money were spent preparing for and implementing PBS, and (c) changes in behavior referrals and…