Wednesday, July 22, 2009

PBS?!?

Has anyone heard of or do you already use the PBS approach to discipline? This is the new program that we are to follow at my school this year. It wasn't explained very well to the staff (We only had a half hour introduction to it.) and I haven't researched it enough to really understand it, but the first thing that hit me was that it seems like we are suppose to reward the kids for doing what they should be doing anyway. It seems to have some good components to it, but I don't think a half hour introduction to this is anywhere near enough to fully understand nor implement it properly. The entire staff is stressed out about it. This was thrown at us with no real support backup or clear understanding. 

Our school is multi-track year round, so must teachers started with their new class today. At least I have three more weeks. I'm going to work in my classroom tomorrow and Friday, but the first day is always chaos, so I decided to stay home today.

5 comments:

HappyAutisticMama said...

Ugh, this brings back memories of my teaching years. I'm all too familiar with poorly-explained nonsensical initiatives, most of which seem to be last-ditch efforts by nervous principals. We tried something like this. It didn't improve behavior any, but it did look good when deserving kids got a free bike. It is good to reward the good kids, but rewards aren't going to change the bad behavior in the rest of the kids. The kids who are already misbehaving have way too much going wrong in their life to care about the prize. Most of them think that the teachers hate them anyway, and that they don't have a chance to get the prize to begin with.

Our Growing Family said...

Our school is doing a similar program that they like to call ESD (effective school wide discipline). They originally titled the program Blaze (clearly they did not think that thru! These are highschoolers :). Anyway, it is based on the same idea of rewarding kids for what (in my opinion) they should do anyway. I think it is silly. I have not seen my students benefit from this program. Instead, the kids who always "do the right thing" are annoyed because the "bad" kids are rewarded for occassionally doing the right thing.

Becky said...

Never heard of it but, I've been out of teaching for 9 years. I totally agree tho, no one cn expect any teacher to understand it and implement it correctly on that poor of an inservice!!

Anonymous said...

Sounds like foster care. We are supposed to interrupt them doing good things and reward them so their brains associate attention and reward with being good.

My middle child who is very compliant and rarely gets into mischief benefits greatly from this type of approach, but when kids are jumping on furniture it's hard to not to say "stop jumping on the furniture".

I don't know...

MtnGirl said...

From one teacher to another.....


HUH????????????