SWPBS FRAMEWORK
Sacred Heart College has begun implementing SWPBS – School Wide Positive Behaviour Supports for secondary students. We have an SWPBS team of teachers and we are supported by an external facilitator who helps the team to review student behaviour data. This enables the development of new strategies that will specifically address trends in behaviour that may be occurring across a particular year group.
What is School Wide Positive Behaviour Support?
SWPBS is a process for creating safer and more effective schools. It is a systems approach to enhancing the capacity of schools to educate all children by developing research-based, school-wide and classroom behaviour support systems. The process focuses on improving a school’s ability to teach and support positive behaviour for all students. Rather than a prescribed program, SWPBS provides systems for schools to design, implement and evaluate effective school-wide, classroom, non-classroom and student specific plans. SWPBS includes school-wide procedures and processes intended for all students and all staff in all settings. SWPBS is not a program or a curriculum. It is a team-based process for systemic problem solving, planning and evaluation. It is an approach to creating a safe and productive learning environment where teachers can teach and all students can learn.
What is SWPBS at our school?
We have adopted a unified set of expectations. Our expectations of Always Be Responsible, Always Be Respectful and Always Be Your Best inform how we talk about and teach the behaviour we wish to see in our College. You will see these rules posted throughout the school and your child will be learning about them and the specific behaviours that are required throughout their schooling experience. Our classroom expectations are found in every classroom and non-classroom setting in the College, include the following as an example:
- Be prepared and organised for class
- Use positive and friendly language
- Follow yard duty teacher instructions
- Leave no trace
- Know your impact.
As part of our SWPBS process, teachers and other staff members will use evidence-based practices to increase student learning and decrease classroom disruptions. To keep students on the expectations in a positive manner, we do the following when teaching academics and behaviour:
- Constantly teach and refer to our College-wide expectations
- Provide students with more praise than correction
- Talk to students with respect, using positive voice/tone
- Actively engage everyone in the class during instruction
- Use pre-correcting, prompting, and redirecting as we teach.
- Look for the positive first and provide positive, immediate, frequent and explicit feedback.
It is important for parents/guardians to understand that, while the emphasis is on creating positive interactions with students when correcting behaviour and teaching behaviour, there are also consequences for repeated unproductive behaviour that is not in keeping with our College wide expectations.
