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Positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS)

This is an excerpt from Paraeducators in Physical Education 2nd Edition by Lauren J. Lieberman,Melissa Bittner.

By David Adams, Barry Lavay, and Eric Kohl

Skill Building Approach to Dealing With Positive and Challenging Behaviors

During the past 15 years, educators have continued to move away from using punishment and coercing students to change their behavior by using a more positive, affirming, and ethical approach to promoting positive student behaviors and redirecting challenging behaviors through PBIS (Lavay et al., 2016; Sugai & Horner, 2014). You, as a paraeducator, will need to understand the process of skill building within the PBIS process, which follows four phases of learning.

1. Acquisition. Students are introduced to the new behavior. Mistakes are commonly made and will need consistent re-teaching and support throughout the day. During this stage, you need to provide continuous reinforcement each time the student demonstrates the desired behavior.
2. Fluency. Students are developing age-appropriate behaviors and increasing correct responding. Mistakes are becoming minimized, but support and re-teaching is still consistent. During this stage, you can begin to fade or reduce the number of reinforcements provided. For example, the student may be reinforced after every third occurrence of the desired behavior.
3. Maintenance. Students are demonstrating their behavior without reteaching. While mistakes may still be made, providing specific prompts can help to refocus the student. During this phase, you can continue to fade or reduce the number of reinforcements given. For example, now the student will be reinforced after every fifth occurrence of the desired behavior.
4. Generalization. Students are demonstrating the behavior throughout their day within multiple settings. Mistakes are minimal, and specific prompts need to be used to help refocus the student. During this phase, you can continue to fade or reduce the number of reinforcements given. For example, the student now will be reinforced when the desired behavior has been demonstrated throughout each class setting (Simonsen & Myers, 2025).

As you can see, PBIS moves dramatically away from a reactive, punishing approach that is often ineffective and more for the teachers’ and paraeducators’ short-term well-being than for the benefit of the student. Although ethically questionable and often ineffective, professionals still choose negative approaches, such as verbal reprimands, time-outs, movement to a more restrictive PE setting, and corporal punishment. These approaches may provide immediate relief from a difficult situation, but they are rarely effective in the long term for reducing or eliminating challenging behaviors. In addition to being ineffective, these punitive approaches are time-consuming, do not build positive behavior, and are emotionally draining for all involved (e.g., paraeducator, teacher, and student). Sugai and Horner (2014) have outlined specific reasons to avoid punishment:

Practical and Ethical Reasons to Avoid Punishment

1. Punishment leads to environments that control students rather than support them.
2. Punishment sets the stage for and reinforces antisocial behavior.
3. Punishment shifts accountability away from the paraeducator and school.
4. Punishment leads to a more adversarial relationship between the student and paraeducator.
5. Punishment may reinforce the inappropriate behavior, thus making it worse.
6. Punishment does not teach alternative, effective options to inappropriate behavior.
7. Punishment does not address the reason for the behavior.
8. Punishment may result in injury.
9. Punishment may result in the student avoiding the environment (i.e., the gymnasium becomes a punishing place to be).
10. Punishment may result in unanticipated and unwanted side effects.

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