Getting Back on Track

As my journey at Walden University continues with the focus of instructional design, we begin to look at positive and negative behaviors seen in project management.  Over the past three years, my school building has made the transition from a reactive behavior management plan to a proactive behavior management plan called Positive Behavior Support, known commonly in the field of education as PBS. As part of this transition, I have become a member of a design team to aid in the implementation of this plan.

In the plan’s initial year, we as teachers were expected to follow a rubric guide that had been created at the district level outlining the desired behaviors of the students. While the rubric was clear, it was overwhelming and in the end, several teachers chose to not refer to it at all, classifying it as “just something else to do.”

The second year of the program, a team was assembled to take the before-mentioned rubric and put it into terms that were not only friendly to the staff,  but were also friendly to the students.  As a team, we took the given expectations for each area of the school building and created posters that outlined the desired behaviors and posted the posters in the various areas of the building, such as the restrooms, hallways, pods, and cafeteria. We also created lesson plans for the teachers to use to help teach the desired behaviors, but again, several teachers felt this was overwhelming and too time consuming, therefore allowing the plan to appear to fail.

This year, our team decided to try a new approach to the solution, as the district has seen success in other buildings outside of ours. Because the posters were already in place, and the lesson plans created, we decided as a team to change how we delivered the expectations of our plan. After we “tweaked” the previously developed lesson plans, we assembled a “toolkit” for each classroom teacher that included the lesson plans. As part of the toolkit, we also developed a “student check-sheet” that was written in student-friendly terms so that the students themselves could be responsible for self-evaluating their behaviors and “Leading Leopard” cards that are awarded to students caught demonstrating the desired expectations, which when earned enter students into weekly prize drawings. Next, we developed a series of stations designed to teach the expectations, with each station leader using the developed lesson plans for that particular station, and students spent 20 minutes at each station on the first day of school practicing the expectations. Lastly, we developed a video that demonstrated the expectations from the lesson plans. The video was shown every day for the first week of school, and is additionally shown the first Wednesday of every month. As we have progressed through the school year, the data we have collected has shown a larger decrease in disciplinary measures at the administrative level than those of years past.

Looking back at the process of designing and implementing this plan in our particular building, had we taken more time in the development of materials at the beginning of the process, I feel that we could potentially have seen a consistent decrease in administrative discipline over the three year time period rather than just a consistent decrease over the current school year. Had we done what was done this year in the first year of the plan, I feel the buy-in from all stakeholders would have been much less resistant, for it seemed that when we took the time in developing a plan that was specific and practically applied, the buy in from teachers was more consistent building-wide.

Just as one creates and follows a map to get to their destination, a project manager creates and follows a plan when designing a learning module, and as we all know, sometimes when we are asked to take an unplanned detour, which can throw us off course. However, it’s our choices during these detours that determine our success. Detour signs are put up by the road crew as guides to getting us to where we need to go, or in project management, the failed attempts help us to better prepare our plans and serve as lessons that can help us avoid making the same mistakes again in future projects.