What Positive Behaviour Support Looks Like in Schools Now — and Why Some Teachers Are Changing Their Approach
Friday morning, and Marcus is under the table again. It’s writing time, which is usually when it happens. His pencil is on the floor, his chair is pushed away, and he’s lying flat on the rug with his arms crossed, staring at the legs of the table. In my first years of teaching, I would have done the standard thing: “Marcus, get out from under there right now. Count to three.” Then when he didn’t move, I’d have sent him to the office, and he’d have come back twenty minutes later with a behavior slip and a fresh grudge.
I don’t do that anymore. Instead I crouch down. “You’re telling me your body is having a hard time right now,” I say. “That’s okay. I’m going to leave your chair open. Come join us when you’re ready.” Then I stand up and continue the writing lesson. Two minutes later, Marcus crawls out, picks up his pencil, and starts copying the sentence I put on the board.
This is positive behaviour support. It’s being rolled out in schools all over right now, and if you’ve heard about it and wondered if it means kids just get away with everything, you’re not alone. I had the same worry when our district first introduced it. It sounded nice in theory. But in a classroom of twenty-seven students, with one child melting down and three others watching to see what happens, the last thing you think you need is another philosophy.
What changed things for me was a conversation at a staff meeting. The trainer asked us to stop describing behaviour as “bad” or “defiant” and start asking a simpler question: what need is the behaviour meeting? For Marcus, the answer came after we watched him across two weeks. He wasn’t trying to be difficult. He was avoiding writing because his hand fatigued quickly and he didn’t know how to say, “I’m struggling” without everybody noticing. The meltdown wasn’t the problem. It was his only way of communicating.
That shift in thinking is the heart of positive behaviour support. It’s not about letting children do whatever they want. It’s about recognising that behaviour is communication, and then teaching children a better way to communicate the same message. For Marcus, we introduced a small laminated card he could put on my desk sometime during writing. That meant he could take a two-minute break to get a drink or walk to the back of the room. Nobody had to know why. At first he used it every day. Then he used it less. He could say “I need a minute” in a way that didn’t involve crawling under a table.
The practical parts of this are surprisingly ordinary. We changed the order of our morning: writing moved from after recess to after music, because the data showed he had more trouble after unstructured time. We gave him a job — delivering the attendance sheet to the office — right before writing, so he had a successful transition instead of going straight from one hard task to another. No big rewards, no punishments, no elaborate charts. Just small adjustments based on what we noticed about him.
It sounds obvious, now that I write it down. But in a busy classroom, you don’t always notice. You just handle the behaviour and move on. The hardest part of positive behaviour support is slowing down enough to see patterns. We were asked to track when incidents happened, what happened right before, what happened right after. That one step made us better teachers, even before any new strategies were introduced.
I know what many parents are thinking: what about consequences? I’m a parent too, and I’ve asked the same question at home. When my daughter refused to put on her shoes one morning and then threw one at the wall, I didn’t say, “It’s okay, sweetie, we’ll just stay home.” We did still talk about it. But the old script — “Stop being silly, put your shoes on now, we’re late” — was just making it worse. So I tried something closer to what we do at school. “Shoes are feeling hard this morning. Do you want to put them on at the front door instead?” She carried them to the door, sat on the step, and put them on herself. She needed a different way to do the same thing.
That’s what positive behaviour support looks like outside a classroom. It’s not removing limits. It’s keeping the limit but making the path to it easier. Consequences still exist. When a child throws blocks, we say, “Blocks aren’t safe when they’re thrown. Let’s pick them up together, and you can try again once we’ve cleaned up.” That’s more work than just sending them to time out, but it actually teaches something.
There are days it falls apart. A substitute teacher comes in and doesn’t know the card system. An assembly runs late and all the carefully planned timeings go out the window. The new student who just arrived doesn’t know that raising his hand for a break is even an option. Positive behaviour support isn’t a magic switch. It’s a slow, messy way of working.
It’s also uneven. Some schools have full teams, a coach, and a data system. Others have one training day and a poster in the staff room. The rollout has been cheaper in some districts than in others. I can already see that some of what we’re doing now will fade when next year’s budget is cut. But even then, something stays. We’re no longer asking “what’s wrong with this kid?” We’re asking, “what has happened, and what does he need to get back in?”
Marcus still has hard days. Last week he wrote a full paragraph for the first time, and then ran to the back of the room because he wasn’t sure what to do with his relief. I didn’t ask him to explain. I just gave him a thumbs up and let the moment settle. It wasn’t perfect. It rarely is.
But I’ve had lunchtime conversations with other teachers who are trying this too, and the questions we share are different now. Not “how do you stop bad behaviour?” but “what do you do when the routine works for three days and then stops?” The honest answer is that we keep adjusting. We watch. We change one small thing. We try again. That’s not a policy slogan. It’s just what teaching has become.
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