How Positive Behaviour Support Is Changing Classrooms: A Teacher Explains
Calum was four minutes into his diary writing when the tapping started. It began as a light drum of his pencil on the desk, then grew louder, snappier, until the girl beside him flinched. Under the old system, I would have called his name across the room, maybe with a warning: Calum, that’s enough. When he didn’t stop, I’d have sent him to the buddy class for the rest of the lesson, and then we’d both spend the following week giving each other a wide berth.
Today, I didn’t even raise my voice. I walked over, crouched down beside his table, and said quietly, “Your hands are telling me you’re feeling a bit cramped. Are you done with your writing?” He looked up, surprised. “Nearly,” he mumbled. “I’m stuck.” I pointed to the basket on the bookshelf where we keep the sensory strips and the fiddle toys. “Grab one of those for your non-writing hand,” I said. “Finish your last two sentences, and then you can take the movement break.” He nodded, picked a textured strip, and wrote the remaining lines. No audience, no escalation, no lost recess.
That was a small moment, but it’s the small moments that make up the larger shift happening in schools right now. Positive behaviour support, or PBS, is being rolled out across our district, and it’s not the soft discipline policy I once assumed it would be. It’s not letting kids off the hook. It’s teaching them a different way to get what they need.
For years, my approach to behavior was based on a simple script: a rule broken, a consequence issued. I prided myself on being consistent. But consistency meant Calum was spending more time in the buddy class than in my room, and his behavior wasn’t improving—it was getting more creative. I remember one thursday when he knocked over his water bottle three times, then asked me for the fifth time when the lesson would end. From the outside, he was disruptive. From his side, the work was too long and his body was done. I didn’t have the language to see that then.
PBS gave me that language. It asks a deceptively simple question: instead of punishing the behavior, what are we trying to teach? In Calum’s case, the tapping wasn’t defiance—it was regulation. His hands needed a job. So now I have a whole drawer of jobs for them to do.
None of this happened overnight. Last year, the school ran a series of professional development days, and there was a lot of acronyms and data spreadsheets. To be honest, my eyes glazed over. I thought, Here’s another program that’ll be forgotten by Easter. But then the behaviour support coach came into my room and did an observation. She pointed out that I was already doing something that looked like positive reinforcement—my praise was specific, like “I love how you’re showing your working.” But I was missing the proactive part. I hadn’t taught the expected behaviours for each routine. I was assuming kids knew what “a quiet workspace” looked like, and then punishing them when they didn’t deliver.
So we did something painfully simple. We spent twenty minutes one Monday morning scripting out what good listening looks like: eyes on the speaker, hands empty or flat, feet under the table. We role-played it. We had kids demonstrate the wrong way (hilarious, of course) and then the right way. We made a poster. It felt like elementary teacher training, but something shifted. The same kids who “knew the rules” actually hadn’t internalized the specifics. When I said, “Show me what it looks like to have your body ready to learn,” they knew exactly what to do. Because we’d taught it.
At home, my sister tried a similar move with her six-year-old, who throws his crisp packet on the floor every afternoon. Instead of shouting “Pick that up!” she now says, “When you finish your snack, the packet goes in the bin. Show me where the bin lives.” She said it took three days before he absent-mindedly carried it over himself. She wasn’t being soft—she was setting him up to succeed.
The broader rollout is still patchy. Some schools are embracing it with behaviour teams and individual plans. Others are just hanging a few posters and calling it a day. The difference is often training. PBS isn’t a bag of tricks; it’s a way of looking at behaviour as communication. When a child in reception screams during carpet time, a PBS teacher doesn’t just ask “How do I stop the screaming?” They ask “What is the screaming telling me?” Is she too crowded? Is the story too loud? Does she need a visual cue to know what comes next?
Practical changes can be almost absurdly small. In my room now, we have a check-in board by the door where kids put their name next to a colour. Green means I’m ready, yellow means I’m wobbly, red means I’m having a rough one. It takes ten seconds. But now I know before the morning bell whether a kid like Mia needs a quiet chat or a re-set at the calm corner. We call it “co-regulation.” It’s just another way of saying: I’ll help you carry your hard feelings until you can carry them yourself.
The hardest part for me was letting go of the public reprimand. There’s a certain satisfying authority to calling a child out in front of the class. It makes the other kids see that you’re in control. But I’ve since learned that public consequences often trigger shame, and shame is terrible for learning. Calum’s tapping stopped the moment I gave him a private, quiet way out. No audience. No win-lose.
This year, Calum is in my class again (there’s only two grade four rooms, so it happens). His bad days are different now. He still gets dysregulated. He still needs movement breaks. Last week he bolted into the hall and sat beside the water fountain, refusing to come in for five minutes. I didn’t drag him back. I sat down nearby and said, “I can see you’re feeling big and loud inside. It’s okay. When you’re ready, we’re doing the maths game with the dice.” He came back on his own. That moment didn’t feel heroic—it felt normal. But a year ago, the same incident would have ended with him in the principal’s office, his name on the whiteboard, and both of us frustrated.
I’m still not wholly convinced PBS is a silver bullet. There are kids with serious trauma histories who need far more than a check-in board. There are days when I fall back into old habits and raise my voice, and I see the room tense up. There are families who see the approach as soft, and I get it. For a parent, hearing that your son’s teacher “taught him how to listen” can sound like we’re blaming everyone except the child.
But the data is hard to ignore. Our office referrals are down by a third this year. Suspensions have almost disappeared for the low-level stuff that used to get kids sent home. More importantly, I see kids like Calum staying in the classroom instead of missing instruction. He’s still not a perfect student, but he’s learning. That’s what we’re here for.
I don’t know what next year holds. The district keeps talking about scaling up, and we’re supposed to get more training on functional behaviour assessments. I’ll believe it when I see it. For now, I’m holding on to the little victories: a quieter pencil, a child waiting by the door to check in with me before the bell, and a stack of stable writing on my desk at the end of a long afternoon. It’s not everything. But it’s a start.
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