TAUNTON, Mass. — In between a poetry lesson on Paul Revere’s ride in Nora Sweeney’s Grade 5 class, the vocabulary and grammar lessons in Lori Nixon’s Grade 6 class and learning about Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and the Civil Rights movement in Christine Dever’s Grade 7 English Language Arts class, red paper tickets are left on students’ desks in each classroom.

Not just left, but placed, purposefully, as part of a new program at each of the city’s three middle schools.

Parker Middle School teacher Nora Sweeney holds red tickets used in the school’s new Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports program in Taunton, Mass. Photos by Mike Gay/The Daily Gazette

Parker Middle School guidance counselor Meghan O’Brien, left, gives student Joceila Andrade a thumb drive in a store at the school where students “spend” the red tickets that they earn for good classroom behavior.

The Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports is a new initiative this school year at John F. Parker, Benjamin A. Friedman and Joseph H. Martin middle schools. It is used across the country in school districts to promote student achievement by improving the school’s behavioral climate, according to the nonprofit May Institute, an education consulting firm.

“The program is a way to recognize the positive as opposed to the negative,” said Parker Middle School Assistant Principal Jaimie Pereira.

It’s a subtle reinforcement of good behavior that students can model and inculcate.

PEER-TO-PEER COACHING

Grade 7 English teacher Christine Dever’s school is a coach for other Parker teachers in implementing PBIS. As such, it’s a peer-to-peer coaching and not a top-down administrative directive.

Teaching middle school students may be more of a challenge than some teachers choose to bear. For Dever, it remains the right, and best, fit for her. She’s been teaching at Parker for 12 years. For some teachers, middle school students’ can push too many personal or professional buttons and be a greater classroom challenge. Not so for Dever.

She thought she wanted to teach English in high school. Yet when an opportunity opened up teaching older students after she taught middle schoolers, she knew she wanted to stay at Parker.

“I love the transient space the kids are in,” Dever said. “They are very honest creatures and they’re really bad liars.”

In visits to three different classrooms at Parker, students save the red tickets in their book bags, pencil cases or pockets. The tickets are a visible reminder of a behavior or gesture for which they’re being recognized. For coming into class quietly, sitting down, opening up notebooks and being ready to work, a student receives a red ticket. Several other red tickets are handed out to different students across the room, as in Dever’s, Nixon’s and Sweeney’s classroom.

“It says a lot about how the staff has bought in and made it real,” Pereira said of the initiative. “You have to really live it in your building for it to be effective.”

Bolstering the PBIS program at Parker are the expectations set before students, and by extension, staff.

At the entrance to the school where 450 students attend classes, a poster reminds all who enter to be: Safe. Responsible. Respectful.

In every classroom, there’s a copy of this poster.

“Your rewards come from aligning with those expectations,” Dever said.

It’s not a scripted program, as website pbis.org notes. Each community or school district makes the decision to make it their own.

The red tickets look like tickets sold for informal auctions at fundraisers. All the tickets are stamped, identifying the school with its own icon.

FOCUS REMAINS ON INSTRUCTION

Placing the tickets on a student’s desk or handing a ticket to a student being rewarded or recognized does not break the pace of classroom instruction. That’s one visible quality of the program.

A second is that in these three classrooms, no student gloated over another’s reward, nor did the recipient boast as well.

The focus remained on classroom instruction. With a third of the school year completed, students and teachers continue to work their way through the curriculum.

“Kids love to be recognized for the wonderful things that they do, Dever said.

Rewarding positive behavior works better than pinpointing negative actions.

The goal, at Parker, is to create a safe and comfortable place for the students, “where they can take risks and be willing to let their guard down and learn,” Pereira said.

The skills of the teachers, the attentiveness of the students, the red tickets; all combine to demonstrate how PBIS is working at Parker.

For the split second that the red ticket is handed out, students tuck them away. Students can use the tickets at the school store, where a certain number of tickets bring purchasing power.

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