Another fun and creative example for stating positive behavioral expectations is through the use of a school video. I believe that the best way for students to learn their school’s behavioral expectations is not just by being told what they are, but by modeling it for them. One decision your PBIS team will have to make is whether to have students or teachers (or both) modeling expected behavior for the video. Your PBIS team will also have to pick settings to model expected behavior (i.e. bathrooms, hallways, cafeteria), and I’d recommend choosing a setting where problematic behavior occurs most often. This is why collecting data is so important. Also recommendedis to just pick one area at a time. Each video should be dedicated to one specific area or it may be too much information.

An efficient way to collect the data is by using a website such as surveymonkey.com. At my school, we had every student and teacher in the school answer the survey (not including support staff and admin). We asked these questions in a simple manner: Do you feel respected by other students in the cafeteria: yes/no. Have you been taught the rules and expectations at recess: Yes/No. Do you feel safe in the hallways: Yes/No.   We also gave the option to leave comments. We received a large amount of information about the settings causing the most problems.

Once you have the data, your PBIS team can determine which area to focus on. Let’s say for example that you decide that your target area is going to be the bathrooms. You can set behavioral expectations using an acronym such as FLUSH:

“F- Feet and hands to self

L- Leave it clean

U- Use it quickly

S- Soft voices

H- Hands washed” (Frydman)

You can make posters of these in the bathrooms and have each teacher explain these expectations to their students. Then create a video tutorial specifically modeling these behavioral expectations. You can run through the acronym in the video showing an example what to do and what not to do for each one. If it fits your team’s style, try to add humor into your video tutorials. Having some funny tidbits in the video helps keep students more engaged while watching the video.

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You may be wondering how to edit a video recording. The program I use is Adobe Premiere. This is one of the best video-editing programs on the market and has a lot of flexibility. Plus there are plenty of Youtube tutorials on it if you’re interested in learning. The only downside is that you have to pay for this while MAC and Windows have free, basic movie editing programs. If you’re just looking for a basic video-editing program, then use Windows Movie Maker for Windows or iMovie for Mac. I can say from firsthand experience that all three video-editing programs are user-friendly and easy to figure out.