PBIS Beyond the Binder: Building a Restorative Behavior System That Works in Real Classrooms
Have you ever watched someone experience such a strong emotional reaction that you began to feel it in your own body?
Have you ever seen someone do something you found appalling and suddenly felt unsure how to respond?
Have you ever absorbed another person’s fear, anger, or anxiety before they explained what had happened or why they felt that way?
Yes, yes, and yes for me.
I have experienced all of those things while being the only adult responsible for a classroom full of students.
That is one of the reasons I believe so strongly that Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS, cannot remain a document describing how a school hopes adults will respond.
It must become a functioning system that helps adults respond well when calm, time, patience, and certainty are in short supply.
A school can have carefully chosen values, attractive posters, detailed behavior charts, tiered interventions, reflection forms, and a polished handbook. But none of those things can regulate a classroom on a difficult Tuesday morning.
The real test comes when a student is overwhelmed, the teacher is depleted, classmates are reacting, and the next decision must be made immediately.
A functioning PBIS system should help adults know what to do next.
It should translate values into language, procedures, tools, training, coaching, supervision, repair, and follow-through.
It should help schools move beyond simply controlling behavior and toward teaching regulation, responsibility, dignity, and participation in a community.
When Behavior Felt Like a Reflection of Me
As a new teacher, I often felt intense anxiety when a student “acted out.”
If a student became disruptive, oppositional, angry, or emotionally overwhelmed, I sometimes interpreted the behavior as evidence that I was failing to manage my classroom.
That created enormous pressure to make the disruption stop quickly.
At the time, “manage” often meant control.
I wanted the room to appear calm again. I wanted to prove that I was capable of maintaining order. I wanted the other students, nearby teachers, administrators, and perhaps even myself to believe that I had the situation under control.
Sometimes, I genuinely did not know what to do.
I had not yet done enough of my own emotional work to separate what the student was doing from what I believed the behavior meant about me.
Years of therapy, parenting, professional learning, and reading about trauma, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and regulation later helped me understand those moments differently.
I can now see that I was not always responding from my training, research, or educational philosophy. Sometimes, I was reacting from an older, less informed, and less skilled version of myself.
Sometimes I found a way to repair the moment.
Sometimes another adult helped us find it.
I was fortunate to have a mentor, Abbie Greer, who was further along in her own professional and emotional development than I was.
She often stepped in during difficult moments. Sometimes she helped the student. Sometimes she helped me. Often she helped both of us.
She showed me what it looked like for one adult to offer another adult regulation, perspective, and relief without humiliation.
I also received wisdom from my mother, who is an educator, and from my aunt and grandparents. They shared ideas about calm, patience, balance, spiritual nourishment, self-care, and mindfulness, even when they used different language for those concepts.
They were helping me begin the long process of becoming the emotional anchor I wanted to be for children.
Experience Does Not Eliminate Blind Spots
Years later, I had considerably more experience as an educator, but I was in my first year teaching high school.
Near the end of an academic term, one of my students became extremely upset with me.
He had expected to complete last-minute extra-credit work and raise his grade by approximately two and a half letter grades.
I could not ethically award a grade that did not reflect demonstrated learning. The academic boundary was appropriate.
Although we had discussed his standing before, I realized afterward that the limits and consequences had not landed as clearly as I believed they had.
When the student understood that the situation would not change, he stood up and yelled at me. He was significantly taller than I was, and he towered over me while speaking.
When I later described the incident to his parent, I said that he had behaved “aggressively.”
At the time, I believed I was simply describing what had occurred.
Looking back, I can see several layers that I did not fully understand in the moment.
The student was a junior in high school. The grade could affect college applications, future opportunities, and the way he imagined his life unfolding.
His anger may have been directed toward me, but it was not only about me.
He was suddenly confronting the consequences of an entire term’s work and realizing that the problem could not be corrected during the final week.
That realization likely held fear, regret, embarrassment, and anxiety.
During intense emotional arousal, our ability to access planning, impulse control, perspective-taking, and flexible problem-solving can become less available.
That happens to teenagers.
It happens to adults too.
In that moment, the student had less access to his most reflective thinking.
So did I.
I did not believe he intended to hurt me, and I was not consciously afraid of him. However, my nervous system still registered his volume, height, proximity, and emotional intensity.
A person can become activated without consciously believing they are in danger.
There was also a racial dimension that I did not recognize clearly enough at the time.
I was a white woman in a position of authority describing a Black young man as “aggressive.”
That word was not neutral.
Descriptions of Black boys and men as aggressive, threatening, dangerous, or intimidating carry a long historical and cultural weight.
I did not choose that word because I wanted to make him appear frightening.
My intention did not erase its impact.
By using a loaded label instead of describing the observable behavior, I created the possibility that others would perceive him as more dangerous than I believed him to be.
I could have said:
He stood up, raised his voice, and continued speaking while standing very close to me.
That description communicates what happened without converting the behavior into a judgment about the student.
Language matters because adult interpretations can shape institutional consequences.
“Aggressive” can produce a different response than “raised his voice.”
“Defiant” can lead to a different result than “continued disagreeing after the direction was given.”
“Threatening” can carry a different consequence than “moved closer while speaking loudly.”
“Disrespectful” often conceals more than it reveals.
What happens in one classroom does not always remain in one classroom.
Adult interpretations become referrals.
Referrals become records.
Records can become exclusions, suspensions, police contact, and lost instructional time.
The lesson from this experience was not that I should have changed the grade.
The academic boundary remained appropriate.
The lesson was that I could have maintained the same boundary while responding differently to the human being standing in front of me.
I could have acknowledged the significance of what he was realizing.
I could have said:
“I can see that you are realizing how much this grade may affect your plans, and I understand why that feels frightening and frustrating. I cannot change the grading requirements, but we do not have to solve your entire future while emotions are this high. Let’s pause and look at the available options when we can both think more clearly.”
The boundary would have remained.
His dignity could have remained too.
Experience gives us more tools, but it does not eliminate our histories, fears, identities, assumptions, or blind spots.
It can help us recognize them sooner.
Becoming the Person Who Steps In
Later, as a curriculum coach and instructional coordinator, my role with students changed.
Much of my work focused on curriculum implementation, teacher development, observation, feedback, fidelity checks, and helping teachers translate training into daily practice.
But I worked in a small school, and in small schools, everyone wears many hats.
I was still frequently called when a student was having a significant emotional reaction, when a teacher needed assistance, or when someone simply needed a moment to step away and reset.
In many of those moments, I had the opportunity to play the role Abbie had once played for me.
I could enter a room and offer another adult emotional relief. I could model a different response, provide language when words were difficult to find, or remind a teacher to slow down and reconnect with tools they already possessed but could not easily access under stress.
Sometimes my arrival made an immediate difference.
I helped lower the emotional temperature, supported the student in regulating, and guided the student back into the group.
Sometimes another calm adult created enough space for everyone to begin again.
And sometimes it did not work.
That taught me something essential.
No intervention depends only on how calm, skilled, or experienced one adult is.
All of those qualities matter, but relationships matter too.
Trust matters.
Timing matters.
The history between the people involved matters.
What happened earlier that morning matters.
Whether the student slept, ate, felt safe, or experienced something painful before arriving may matter.
The adult’s condition matters too.
There were days when I had slept poorly, felt sick, or already responded to one crisis after another. By the time I entered the next room, my patience well was shallow.
There were times when I had the correct tools but could not access them quickly enough.
There were times when an approach that had worked beautifully with a student before simply did not work that day.
Human beings are not predictable machines.
Regulation is not a formula in which the correct words always produce the correct result.
I had become someone who could sometimes step in and help another adult regulate. But I also learned that no person, no matter how skilled, can reliably carry an entire system on the strength of their own nervous system.
That truth makes strong school systems more important, not less.
The Goal Is Not Simply Better Behavior
Too often, school behavior systems begin and end with compliance.
How can we make students follow directions?
How can we stop disruption?
What reward will motivate them?
What consequence will discourage them?
These questions are understandable.
Teachers need classrooms that are physically and emotionally safe. Students have a right to learn without constant disruption. Adults must establish clear limits and intervene when behavior becomes unsafe.
But compliance alone is too small a goal.
The deeper goal is to help students develop the internal capacities they will need throughout their lives:
emotional regulation, problem-solving, perspective-taking, accountability, communication, boundary-setting, repair, and participation in a community.
We do not merely want children to behave because an adult is watching, a prize is available, or a punishment is looming.
We want them to understand how their choices affect themselves, other people, and the larger group.
This is where Alfie Kohn’s work on intrinsic motivation becomes especially relevant.
Kohn has challenged the assumption that rewards are fundamentally different from punishment. Both can function as methods of controlling behavior from the outside.
Rewards may produce temporary compliance without developing a lasting commitment to kindness, learning, responsibility, or ethical decision-making.
This does not mean that every visual tracker, encouragement system, or structured reinforcement is inherently harmful.
Some students benefit from immediate feedback, concrete goals, and temporary external support while developing a skill.
The essential question is whether those supports are scaffolds toward independence or whether they have become the entire structure.
PBIS does not have to mean prize carts, token economies, public point systems, or endless rewards. Those are implementation choices, not the full definition of the framework.
A system cannot claim to build self-regulation if its primary tool is continuous external control.
The destination should be internal motivation.
We want students to become people who can think:
I need a break before I say something hurtful.
I caused harm, and I need to address it.
I disagree, but I can still speak respectfully.
I am allowed to maintain a boundary without humiliating someone else.
I can be angry and still make a safe decision.
I may not be ready to forgive, but I do not need to seek revenge.
I am part of this community, and my choices affect other people.
That is far more demanding than simple obedience.
Behavior Support Is Instruction
Children are not born knowing how to manage disappointment, rejection, embarrassment, anger, jealousy, sensory overload, frustration, or perceived unfairness.
They learn these skills gradually through development, relationships, observation, instruction, repetition, mistakes, and repair.
Yet schools often respond to missing social-emotional skills very differently from missing academic skills.
When a child cannot read, we generally understand that the child needs assessment, explicit teaching, practice, feedback, and perhaps more intensive intervention.
When a child cannot regulate anger, recover from disappointment, resolve a peer conflict, or express frustration safely, adults may treat the missing skill as a moral failure.
The student “knows better.”
The student is “choosing to be difficult.”
Sometimes students do understand an expectation and still violate it.
Accountability matters.
But knowing a rule intellectually is not the same as being able to follow it while frightened, ashamed, overwhelmed, or emotionally flooded.
A restorative PBIS system treats behavior as both a matter of responsibility and an area for instruction.
It asks:
What happened?
Who was affected?
What responsibility must the student take?
What skill was missing?
What conditions contributed?
What needs to be taught, practiced, repaired, or changed?
How will the student return successfully to the group?
This is not excusing harmful behavior.
It is addressing it more completely.
The Adult Must Be the Thermostat, Not the Thermometer
A metaphor often used by educator Todd Whitaker offers a powerful way to understand the adult’s role: the adult should be the thermostat, not the thermometer.
A thermometer reflects the temperature around it.
A thermostat helps regulate it.
When a student becomes louder, the adult may become louder.
When the student becomes rigid, the adult may become rigid.
The interaction becomes a contest, and the emotional temperature rises until the whole room is caught in it.
Being the thermostat means noticing the rising temperature without simply reproducing it.
It may mean lowering one’s voice, slowing one’s speech, reducing the audience, giving physical space, acknowledging emotion without surrendering the boundary, and postponing problem-solving until reflective thinking becomes more available.
The adult’s nervous system is part of the intervention.
However, schools cannot tell teachers to be the thermostat and then abandon them in overheated rooms.
A slogan is not a support system.
Teachers need usable language, clear procedures, opportunities to practice, access to assistance, and confidence that someone will respond when they request help.
They need colleagues who can step in without judgment.
They need supervisors who coach rather than humiliate.
We cannot expect an unsupported, isolated, exhausted adult to generate endless calm from an empty well.
The Adult Must Do Personal Work Too
A restorative system begins with the adults.
Every adult enters a classroom with a personal history.
We carry beliefs about obedience, authority, respect, noise, movement, eye contact, emotional expression, culture, gender, disability, and what a “good student” should look like.
We also carry triggers.
A raised voice may remind an adult of chaos from their own childhood.
A student’s refusal may feel like a personal rejection of authority.
A child who avoids eye contact may be interpreted as disrespectful.
A student who argues may activate an adult’s fear of losing control.
When adults have not examined these reactions, they may mistake their own emotional activation for objective proof that a child deserves punishment.
The adult may then contribute to the dysregulation they are trying to resolve.
Montessori education has long emphasized the preparation of the adult, not only the preparation of materials and lessons.
This adult-first work requires us to ask:
What behaviors activate me most quickly?
What story do I tell myself when a student refuses?
Do I interpret compliance as respect?
Do I interpret disagreement as defiance?
What happened to me when I made mistakes as a child?
Am I trying to teach this student, or am I trying to make the student feel what I once felt?
Can I maintain a boundary without needing to dominate?
Can I recognize when I need help before I escalate the situation?
Adults do not need to become emotionless.
The goal is awareness, responsibility, and practice.
Teachers also deserve the humane framework we expect them to offer students.
When an adult responds poorly, supervisors should help the adult reflect, repair harm where necessary, practice a better response, and return with greater skill.
A school cannot become restorative for children while remaining punitive toward its staff.
Montessori, Peace, and the Prepared Environment
Maria Montessori’s work provides another foundation for restorative PBIS.
In Montessori education, peace is not simply a special lesson delivered after conflict.
Peace grows from the conditions created throughout the environment.
Students need meaningful work, understandable expectations, freedom within limits, opportunities for movement, predictable routines, respectful language, a sense of belonging, and adults who observe before reacting.
Montessori used the term normalization to describe the growth of concentration, independence, self-discipline, and constructive participation that can emerge when children have purposeful work and a carefully prepared environment.
It was not a call to make every child behave identically.
It was a vision of internal organization rather than externally imposed quiet.
A quiet classroom is not necessarily a peaceful classroom.
Children may be silent because they are concentrated and secure.
They may also be silent because they are frightened, ashamed, or afraid of punishment.
Peace is not merely the absence of noise or visible conflict.
Peace is the presence of structures, skills, and relationships that allow people to experience strong emotions, disagreement, mistakes, and harm without destroying one another’s dignity.
The goal is not a perfectly controlled room.
The goal is a community that knows how to return to peace.
Why Punishment and Public Shame Fall Short
Traditional discipline often relies on the belief that discomfort will teach the lesson.
A student is publicly reprimanded.
A name moves down a chart.
A behavior is announced to the class.
A child is removed from the room.
A student is required to apologize before they are emotionally ready.
The adult may intend to communicate that the behavior is unacceptable.
But public shame can communicate something larger:
Everyone can see that there is something wrong with you.
Guilt says, “I did something harmful.”
Shame says, “I am harmful, defective, or unworthy.”
Healthy accountability can help students understand impact and take steps toward repair.
Shame can make honesty and reconnection more difficult because the student’s attention shifts from the harm caused to the threat against their own identity and belonging.
A child who feels exposed may deny, blame, flee, fight, shut down, or seek revenge.
Those reactions may look like further defiance when they are also attempts to defend against humiliation.
Punishment may stop a behavior in the moment.
That is not the same as teaching the student what to do next time.
It may teach the student to avoid getting caught.
It may teach that powerful people are permitted to cause pain when someone displeases them.
It may teach that belonging can be withdrawn after a mistake.
This does not mean schools should eliminate boundaries or consequences.
A consequence is what follows an action.
Accountability requires understanding impact, accepting responsibility, and taking meaningful steps forward.
Punishment is the deliberate imposition of suffering or deprivation in response to wrongdoing.
These concepts may overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
A student who throws a classroom material may temporarily lose access to it while learning to use it safely.
A student who causes harm may need to repair what was damaged.
A child who is physically unsafe may need to leave the immediate environment until safety is restored.
The central question is purpose.
Is the response designed primarily to make the child suffer?
Or is it designed to protect safety, establish accountability, teach a skill, repair harm, and make successful participation possible?
Discipline, Disproportionality, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
The effects of punitive discipline extend beyond one child’s embarrassment during one difficult moment.
When schools repeatedly respond through removal, suspension, expulsion, police involvement, and exclusion, students lose instructional time, relationships, belonging, and opportunities to practice more constructive behavior within their community.
These patterns can feed what is commonly called the school-to-prison pipeline.
The term describes policies and practices that push students out of educational environments and into greater contact with juvenile or criminal justice systems.
These systems do not affect all students equally.
Research has repeatedly documented discipline disparities affecting Black students, students with disabilities, boys, and other historically marginalized groups. Black girls also experience disproportionate punishment for subjective behaviors such as disrespect, disruption, or defiance.
This is why adult interpretation and documentation matter so much.
A student is not disciplined only for what occurred.
The student may also be disciplined according to how an adult understood, labeled, and communicated what occurred.
The presence of police in schools adds another layer of concern. When law enforcement becomes involved in routine student discipline, behavior that might otherwise have been addressed educationally can become criminalized.
This does not mean schools should ignore dangerous conduct or avoid emergency services when they are genuinely needed.
Serious threats, weapons, severe violence, abuse, or immediate danger require appropriate safety procedures.
But not every act of defiance is a threat.
Not every emotional outburst is a crime.
Not every dysregulated student needs to be removed from the community.
A functioning PBIS system gives adults meaningful options between ignoring behavior and excluding the child.
It creates a continuum of support.
Adults build relationships and explicitly teach expectations.
They respond to ordinary developmental mistakes with redirection, regulation support, and skill instruction.
They provide targeted interventions when patterns emerge.
They involve specialists and families when needs intensify.
They use clear crisis procedures when safety is at risk.
They create processes for accountability, repair, and reintegration after harm.
Without this continuum, exclusion can become the default simply because adults have no other practiced response available.
Restorative Practice Is Not the Absence of Accountability
Restorative practice is sometimes misrepresented as a gentle conversation in which no one experiences meaningful consequences.
That is not restoration.
A restorative approach does not require adults to overlook harm, pressure injured people to forgive, or immediately return everyone to the same environment without boundaries.
Instead of asking only, “What rule was broken, and what punishment does the student deserve?” restorative practice asks:
What happened?
Who was affected?
What harm occurred?
What does each person need?
What responsibility must be taken?
What repair is possible?
What boundaries are necessary?
What support or skill is missing?
How can safety and dignity be restored?
How can the student return successfully to the community?
Restorative accountability can be more demanding than receiving a conventional punishment.
A student may need to tell the truth about what happened, listen to the impact, repair damaged property, replace lost time, practice a different response, accept a boundary, participate in a support plan, and rebuild trust gradually.
Restoration also cannot be forced.
The person who was harmed should not be required to forgive, accept an apology, participate in a face-to-face conference, or resume a close relationship before they feel safe.
Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same.
A person can maintain a firm boundary while the community supports accountability and prevents further harm.
The purpose is not to recreate the relationship exactly as it existed before.
The purpose is to address harm honestly and determine what safe, dignified participation looks like moving forward.
Research on restorative practices in schools is promising, but it should not be oversimplified.
Restorative approaches have been associated with reductions in suspensions, stronger relationships, and improvements in school climate. Results vary, however, according to leadership, trust, training, resources, student group, grade level, and implementation quality.
A circle added to an otherwise punitive school does not transform the culture.
An apology form does not repair harm by itself.
A restorative conference led by an untrained adult can become another place where a student is exposed, pressured, or shamed.
Restorative practice must be embedded in the life of the school.
Relationships must be built before conflict.
Students and adults need shared language.
Staff need training and practice.
Administrators must model the approach.
Supervisors must support implementation.
Schools must examine their discipline data and disparities.
Restorative values must shape what happens before, during, and after harm.
Teachers Cannot Pour From a Structurally Empty Well
It is easy to tell teachers to remain calm, build relationships, practice self-care, and become the emotional thermostat of the classroom.
It is much harder to create working conditions that make those expectations possible.
In many schools, staffing is leaner than would be ideal.
Teachers may not receive enough breaks to attend to their physical, emotional, and mental needs.
Planning, preparation, documentation, grading, and communication frequently extend beyond the school day.
Even basic physical regulation can be difficult.
Teachers cannot always use the restroom when they need to. They may postpone eating, forget to drink water, or move through the entire day without a genuine moment of quiet.
These conditions matter.
Emotional regulation does not exist separately from sleep, illness, pain, hydration, workload, safety, planning time, and access to support.
A depleted adult may still care deeply and possess excellent training.
But sustained stress makes it harder to access patience, flexibility, perspective-taking, and deliberate decision-making.
Then we place that adult in charge of children who are even more dependent on co-regulation.
Children need adults to model regulation, teach it directly, and help them practice.
They need physical and emotional safety.
They need belonging.
They need an adult presence that communicates:
You are not alone.
This feeling is large, but it is survivable.
We can move through it without destroying your dignity or anyone else’s.
That is an extraordinary responsibility.
It cannot rest entirely on the individual teacher’s personality, stamina, or private self-care routine.
From Philosophy to an Operating System
All of these ideas sound beautiful in theory.
Maintain dignity.
Build internal motivation.
Co-regulate.
Repair harm.
Prepare the environment.
Be the thermostat.
But PBIS must answer the harder question:
What does this look like when the classroom is not calm, the adult is tired, the behavior is intense, and several things are happening at once?
A functioning PBIS framework needs five connected parts.
1. Shared Definitions
Staff need common definitions for different levels and types of behavior.
What can usually be handled within the classroom?
What requires additional support?
What constitutes an immediate safety concern?
What is the difference between conflict, harm, dysregulation, defiance, and crisis?
What does repair mean?
What does successful reentry mean?
Without shared definitions, one teacher may treat a behavior as ordinary classroom disruption while another treats the same behavior as an emergency.
Subjective labels can also increase bias and inconsistency.
Clear definitions should emphasize observable actions rather than judgments about a student’s character or motivation.
2. Response Pathways
Adults need to know what happens first, second, and third.
What does the classroom teacher try before requesting assistance?
When should another adult be contacted immediately?
Who responds?
What does that person do?
How is the rest of the class supported?
Who communicates with the family?
Who documents the incident?
Who follows up the next day?
A response pathway should distinguish among ordinary classroom behavior, recurring patterns, targeted interventions, and genuine crises.
The goal is not to force identical responses in every situation.
The goal is to create enough consistency that support does not depend entirely on which adult happens to be present.
3. Practical Tools
Teachers need more than principles.
They need scripts, decision trees, checklists, documentation forms, family communication templates, debriefing questions, intervention plans, and reintegration protocols.
A checklist can hold the thinking when the human brain is under stress.
A language bank can provide respectful words when an adult cannot easily find them.
An SOP can ensure that a request for help does not disappear into uncertainty.
These tools should support professional judgment rather than replace it.
Their purpose is to reduce cognitive overload, not turn educators into robots.
4. Practice and Coaching
A school does not implement PBIS by distributing a handbook or delivering one presentation in August.
Adults need to see responses modeled.
They need examples and non-examples.
They need to rehearse realistic situations while the stakes are low.
They need coaching when they begin applying the practices in actual classrooms.
They need opportunities to debrief difficult incidents without being shamed.
Supervisors and instructional coaches also need training.
They must know how to observe implementation, provide specific feedback, model alternatives, and support teachers whose own regulation is slipping.
5. Fidelity and Continuous Improvement
Fidelity does not mean enforcing robotic sameness.
It means determining whether the school is genuinely implementing the system it claims to have.
Are expectations being taught explicitly?
Are adults using private redirection before public correction?
Are staff following crisis procedures?
Are administrators responding consistently?
Are certain students being referred or removed disproportionately?
Are restorative conversations actually occurring, or are students completing worksheets labeled “restorative”?
Are families included?
Do teachers feel supported?
Are the same students repeatedly cycling through consequences without receiving a different intervention?
Fidelity checks should not become another punitive tool.
Supervisors should not shame teachers for imperfect implementation while telling teachers not to shame children.
The purpose is to identify strengths, coaching needs, resource gaps, disparities, and places where the written plan does not match classroom reality.
Reintegration Is Part of the Intervention
Many school systems explain how to remove a student but provide little guidance for bringing the student back.
A student returns after a suspension, crisis, office referral, or serious conflict.
The teacher may still feel angry or unsafe.
Classmates may have questions.
The person harmed may not feel protected.
The returning student may feel embarrassed, defensive, resentful, or socially exposed.
Everyone is expected to resume learning as though the incident disappeared during the student’s absence.
But removal is not resolution.
Reintegration must be planned.
Before a student returns, the school may need to ask:
Has immediate safety been restored?
Has the student received support in understanding what happened?
Has the person who was harmed been heard and supported?
What accountability or repair is appropriate?
What boundaries will be in place?
Does the teacher need assistance?
What will be communicated to classmates while protecting privacy?
Who will greet the student?
What words will be used?
What follow-up will occur?
What intervention might reduce the likelihood of recurrence?
A successful return does not require pretending nothing happened.
It communicates that harm is taken seriously and that human beings are not disposable.
The student remains responsible for their choices.
The community remains responsible for creating the conditions in which learning, repair, and change are possible.
The Real Measure of a PBIS System
The true measure of a behavior system is not how attractive the handbook looks.
It is not the number of posters in the hallway.
It is not whether every child can recite the school values.
It is not how many reward tickets teachers distribute.
The measure appears during the imperfect moments.
When a student becomes dysregulated, do the adults know what to do?
Can they protect safety without unnecessary humiliation?
Can they maintain a boundary without turning the interaction into a contest of power?
Can they support the rest of the class?
Can they distinguish among an ordinary developmental mistake, a recurring skill deficit, an unmet need, and a genuine emergency?
Can they help the student accept responsibility?
Can they support the person harmed without forcing forgiveness?
Can they repair what can be repaired?
Can they reintegrate the student intentionally?
Can adults examine their own role honestly?
Can supervisors provide meaningful coaching?
Can the school learn from the incident instead of merely recording it?
The goal is not a school without conflict.
That would require a school without human beings.
The goal is a community that knows what to do when conflict arrives:
protect safety, preserve dignity, regulate before reasoning, repair what can be repaired, and help people return.
A PBIS plan becomes meaningful only when adults can use it on the hardest Tuesday of the year.
That is how values become practice.
And practice becomes culture.
References and Professional Influences
Augustine, Catherine H., John Engberg, Geoffrey E. Grimm, Emma Lee, Elaine Lin Wang, Karen Christianson, and Andrea A. Joseph. Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018.
Brackett, Marc. Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive. New York: Celadon Books, 2019.
Center for Responsive Schools. “Professional Development Overview.” Responsive Classroom. Accessed July 27, 2026.
Darling-Hammond, Sean. Fostering Belonging, Transforming Schools: The Impact of Restorative Practices. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute, 2023.
Faber, Adele, and Elaine Mazlish. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. Updated ed. New York: Scribner, 2012.
Kohn, Alfie. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. 25th anniversary ed. New York: HarperOne, 2018.
Levine, Peter A., and Ann Frederick. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997.
Montessori, Maria. Education and Peace. Translated by Helen R. Lane. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clio Press, 1992.
Nelsen, Jane. Positive Discipline: The Classic Guide to Helping Children Develop Self-Discipline, Responsibility, Cooperation, and Problem-Solving Skills. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.
Nhat Hanh, Thich. No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2014.
Siegel, Daniel J., and Mary Hartzell. Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. 10th anniversary ed. New York: TarcherPerigee, 2013.
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