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DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM

Our overall goal for our project of PBIS implementation is to tangibly improve behavior in

classrooms by decreasing occurrences of students’ problem behavior, specifically disruptive, aggressive, and

disengaged behavior. We want to do this in a way that proves sustainable in the future, so our focus will be

less on implementing the system ourselves and more on allowing teachers to access and learn the system so

that they can use it. Since the system is multifaceted and typically requires a fairly large, trained, and

compensated committee, we are realistically treating our portion of this project as the inception and “pilot” of

PBIS in Virgen del Carmen. We will start the system, observe and take data, and, at the end of our time in

Peru, provide the next cohort guidance on how to continue the system’s growth (in the form of this report).

We will also be leaving a manual for the teachers that explains the main components of the program so they

can reference it once they leave.

It is important to give some background information on the services, a.k.a. PBIS, that we will be

providing to Virgen del Carmen. PBIS is a research-based system developed by a team of educators in the

United States. Since it has been made available to the public, it has been implemented in thousands of schools

across the country and purchasing the official program and associated supports costs thousands of dollars. It

was originally intended to be used in special education classrooms for children with behavioral

disabilities/struggles; however, it quickly took hold as an immensely useful tool in mainstream classrooms

and schools. Overall, research studies done on PBIS have shown that the system decreases problem behaviors,

increases teachers’ abilities to work as a team, and is correlated to increased academic achievement in schools.

PBIS, when put into practice in the classroom, is comprised of a cycle with six different parts:

establish, teach, prompt, monitor, reinforce, evaluate. After evaluate, the cycle restarts again at establish. This

is the most concrete way that PBIS is demonstrably implemented in schools - by following the cycle in the

classroom each day. Therefore, since us four are implementing the program in pilot mode, we will be focusing

most of our energies on jump starting this cycle in each classroom. The other parts of the system (parent

involvement, behavior in shared school areas, school-wide recognition of positive behaviors), although of

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