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setting behavioral norms/standards across school settings and giving educators a clear behavior management

system.

Another finding in this report was that “reading scores are much higher in some standard public schools that

have had some NGO assistance, as long as the NGO assistance goes beyond generic management

improvement and focuses on very specific classroom management and learning issues” (Crouch, 2007). This

is a very important finding relating to what we want to do at Virgen del Carmen and has implications for how

volunteer organizations can have a larger impact on improving Peru’s education system when they take a

more holistic approach to education. While the end goal in education may be to improve student achievement

and success, we know that this will only happen when we focus not just on academics, but also on classroom

behavior management and the whole child. By developing and supporting a behavior management system in

our school, less time will need to be spent on dealing with “bad” behaviors and more time can be spent on

quality academics.

Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS)

What is PBIS? On the broadest level, PBIS is a behavior management system that teaches and enforces

positively stated behaviors both on the school and class wide levels. It is meant to maximize the use of

“evidence-based prevention and intervention practices along a multi-tiered continuum that supports the

academic, social, emotional, and behavioral competence of all students” (OSEP, 2018).

One of the key elements of PBIS is that is evidence based. This means that all of the practices are founded in

solid research. During the implementation process of PBIS it is important to focus on employing the core

elements, all based on research and evidence, along with evidence based strategies that best fit educators’

specific settings and cultural contexts (Putnam, & Knoster, 2016). This gives educators flexibility within PBIS

to use proven methods that really apply to their needs. This explains why it was helpful to sit and discuss what

Virgen del Carmen needed most: what behaviors were most important to focus on teaching, what strategies

would/would not be effective, and how to best explain the system to the teachers. In this project, and with

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