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the consequence, which can either reinforce or decrease the behavior. PBIS focuses on the causes for bad

behaviors and preventing them before they happen as well as giving consequences that reward positive

behaviors and punish or decrease bad behaviors (Simonsen, 2015).

As we mentioned in the description of the problem, there is a cycle in which PBIS is implemented: establish,

teach, prompt, monitor, reinforce, evaluate (Simonsen, 2015). Establish involves creating a contextually

appropriate evidence based system. Teach, a very important step that is often looked over, involves teaching

and modeling the behavior expectations. We cannot just expect children to meet classroom expectations

without having them first taught, modeled, and practiced systematically (Carter & Pool 2012). This would be

the same as expecting students to just know the academic content without being taught, because of this it is

recommended to teach the behavioral expectations to students the same way that they teach academics

(Bradshaw, Reinke, Brown, Bevans, & Leaf, 2008). It is important for us to teaching explicit lessons to the

children at Virgen del Carmen, and because the behavior system is new behaviors will be new as well so they

will need to be frequently taught. Teaching behaviors does not just take up instructional time; it saves time

later on by avoiding many time consuming and disruptive problem behaviors.

The next steps of the cycle are prompt and monitor where students need to be reminded of appropriate

behaviors in each setting before they act and the teacher needs to actively monitor behaviors during class time

(Simonsen, 2015). After a good behavior occurs it is important to reinforce this behavior, this can be with

verbal affirmation or with other types of rewards systems (Simonsen, 2015). An important thing to note here

related to teaching and reinforcing behaviors is that often schools that lack formal training in PBIS only

implement more traditional elements of the model to discipline students but are not as likely to teach and

reinforce positive behavior expectations (Bradshaw et. al, 2008). Because of this schools that have

implemented PBIS without formal training have been less effective (Bradshaw et. al, 2008). To try to make

our PBIS system as effective as possible we are doing our best to mimic professional training, and cater the

system to the needs of Virgen del Carmen even on the small scale that we are implementing PBIS. We have

noticed—similar to Bradshaw’s findings—that it is difficult for the teachers to focus on and take time to teach

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