Counteracting School Violence Through Positive Behavior Supports
From a cluttered corner office in Eugene, Oregon, Jeff Sprague observes the landscape of school safety and youth violence in the United States. As co-director (with Hill Walker) of the University of Oregon Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior, Sprague has seen an ominous progression in the incidence of school shootings and a shift in the public response to them.
Even as the unthinkable happened, preventing school shootings didn’t show up on the public’s radar during the early 1990s. In the years that followed, student profiling came on the scene, along with stepped up school security measures like metal detectors, ID badges, and increased police presence. The “third wave,” says Sprague, was marked by people asking what they could do on a daily basis to decrease the likelihood of school violence. While the focus on improving school climate and addressing children’s mental health issues is still ongoing, a post-9/11 perspective is redefining incidents of school violence as acts of urban terrorism.
Sprague has been a national player throughout all of these phases. In 1998, President Clinton tapped him to contribute to a safety handbook distributed to every school in the nation. Sprague, whose background is primarily in special education, continues to draw recognition as a researcher, author, trainer, evaluator, teacher, and one of the developers of the positive behavior supports (PBS) model. He recently spoke with Northwest Education about PBS, the growth in cyber-bullying, and the lessons gleaned from tragedies like Columbine and Thurston.
Q: In the wake of all these high-profile violent incidents, how safe do students and school personnel feel today?
I think it’s in how you frame the question. Principals will vary based on where they work; obviously urban high school principals have a larger concern, because it’s in their face on a day-to-day basis. Actually, there aren’t a lot of surveys where we ask kids: Are you worried about school shootings? We tend to focus on bullying and harassment as really equivalent constructs or on attachment to schooling, so it’s a way of walking around the issue of do you feel safe in school.
I think harassment is a huge issue and the new wave is what’s been termed cyber-bullying. I spend a lot of time in the field, and I’m hearing a lot about this issue. For example, I was in Northeast Nebraska this week—the middle of nowhere, two and half hours from an airport if I break the speed limit—and there were two suicides in a small high school of 140 kids. Harassment over a mobile phone was the precipitating event.
How do administrators deal with a challenge like cyber-bullying?
There are a couple of things you might see in schools now, such as differently enforced policies about technology use in the classroom. Certainly, in many schools you can’t have your mobile phone in the locker room so you can’t take pictures of people in compromising positions and post them on the Internet. We’re also seeing some careful policy development and legislation.
The issue right now is defining the roles and responsibilities of schools. It’s going to be clear that you can’t cyber-bully from school computers, but the question is what if there’s cyber-bullying among peers from their home computers. My understanding is the legislation is going to put a circle around the school: The school isn’t going to take responsibility if it originates from outside the school but I think that’s going to get challenged and shaped a bit.
It seems that middle school is an especially vulnerable time when kids either start down the path toward developing violent behaviors or can be redirected. What does your research tell you?
We term it the last best chance. You’ve got kids who are called “early starters”: They have an emerging pattern of anti-social behavior before they even get to kindergarten, but it really gets picked up by about middle school. Then you have another group of kids who start to not do so well academically around grade 4 or 5. Right about grade 6, when the academic press really starts, you see a coming together of these early starter kids with the late starter kids who are beginning to disengage from the schooling process because it’s now pretty darn hard—especially in a No Child Left Behind environment. We see these kids getting in trouble in their classrooms because one of the ways to avoid the sort of reality of academic failure is to disrupt the educational process and get kicked out of class.
You also see a powerful social process in middle school, which we call teacher and peer rejection. The middle school teacher starts to frame the successful kids as those who really want to be there. At that point, too, the most important socializing influence for middle school kids is each other. The adult’s influence goes down. You see the formation of the deviant peer group
The third leg is the family. The parents, especially of these kids, also start to disengage. So we look for parental monitoring, encouragement of school success, and encouragement to engage in conventional pursuits that don’t involve sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and badmouthing the teacher.
Schools buy into the theory that hormones are driving bad behavior, yet it’s really a powerful process of socialization that’s at play. We see the period from grades 6 to 9 as probably the hottest, most challenging point behaviorally for kids and teachers. The challenge for kids is to avoid stepping into that water. The challenge for educators is to interpret their own perceptions of self-efficacy and job control in a period where even if you’re going to do state-of-the-art work, it’s a messy period.
Positive behavior supports (see sidebar) has gained wide recognition as one strategy for improving school climate and counteracting anti-social behavior. What role did the Institute play in developing the model?
My colleagues and I would say, if you steal from one person it’s plagiarism. If you steal from a lot of people, it’s research. We’ve been behavior analysts for more than 40 years, and what we basically did was synthesize many years of research from a few key people like Ray Mayer, melding it with our work with individual students with anti-social behavior and with the knowledge of universal or schoolwide interventions. We basically put it all together in a way that was exactly what people were looking for at that point. People were asking: What can I do every day with every kid to prevent them from not only acting out but from harassing each other?
In some ways [PBS] is old wine in new bottles, but I also think there are some very specific contributions. One is we, unlike other researchers, have placed a heavy emphasis on helping the school use data about patterns of problem behavior in their own school to make decisions about interventions, selection, and design.
A traditional approach might say, “I’ve got a package, let me come and install it in your school”—what we call the drive-by workshop or episodic training event. They leave behind some materials, and there’s very little feedback to the implementers about the quality of what they do or assessing the extent of implementation of the intervention. In my view, the true contribution of PBS comes at the level of heavy emphasis on giving data-based feedback on the outcome of the intervention, and also regular feedback and assessment about the fidelity and quality of the intervention.
There’s absolutely nothing in PBS interventions that are applied to kids that hasn’t been researched by us or someone else many times over: teaching school rules, communicating expectations. What I say is set the rules; teach the rules; recognize and reward kids for following the rules; actively supervise kids in all settings of the school including classrooms; and when they do misbehave, correct it in a way that reteaches the behavior and prevents behavioral escalation. Then, use the data to give feedback to schools. As we get deeper, we also focus on classroom management, which is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Ultimately PBS is about integrating all that stuff using what we call the concept of goodness of fit, which is to say, if I’m in Woodburn, Oregon, the PBS program is going to have features based on the needs of local kids; the skills and values of the educators in that building; the data patterns that emerge from the work; and where we see holes in terms of fidelity of intervention.
What lessons have we learned from tragedies like Columbine—or closer to home, here in Oregon—Thurston?
The tragedies have taught us it can happen anywhere and it’s going to happen. Like cancer or heart disease, we’d like them to go away forever, but they’re going to happen. Statistically the rates [of school shootings] have changed very little since 1972 when these things started getting tracked.
I think the other lesson from the analyses is that police presence doesn’t prevent these incidents. I’m a real fan of school resource officers and police in schools—I think they provide an important function—but only one of the famous school shootings was actually prevented from getting worse by police presence. In the Santee incident in San Diego, the school resource officer happened to be in a meeting in a room in the hall where the shooting was occurring and he stepped out and subdued the guy who was aiming the gun and shot him. He didn’t kill him, but it stopped the shooting. So, the basic message from that is that the high-security approaches will not prevent the shooting; they may displace it, but security by itself is not the answer. You need to focus on what you can do every day. 
Positive Behavior Supports in Schools
Research has shown that schools that implement positive behavior supports reduce disruption and delinquency. The elements of PBS include:
- Shared values regarding school mission and purpose
- Clear expectations for learning and behavior
- Multiple activities designed to promote prosocial behavior and connection to school traditions
- A caring social climate involving collegial relationships among adults and students
- Valued roles and responsibilities for students in the school
To successfully implement PBS, the school needs an actively engaged principal, a trained team to guide the work, and a commitment to using data on student and staff behavior to make decisions and provide feedback. There must be schoolwide expectations for appropriate behavior, a plan to teach expected behavior, a way to recognize expected behavior and actively supervise students, and firm but fair corrections for misbehavior.