How do you help 282 students all follow the "rules"?
Have you ever hosted a big birthday party for your child - one of those parties where you invite many, many friends and they all come to your house for several hours? Many families say to our teachers, "I don't know how you do it." First of all, it takes a lot of training and solid relationship building to establish the wonderful classroom environments that we have at Lakeview. And we use something called "PBIS" - Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports - to create a school-wide environment of high expectations.
This starts with actually teaching our students our way of how to have lunch, how to walk in hallways, come to the health room, enjoy recess safety, and ... yes ... even use the bathrooms correctly. Take lunch for example: Every family has different styles and "rules" for eating at home. Some might eat at a table, some might eat by the TV, some might make everyone clean up their own mess, some not. By teaching every student the "Lakeview way" of eating lunch on the first days of school, it goes smoothly for the rest of the year. And when something goes wrong, it is a teachable moment to reteach and practice the expectation. Last year by doing this, nearly 80% of our students never needed any correction or extra learning about our expectations the ENTIRE YEAR. I can tell you we are off to a great start for this year as well!
Just think of that - 8 out of 10 kids at Lakeview last year did exactly what we needed them to do all year without a teacher ever reminding them. No yelling out in class, no saying mean things to others, etc. All of this allows us to focus more on learning which is the reason we are actually in school together.
Our PBIS chart is below (or click here for a larger version). Every student learns and practices this, and our teachers actually make charts like this with student for their own individual classrooms as well. It isn't magic - it isn't easy - and your children are amazing!
