Thursday 6 August 2020

PB4L - reviewing the triangle

I have wanted to do this session with my staff for sooo long, but we never had the time during staff meetings. 

In the holidays we had an hour session (the school also had no wi-fi at the time), which meant we had to do something paper-based. 

Finally my chance! 

Firstly I asked teachers to draw the three-tiered triangle, and write in whatever they knew about PB4L, wherever they thought it went. 
Some new teachers barely knew about the triangle, let alone the information that went in the triangle, but that was okay. 
Teachers who have been working with PB4L for a few years knew a bit more.

After about ten minutes, I shared my giant blank triangle and asked people to share with the group any piece of information they knew about, and where they thought it went. 

Slowly but surely, people started sharing information they knew and I filled in the giant triangle as we went. With each piece of information (E.g. Tier 1 works for 80% of kids), I would add on to the thought and further explain (E.g. yes it does, but also you need 80% buy in from the adults for PB4L to work in your school). 

We continued sharing and discussion, sharing and discussing, until we got to this triangle!
For a non-educator, non-PB4L person this might not mean anything or make sense - but for us as a school, it was a lot! 

Every staff member either learnt lots of new information (mostly the beginning teachers), or were able to make connections with different pieces of information they kinda knew about but hadn't connected together (mostly experienced teachers). 

For a lot of staff, there were things we do in our school they never realised were PB4L. We were able to teach/revise a lot of little things as well (that normally wouldn't get covered in a standard PB4L Meeting), such as WHO is involved with each level, WHO is responsible for supervising/implementing each level. 

We also could review how students shouldn't be labeled as "a Tier 2 student" or "Tier 3 student", but rather they are "showing Tier 2 behaviours in X context".