Outstanding Educators of the Year 2008 Share Best Lessons & Techniques
Ellie Greenberg
Principal, P4K, Brooklyn, NY
School Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SW-PBIS) has given us a way to organize the school environment and create a positive school climate by providing proactive supports and interventions along a three-tiered continuum of strategies. By conducting a needs assessment, our team established a simple way for students, parents and staff to understand and remember what the school-wide expectations for behavior are for P4K. We call it “Be a SPORT”. “SPORT” represents Self-control, Prepared, Organized, Respectful and Try hard. We believe that all students, regardless of disability can achieve success in meeting the behavioral expectations in each of the SPORT areas given opportunities for practice and positive recognition of progress. P4K is a District 75 cluster school located throughout Brooklyn and consists of one main site and five (5) off-sites. Our students are pre-k through sixth grade with a variety of special needs including but not limited to: autism, severe emotional and behavior disorders, hearing impairments and deafness and varying degrees of cognitive and developmental delays. Most of our students have communication and social skills deficits and ALL of our students present challenging behaviors. We use puppets to teach the behavioral expectations in a fun, creative and memorable way. The SPORT KIDS puppets have helped to create a positive school climate and have served to unify our five sites into one school with common behavioral expectations; common language to discuss them and a way of teaching those skills and expectations to our very special students.
