Unlock Your PBIS Potential With a Continuous Improvement Cycle

This summer, my family and I took a 12-day vacation to visit family in Alaska. We picnicked. We hiked. We ate. We enjoyed every day relaxing, going with the flow, and soaking up all that quality family time. You know what we didn’t do? Schedules. Routines.

The chaos of summer works for summer. It feels right to be untethered from a schedule. Then fall comes and we remember everything that goes along with a return to the school year. For some of us there’s an excitement about it; we welcome the predictability of schoolwide systems and practices. For others, a return to the school year is an anxious time; we see the challenges ahead and feel an immediate tightness in our chest.

You can’t spend your time making plans all year. At some point, you’re gonna have to do something.

Research tells us implementing a PBIS framework contributes to improved student outcomes both academically and behaviorally.¹ We also know to achieve those outcomes requires a sustained level of implementation and “a continuous regeneration of the practice through processes of monitoring, assessment, practice adaptation, and continued improvement.”² In other words, you’re going to have to keep doing it.

The more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to the word “continuous”. What does it mean to engage in a process of continuous improvement?

Continuous Improvement Cycle

Dr. W. Edward Deming was a scholar, a teacher who believed in the transformational power of continuous improvement. He wasn’t the first person to come up with a formal process for this kind of improvement, however, his version is one of the most well-known. Dr. Deming’s process, known as the Deming Wheel or the Deming Cycle, is a problem-solving model designed to improve a system or process over time.  

There are four steps and then the cycle repeats:

1. Plan what’s needed
2. Do it
3. Study what worked
4. Act to improve

We can see other continuous improvement models with very similar steps. For example, the Center on PBIS cites the Deming Cycle in the continuous improvement model they recommend school teams follow.³

1. Define the goals and objectives to be achieved.
2. Analyze and identify possible reasons why the goals are/are not being achieved.
3. Implement a plan using evidence-based practices.
4. Evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention.

Research tells us a key component to sustaining PBIS implementation is your schoolwide team and the way you’re able to improve the systems, practices, and data you already have in place.⁴ Implementing a continuous improvement cycle can help your team kickstart those efforts this school year.

Plan What’s Needed

To achieve a goal, you need a plan. We call that plan an action plan because it’s full of the actionable things you can do to accomplish that goal. Surveys like the Tiered Fidelity Inventory (TFI) and the School Climate Survey (SCS) come with action plan templates based on any survey items marked for improvement. If you’ve taken those surveys, go ahead and make a list of all the items where you know you could improve.

Dear reader: Sometimes that list of items to improve is long! If you’re feeling overwhelmed, this is me releasing you of any obligation to do everything all at once. Make the list and set it aside. We’re going to come back to it.

Next, identify the goal you want to achieve and list out any potential problems standing in your way. Make sure you identify problems with precision and highlight the problems you know your schoolwide community wants to solve, too.

Then, between the list of “Things your schoolwide community wants” and the list of “Items your data identified for improvement,” which actionable items accomplish both? Add those to your action plan and you’re off and running.  

Before moving on to the next step, be sure you know which data you’ll collect along the way to monitor your progress. That way, instead of feeling like things are improving, data will help you know it. Take the time to measure where things are now so you can look back and see the difference later.  

Do It

Yep. That’s it. That’s the step. You can’t spend your time making plans all year. I guess you could, but the name “action plan” implies at some point, you’re gonna have to do something. One place to start is small.

Here’s what I mean.

Every other Thursday, I get together with a group of four PBISApps developers to plan out the next two weeks of work on a new project we can’t wait to share. We break down the larger items on the to-do list into manageable parts. Then, we come up with a plan and design a way to test it out before launching a full-scale implementation — sort of a proof-of-concept. Sometimes the test tells us the plan was flawless; most of the time we learn how to make the plan stronger and more successful moving forward.

Your team can do this too. Check out the action items on your plan.  

• Can you break them down into more manageable tasks?  
• How could you test some tasks with a small group before you launched the effort schoolwide?

Study What Worked

Remember those data you collected as as part of your Plan and Do It steps? It’s time to check in on them and see how successful you were. I want to say that last bit one more time.

“…and see how successful you were.”

So often when we look at data our eyes go immediately to what went wrong and how we can do better. Continuous improvement takes a strengths-based approach by finding what went well. Ok, so maybe there were more referrals this month than last, but did you notice how there were fewer referrals coming from the playground and cafeteria? That’s a win you can look to replicate across other spaces in your school. Look for the things that worked and ask yourself why.

While we’re here looking at data, think about how you can share them with your larger schoolwide community. By sharing these success stories with students, staff, and families you encourage everyone to keep going. The work they’ve done directly affects the goals you achieve together.

Act to Improve

Just because it comes at the end of the cycle, this step is as important as any of the others. It closes the cycle and kicks off the next one. This is where you decide to adopt the change permanently, tweak it in some way, abandon it altogether, or let it ride for a little longer before you decide what to do. Use your data as information to guide your decisions. So, where do you start? We recommend always asking these two questions:

• Are we doing what we said we would do?
• Are we seeing the outcomes we hoped to achieve?

If you answer no to the first question, focus on the fidelity of your implementation. Is there more training needed? Was one part of the plan harder to implement than you thought? What obstacles did we see along the way? How can we remove those obstacles moving forward?

If you answer no to the second question, focus on the outcomes. Was our original goal achievable? Did something happen to make our plan less effective? Knowing what we know now, should we look for other solutions or keep going with this plan a little while longer?

Take advantage of all the skills, experiences, and knowledge on your team as you develop solutions…and get creative! If you get stuck and aren’t sure how to move forward, reach out to students, staff, and families for their input. They’re sure to have some ideas, too.

Sustaining your PBIS implementation requires actively and continuously finding ways to improve what you’re already doing. The work you do as a team to use data, include your schoolwide community’s perspectives, and leverage your experience as educators is critical to create safer, more positive schools. Start by making an action plan based on a goal that resonates with you, your students, and staff. Figure out how you’ll collect data to monitor your progress and then do it. Learn what worked and how you can extend that success to other parts of the plan and act accordingly. Just because you’re doing something the way you’ve always done it doesn’t mean you can’t look for ways to make it better.  

1. Santiago-Rosario, M. R., McIntosh, K., Izzard, S., Cohen-Lissman, D., & Calhoun, T. E. (2023). Is Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) an Evidence-Based Practice? Center on PBIS, University of Oregon. www.pbis.org.

2. McIntosh, K., Filter, K. J., Bennett, J. L., Ryan, C., & Sugai, G. (2010). Principles of sustainable prevention: Designing scale‐up of school‐wide positive behavior support to promote durable systems. Psychology in the Schools, 47(1), 5-21.

3. Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (July 2023). Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) Implementation Blueprint. University of Oregon. www.pbis.org.

4. Fox, R. A., Leif, E. S., Moore, D. W., Furlonger, B., Anderson, A., & Sharma, U. (2022). A systematic review of the facilitators and barriers to the sustained implementation of school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports. Education and Treatment of Children, 45(1), 105-126.