PB4L - Rotorua Intermediate

As Team Leader for Rotorua Intermediate’s 3R’s, I was passionate about making sure that this initiative was well set up and that we had a strong team bond that allowed us to act on behalf of our students, staff, whanau, and visitors making sure that best interests were being met. Many changes have occurred but not solely due to the teams decision making. These changes were made based on student needs and voice, teacher needs and voice, and much deliberation within the team to better the current systems.Positive Behaviour 4 Learning (PB4L) was introduced to Rotorua Intermediate in 2012 to help make the school a safer place to be and to improve academic achievement through the use of positive reinforcement. I was lucky to be selected for this team and help put together policy documents, school and team goals, lesson plans, routines, reward systems, and everything else that was required.

In 2013 we kick started the year with PB4L in full force at Rotorua Intermediate under the name 3R’s. During this first year of having 3R’s up and running, the school community noticed a significant change in behaviours around the playground and within classrooms. These changes were for the good with students focussed and acting in a calm manner.

During 2014 a few changes occurred. We started the year by having a Teacher Only Day that was specifically for PB4L to make sure everyone started school on the same page. Throughout the year we also held different professional development sessions with a focus on Classroom Management.

Examples of some of the documents are below:

Reflection:

2014

I have only served this year for half the year due to leave. My biggest challenge as team leader was to make decisions as a leader rather than always bringing decision making to the team table. A reason for this change was due to inconclusive agreeance being reached by the team and me just having to go with common sense and what the students would prefer. Of course safety was always considered for both students and staff. Some team members didn’t like this and I found it hard at first as I have always lead using distributed leadership. My principal said that there are times you just have to make the decision without input from others to get the job done. This advice I took and used where decisions had to be made quickly.

2013

What a fantastic year this year has been. The whole atmosphere around the school feels good. Students are happy and enjoying being at school, staff aren’t concerned about moving around the school grounds, and lots of good comments have come from visitors and relieving staff. The reward system of certificates and bands are working well. Students are happy to receive the reward and wear the bands with pride.

There are a couple of concerns regarding the end of the year, some teachers have become competitive and thought it was more important for their year 8 students to leave the school with a badge and therefore were very generous in handing certificates and bands out. This is something the PB4L team will look at more closely on how to monitor. We also need to relook at the reward system for those student who have received 3 bands and two badges – where to for them next?

2012

It has felt like a completely different language has just been introduced to me this year starting up PB4L at Rotorua Intermediate. I have no background knowledge of PB4L along with the rest of the team. Our team consists of 10 staff members from around the school and we each have particular jobs to do. Because this is the year we work together and put policy documents together which will support the PB4L initiative, it was really important to have a full understanding of the project as full buy in is needed by all team members. If I could change anything, it would be to research PB4L prior to agreeing to become a part of the team. Teaching alone takes up a lot of my time, being part of this team is going to take up any spare time I have.

We are at the end of our first year of organising PB4L. We have reached a point where we have forgotten about following the structured workbooks given to us to support us during the initiative set up. We found that we were being held up by some of the steps and decided to jump ahead to organising the reward systems and routines for the students. Job delegation has been really important during this time, making sure all team members have jobs to do to be able to meet deadlines and roll this initiative out next year.