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PBIS and ClassDojo go together like PB and J :)

Lindsey Petlak

2014-11-25

Does your school use PBIS to build positive behavior and school wide community? PBIS has made a meaningful impact on my classroom and school, and ClassDojo has been a major tool to that success! Whether you’re a PBIS newbie or a veteran implementor, integrating ClassDojo into your school-wide PBIS will be a management miracle that will make you smile. Read below and check out the helpdesk for information on best practices for marrying PBIS and ClassDojo in your school.

What are best practices for using ClassDojo as a teacher in a PBIS school?

  • ClassDojo is the perfect tool to supplement implementation of SWPBIS (School Wide PBIS). In most schools, PBIS expectations are boiled down to a small quantity (typically around 3) of foundational expectations and then applied to all areas of school and aspects of students’ daily routines. Since ClassDojo gives teachers the freedom to assign specific titles to both positive and negative behaviors for points given or taken away, you may customize your Dojo points to match the specifics of your school’s PBIS plan.
  • In my opinion, impactful best practices of using ClassDojo and PBIS in general include: explicit expectations, consistency, communication, and praise/reward (even if it’s just through Dojo points) to reinforce positive behavior.
  • Perhaps most importantly, one must monitor, evaluate, and respond to the incredibly useful and automatically generated DATA that Dojo provides for each student. Praise and prevention rewarded with a point system is great, but not truly effective if not student driven. Utilize the data to help you make adjustments to your PBIS plan, implementation strategies, and classroom practices using ClassDojo as a tool.
  • The possibilities are endless! My recommendation is to make it work for you by incorporating your PBIS expectations in a way that meets the needs of you, your students, their parents, and your school-wide plan.
  • A few examples of points/categories/classes information could be:
  • To keep things super simple, you could create only PBIS-specific categories for behavioral points titles. For example, if your school focuses on safety, respect, and responsibility as three primary behavior goals for all aspects of student life, then you could have only those three titles listed for your points. You could leave the points system as simple as that, or if you wanted to, you could add notes to student reports if you feel the need to specify how/when/where they earned a point in that category.
  • Each teacher could create his/her own general behavior titles based loosely on the language and categories of your PBIS plan. For example, one could add be safe, respectful, and responsible to their points menu as three positive behaviors if those were the foundational categories of PBIS for their school. Additionally, the teacher could then add other classroom-specific behavior titles of his/her choice to supplement the core PBIS points categories (i.e.- clean desks, genius thought, creativity, etc.).
  • If you want more expansive and specific data, you could create a “class” for each category of your PBIS plan. For example, you could have one class for each setting (hallway, classroom, assemblies, specials classes, etc.) with specific behaviors mapped out in your PBIS plan listed as behavior titles within each of those settings categories (Hallway: Safe walking feet, quiet mouths, hands to self). Another option is to have “classes” for each major category of behavior (i.e.- be safe, respectful, responsible), with specific behaviors for each setting listed within those categories (safety indicators for hallway, assemblies, classrooms, etc. all listed).

Convinced that ClassDojo will be your PBIS best friend? If so, run on over to the ClassDojo resources page to spread the news to colleagues, print decorations, and download informative handouts, presentations and more. With these resources, kicking off ClassDojo use, sharing this great resource, and connecting with parents will be a snap that will ultimately benefit your PBIS!

See PBIS in action in my classroom! Check out my class website page, Rules of the Road, to learn more about PBIS, see it implemented with my students, and read up on tools I use to achieve PBIS success.

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