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Fostering a responsive learning environment through Positive Behavior Support (PBSP)

By Evangeline A. Saculo


It is the DepEd’s Mission to ensure that students learn in a child-friendly, gender-sensitive, safe, and motivating environment while inside the school. Realistically, however, there are serious challenges that often deter the school from ensuring a safe, and motivating environment for students. Bullying incidents added to aggressive and delinquent behaviors are reported to escalate in schools. This poses a pressing need for school communities to step up efforts to correct such misbehavior that oftentimes get in the way of the teaching and learning process, without being punitive.


It has to be pointed out that discipline should never be a punishment but rather a corrective action to improve behavior, it should not, in any way interfere with the quality of life that students experience while inside the school. Relevant to this, Positive Behavior Support (PBS) which aims to affect a culture of change within the school community by understanding how to prevent and decrease the prevalence and incidence of problem behavior among students offers a respite from the traditional disciplinary practices. Said advancement focuses on establishing a school management system that can adopt and sustain routines that can effectively and efficiently cover positive practices aimed at teaching and encouraging positive behavior among students. This entails a careful orchestration of the various supports needed by an individual learner to transform problem behavior into positive behavior that can motivate them towards the achievement of their goal while ensuring a safe and child-friendly school environment.


In PBS, support and intervention should take into consideration the fact that a child’s problem behavior does not exist inside the individual student alone. As pointed out, a child’s behavior is an interaction between them and their environment. Even the school climate contributes to the development of problem behaviors in a child, further aggravated by negative constraints that exist in their home and community. This understanding is necessary within the school community to establish a concrete school management policy upon which an effective PBS program can be crafted. After all, the way that the system is gaining popularity among schools worldwide indicates that indeed, there are benefits to its wide use and development. One advantage of PBS is its capacity to bring in a more positive, collaborative, and holistic framework by shifting a situation that may trigger a problem behavior, devising alternative routes to correct it, and supporting academic development.


It is vital then, that the school recognizes its crucial role in the establishment of a management policy that can adopt, effectively implement, and sustain effective and efficient strategies, routines, and practices that will ensure that students will go through positive experiences while studying. If the establishment of positive and effective behavior support targets that goal, it is significant that schools invest in human resource training to understand the system and to ensure that the program will be effectively and efficiently carried out and sustained.

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