 I really started to understand behavior more. I started to understand when we were seeing behaviors in the classroom that they were happening for a reason. That was profound for me. Some students, for a variety of reasons, may not understand acceptable social behavior and be unable or unwilling to meet the school's behavioral expectations. Positive behavior supports is a school-wide collaborative effort to design and implement strategies, practices, and interventions for promoting positive social and communication skills. Implementing positive behavior supports in schools reduces challenging behaviors in children and increases social, problem-solving, and self-control skills. Over the last year, the administration, multidisciplinary team members, and school staff at Ann Fitzgerald have worked collaboratively to enhance student education using the Pyramid of Intervention Framework. When I first came to Ann Fitzgerald's school, we did have a lot of children who had severe behavior and we were basically, for lack of a better term, putting a band-aid on the situation and I didn't think that was effective. And it was hard on the teachers. People were burning out and it was hard on the children and the families. So we thought a lot about what we could do in order to build capacity within our teachers, work with the teachers and modeling specific strategies, and then those teachers would learn the strategies and they could deal with the behavior on their own. This framework includes utilizing universal supports, targeted supports, and intensive and individualized supports. Universal supports include interventions that have a school-wide focus and fosters social and academic success for all students. Targeted supports are designed for students who are at risk of social, emotional, or behavioral concerns. Intensive and individualized supports are implemented for students who require a behavioral support plan. The things that we've put into place in order to help with the behavior challenges that we have in our school is that we have an emotional therapist who is their .8. So she's in the building and she works specifically with specific teachers when problems arise. Engaging the support of an emotional behavior specialist has proven to be effective in strengthening teacher and parent management skills, improving children's social competence, emotional regulation, and reducing behavior problems. An emotional behavior specialist is a therapist who works on a multidisciplinary team who works in a school setting to support any child that's identified with any social, emotional, or behavioral concerns. We have training in areas of child development specifically around any developmental disabilities or challenging behavior that a classroom teacher might not come with. Emotional behavior specialists have specific training and are able to support children experiencing social, emotional, or behavioral concerns, children who would benefit from concentrated supports regarding initiating, joining, and negotiating in play with others, children who lack problem-solving skills, children who struggle with expressing their needs in a socially appropriate manner. Students looking for additional behavioral strategies for the home. Teachers looking to see first-hand demonstration of social, emotional, and behavioral recommendations. I always work with multiple people to work on solving the puzzle as to in terms of why a child or children are behaving in a certain way, but it really is just having conversations with teachers and helping them bring it together to be a really holistic view. To be able to look at the behavior in a different way and know that there was a reason why it was happening and to it made me more thoughtful about why it was happening and then it gave me more direction on how I could help to correct it or to modify it. Behavior has decreased in my classroom profoundly. When we can understand why they're doing what they're doing, we can find the right strategies to help them to correct it. I've noticed a huge difference. It substantially decreased the negative behavior, and I think that the teachers are doing an incredible job with these students and our EAs. The kids are happy, they feel supported, the parents feel supported, and it's really made a huge difference.