2020 Volume 34 Issue 2 Pages 229-243
Positive behavior support (PBS) is an educational and preventive framework in which individuals are supported to expand their repertoires of appropriate behavior and to increase their quality of life (QOL) in ways that eventually minimize problem behaviors. In school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS), this framework is applied to all the students in a school. More than 25,000 schools have implemented school-wide positive behavior support in the United States, and empirical evidence indicates that school-wide positive behavior support is effective in reducing students’ problem behaviors, increasing academic performance, and improving school climate. Schools with higher implementation fidelity have been shown to have better outcomes and program sustainability. Recently, school-wide positive behavior support has been implemented in several locations in Japan. To encourage broader dissemination in this country, it is important that these initial implementations of school-wide positive behavior support maintain the highest level of fidelity so as to ensure that the framework is effective and sustainable. The present paper describes reasons why adhering to the framework’s guidelines is important, and introduces a Japanese version of the Tiered Fidelity Inventory, a measure of the fidelity of implementation of school-wide positive behavior support. What is needed to improve adherence to the school-wide positive behavior support framework and future research directions are discussed.
