Building Supportive Classrooms with CPI and PBIS

Educators face daily challenges with difficult behaviors and potentially dangerous situations. While not every incident can be prevented, the way they respond to aggressive, disruptive, or assaultive behavior—and how they manage their own stress and emotions—profoundly affects the safety of everyone involved and the relationships with those in our care. CPI’s Nonviolent Crisis Intervention^® (NCI) Training emphasizes behaviors and crisis events do not occur in isolation (Rettmann, 2007).

Addressing School Needs with CPI Training

Emilie O'Connor, the director of student success for the Wauwatosa School District in Wisconsin, plays a pivotal role in integrating CPI methodology across 13 schools. Her prior experience as one of the district's social workers has uniquely equipped her to build positive student-teacher relationships, increase academic achievement, and decrease behavioral and disciplinary issues.

To achieve these goals, the district appointed Emilie O'Connor as the CPI Certified Instructor. NCI empowered staff with the skills and knowledge to handle challenging situations effectively.

CPI Training + PBIS Program = Student Success

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) prepares teachers for success, and NCI offers a proactive approach to addressing students' needs in the teaching and learning environment.

"It's crucial that people don't view NCI training as separate from PBIS,” O’Connor shared. “Many NCI techniques align well with PBIS."

Certified Instructors, while primarily tasked with teaching NCI content, find that integrating this training with PBIS strategies significantly increases the likelihood of positive change.

Figure 1 illustrates several PBIS concepts that align with NCI techniques. Recognizing these correlations and maintaining consistency in methods were powerful tools that aided both students and staff, reducing the risk of misunderstandings and confusion.

Figure 1: Excerpted from CPI’s PBIS and NCI alignment

Instilling Verbal Intervention Strategies at Wauwatosa Schools

Teamwork was an integral part of the CPI training. O'Connor ensured crisis response teams at each school collaborated with teams across the district. This approach fostered inclusivity and teamwork, framing training as an ongoing commitment to care rather than a one-time event.

Another key element of CPI training was the focus on creating a common language to talk about strategies and approaches across the district. This helped reduce potential confusion and reinforced the idea that each part of the training was part of an evolving care framework.

O'Connor also recognized that what works at one school might not work at another, especially given the Wauwatosa school district's diversity. This understanding of each school's unique needs made the training more relevant and impactful.

A key method of reaffirming the tenets of PBIS and CPI training across cultures is to state rules in simple, positive terms. This creates a common ground for all students and staff, and the positive rules help guide students without using negative “don’t” phrases. Each of the 13 schools in the district posted their own rules relating to “Be Responsible, Be Respectful, Be Safe.”

Supporting Student and Staff Success

Since integrating CPI training with PBIS, the Wauwatosa School District has seen significant improvements, including:

• Approximately 25% fewer office referrals at one high school
• 2% decrease in students needing higher-level support in secondary school
• 85-90% of students only needed Tier 1 support across all schools

"On average, one office referral takes a minimum of 10 minutes of the teacher's time, in addition to 20 minutes for the student and 20 minutes for the administrator—and that's not even counting the time lost for the rest of the class. CPI training has helped our district regain hundreds of hours to dedicate to our core mission. Teachers can focus on actual teaching again."

The Wisconsin PBIS Network, a collaborative project funded by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, has designated four of the 13 Wauwatosa schools as Schools of Distinction and two as Schools of Merit for co-implementing CPI and PBIS.

These accolades underscore the commitment to implementing PBIS and CPI across the system and position Wauwatosa as a role model for PBIS efforts. At the end of the 2011–2012 school year, all 13 schools had trained their staff in both the NCI and PBIS programs.

Initially published in 2012.