Evaluation of Positive Behavior Support implementation in French-speaking Belgium: a case study

In French-speaking Belgium, many teachers experience difficulties in establishing a serene classroom climate (Quittre et al., 2019). Students' behavioral difficulties can have significant consequences for students (dropping out of school) and for teachers (leaving the profession). It is therefore essential to implement measures that have been shown to be effective, such as Positive Behavior Support (PBS) in schools.
However, research highlighting effective practices such as PBS is little known in French-speaking Belgium. The implementation of PBS in this context remains a challenge because of the great pedagogical freedom written in the Belgian Constitution. This means, among other things, that each school and teacher can choose the practices they want to implement in order to achieve the objectives of the curricula and to manage the behavior of the pupils (de Bouttemont, 2004).
Firstly, this proposal will summarize the work already carried out in French-speaking Belgium on PBS (Author A & Author B, 2022; Deltour, 2021; Deltour et al., 2022). Secondly, it will answer the following research question: with which fidelity do one French-speaking Belgian school implement PBS? This proposal will present the evaluation of the implementation of PBS in the playgrounds and the classrooms of a French-speaking Belgian primary school that called on our team to be trained in this system. To evaluate the implementation of PBS in these schools, the School-Wide Evaluation Tool (Horner et al., 2004) was used.
The results are currently under study and will be presented during the Symposium. The results will be compared with those of a previous study of PBS implementation in another French-speaking Belgian school (Author A and Author B, 2022), as well as with the international literature on the subject.
These results will help improve the training offered for further implementation of PBS in other French-speaking Belgian schools and in other European contexts.