An Educator’s Guide to Tier 2 and Tier 3 Evidence-based Interventions for Students with Emotional and/or Behavioral Needs

Students with an emotional and behavioral disorder or emotional/behavioral needs can be impacted in many different areas that are critical to school success. These impacts not only affect student success within schools, but also drastically affect post-school success and can result in negative long-term outcomes. Fortunately, many school-based models have been identified to be effective in addressing these impacts for students with and at-risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. A distinctive feature within all these models includes the implementation of tiered evidence-based interventions. However, from personal experience and from literature reviewed, there seems to be a lack of implementation of such interventions – interventions that are clearly needed to improve the current and future success of the students described above. This project entails a review and synthesis of common tiered evidence-based interventions for those with emotional and behavioral disorders, common behaviors addressed by these interventions, and a review of barriers to implementation that may contribute to a lack of implementation of evidence-based behavioral interventions. It also includes the creation of a handbook which details implementation of common evidence-based interventions cited by research and literature and which behaviors these interventions are effective for. It is my hope that the handbook will be helpful in increasing implementation of these practices in schools