This guide is a set of strategies and key practices with the ultimate goal of supporting students with the most intensive behavioral needs, their families, and educators in their transitions back to school during and following the global pandemic in a manner that prioritizes their health and safety, social and emotional needs, and behavioral and academic growth.

The purpose of this guide is to provide an overview of behavioral progress monitoring and goal setting to inform data-driven decision making within tiered support models and individualized education programs (IEPs).

Teams are a vital part of an effective multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) across both academics and behavior as well as special education. Making connections across the across the various teams used in MTSS and special education can be challenging. This resource from NCII and the PBIS Center, provides information about how DBI can support IEP implementation and provides a table with key considerations for teams working across the MTSS system.

In this video, Dr. Steve Goodman, Director of Michigan's Integrated Behavior and Learning Support Initiative, discusses the benefits of embedding intensive intervention within a multi-tiered system of support.

In this video, Lucille Eber, E.D., Statewide Coordinator of Illinois’ Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities (EBD) Network and an NCII Advisory Committee member, discusses the relationship between Tier II and Tier III behavior interventions and whether all kids need to access Tier II prior to Tier III. 

In this video, Dr. Joe Wehby, Senior Advisor to the National Center for Intensive Intervention and Associate Professor in the Vanderbilt University Department of Special Education, discusses the number of data points needed to make decisions for students with intensive behavior needs. 

In this video, Dr. Catherine Bradshaw, Associate Dean for Research for the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, Deputy Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention of Youth Violence, and Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention and Early Intervention, discusses how PBIS can be combined with other programs, such as social-emotional learning curriculum, to support students.

In this video, Dr. Catherine Bradshaw, Deputy Director of the John Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence and Co-Director of the John Hopkins Center for Prevention and Early Intervention, discusses PBIS, who it works for, and under what conditions it works best. 

An effective and efficient data system is essential for successful implementation of a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS). However, prior to selecting an appropriate system, schools and districts must identify what its staff and community need and what resources the district or school has to support an MTSS data system. This two-step tool can help teams to consider both what their needs are and to evaluate available tools against those needs. Step 1 can help your team systematically identify and document your MTSS data system needs and current context and step 2 focuses on selecting and evaluating a data system for conducting screening and progress monitoring within a tiered system of support based on the identified needs and context from step 1

Norms for oral reading fluency (ORF) can be used to help educators make decisions about which students might need intervention in reading and to help monitor students’ progress once instruction has begun. This paper describes the origins of the widely used curriculum-based measure of ORF and how the creation and use of ORF norms has evolved over time. Using data from three widely-used commercially available ORF assessments (DIBELS, DIBELS Next, and easyCBM), a new set of compiled ORF norms for grade 1-6 are presented here along with an analysis of how they differ from the norms created in 2006.