Description:
Targeted supports within the general education environment provide students with additional instruction, practice, feedback, prompts, structure, and assistance while they participate in typical classroom routines and activities.
Rather than automatically removing students from instruction when they experience difficulty, educators can intensify supports within the setting where the skill or behavior is expected to occur. Examples include pre-correction before challenging activities, increased opportunities to respond, additional feedback and reinforcement, visual or environmental supports, structured choices, brief targeted instruction, additional practice opportunities, embedded self-regulation supports, and adult or peer support.
These practices can be particularly useful for students who demonstrate emerging needs but can be successful when provided with additional support, practice, or scaffolding. The Center on PBIS specifically identifies increased instruction and practice, increased prompts, adult support, and positive reinforcement as characteristics of effective Tier 2 support.
Importance:
Students do not always need a separate intervention setting to benefit from additional support. Often, a relatively small increase in instructional intensity, feedback, structure, or practice can help a student experience success in the environment where learning naturally occurs. Embedding support within general education can:
- Increase access to grade-level instruction and classroom activities.
- Preserve connections with peers and trusted adults.
- Provide opportunities to practice skills in authentic contexts.
- Reduce unnecessary removal from instruction.
- Increase opportunities for feedback and reinforcement.
- Promote independence and generalization of skills.
- Help students experience themselves as successful and contributing members of the classroom community.
- Make supports easier to connect with existing Tier 1 practices.
Inclusive classroom supports are consistent with MTSS guidance emphasizing that educators can differentiate, target, and intensify evidence-based practices within classroom instruction based on student need and response to intervention
Critical Features:
Effective targeted supports within the general education environment:
- Build on Tier 1: Additional supports supplement—not replace—universal classroom practices.
- Are matched to student need: The support addresses a clearly identified academic, social, emotional, behavioral, engagement, or regulation need.
- Occur in natural contexts: Whenever appropriate, students practice skills where they are actually expected to use them.
- Increase intensity strategically: More frequent practice, feedback, prompting, reinforcement, or structure is provided based on need.
- Maintain high expectations: Support is provided to increase access and success, not to lower expectations unnecessarily.
- Promote independence: Supports are gradually faded as students develop competence.
- Include student voice: Students have opportunities to identify preferences, strengths, helpful strategies, and goals.
- Coordinate with individualized supports: Classroom Tier 2 practices are aligned with accommodations, modifications, IEP services, and other plans when applicable.
- Monitor response: Teams use data to determine whether supports should be maintained, adjusted, intensified, or faded.
The Center on PBIS emphasizes that Tier 2 interventions should be aligned with schoolwide expectations, flexible and assessment-based, continuously monitored, and designed to increase instruction, practice, supervision, and positive reinforcement.
Implementation Tips:
Schools can begin by asking: "What could we change within the student's existing environment that would increase the likelihood of success?" Consider the following:
- Identify the specific need.
- Determine whether the student needs more practice, clearer directions, additional feedback, increased opportunities to respond, help with regulation, environmental structure, or another specific support.
- Start with the classroom routine.
- Identify when the student is most likely to experience difficulty and determine whether the support can be embedded directly into that routine.
- Increase—not simply repeat—support. Examples include:
- Pre-correcting before transitions or challenging activities.
- Providing additional opportunities to respond.
- Increasing behavior-specific feedback.
- Using visual schedules, checklists, timers, or task cues.
- Providing structured choices.
- Giving a brief additional practice opportunity.
- Embedding a self-regulation strategy.
- Providing a brief adult or peer prompt.
- Keep supports discreet and age appropriate.
- Whenever possible, avoid practices that unnecessarily single out or stigmatize students.
- Teach the support.
- Don't assume that students automatically know how to use a checklist, regulation strategy, visual cue, choice system, or self-monitoring tool.
- Practice in authentic settings.
- A skill taught in a separate setting should eventually be practiced where students will need to use it.
- Monitor response.
- Ask whether the support is actually improving access, participation, and outcomes.
- Fade strategically.
- As students become more successful, gradually reduce adult prompts, scaffolds, or other supports while maintaining the student's access to instruction.
Websites for Additional Information:
Description:
Inclusive Tier 2 Decision-Making is the process teams use to determine who needs additional support, what support is needed, where and how it should be provided, and whether the support is working.
Decision-making begins with an understanding of the student's strengths, needs, context, and response to Tier 1. Teams consider multiple sources of information—including academic, behavioral, attendance, engagement, classroom, screening, student, and family data—to avoid making decisions based on a single incident or referral.
An inclusive decision-making process also examines whether the environment, instruction, routines, or adult practices may be contributing to the student's difficulty. Teams should ask not only, "What does the student need to change?" but also, "What can we change about the environment or support to increase the student's likelihood of success?" Tier 2 teams are responsible for matching students to appropriate interventions, monitoring implementation and response, and coordinating with Tier 1 and Tier 3 systems.
Importance:
Inclusive decision-making helps prevent Tier 2 from becoming a pathway to exclusion. Without a systematic process, schools may unintentionally:
- Refer students based on subjective perceptions.
- Remove students from general education unnecessarily.
- Assume the student is the sole source of the problem.
- Provide the same intervention to students with very different needs.
- Overlook environmental or instructional factors.
- Miss students whose needs are less visible.
- Create inequitable access to interventions.
Critical Features:
Inclusive Tier 2 decision-making includes:
- Multiple data sources: Academic, behavior, attendance, engagement, screening, classroom, student, and family information.
- Strengths and needs: Decisions consider what the student can do and what is already working.
- Response to Tier 1: Teams verify that the student has had meaningful access to appropriate Tier 1 supports.
- Contextual analysis: Consider instruction, classroom environment, routines, relationships, task demands, and other environmental variables.
- Student voice: Students contribute information about their experiences, preferences, strengths, and helpful supports.
- Family partnership: Families contribute important information about the student's strengths, needs, experiences, and priorities.
- Matched intervention: The support is connected to the identified need rather than simply being the intervention that happens to be available.
- Inclusive placement: Teams consider whether the support can be delivered within the general education environment.
- Equity analysis: Teams monitor who is referred, who receives support, who is excluded, and who experiences success.
- Clear decision rules: Teams establish criteria for continuing, intensifying, adapting, fading, or changing supports.
- Coordination across tiers: Tier 2 remains connected to Tier 1 and provides a pathway to more intensive support when necessary.
Implementation Tips:
A useful Tier 2 decision-making conversation can follow this sequence:
1. What are we seeing?
Define the concern using observable, measurable information.
2. What are the student's strengths?
Identify settings, activities, relationships, subjects, and routines in which the student is successful.
3. What does the student need?
Identify the specific skill, access, engagement, regulation, academic, or behavioral need.
4. What have we already provided?
Determine whether the student has had meaningful access to Tier 1 supports and whether those supports were implemented as intended.
5. What might be happening in the environment?
Consider task difficulty, pacing, transitions, sensory demands, communication, peer interactions, adult responses, instructional design, and other contextual factors.
6. What does the student and family say?
Build their perspectives into the decision rather than treating them as an afterthought.
7. What is the least intrusive effective support?
Ask what additional support could increase success while preserving access to instruction, peers, relationships, and typical routines.
8. How will we know it is working?
Identify a baseline, goal, progress measure, and review date before beginning the intervention.
9. What will we do if the student does not respond?
Establish criteria for adapting or intensifying the support.
10. Are there equity concerns?
Review referral, intervention, exclusion, and outcome data across student groups.
This process helps shift the question from "Where should we send this student?" to "What support does this student need to be successful here?"
Websites for Additional Information:
Description:
Monitoring Student Access, Participation & Outcomes involves examining whether students receiving Tier 2 supports are actually able to access instruction, participate meaningfully, and experience improved outcomes.
Monitoring should go beyond asking whether an intervention was delivered. A student may technically be present in a classroom but have limited access to instruction, few opportunities to respond, minimal interaction with peers, or limited opportunities to demonstrate learning.
Teams should therefore examine three interconnected questions:
Access:
Can the student access the instruction, materials, environment, relationships, and opportunities available to peers?
Participation:
Is the student meaningfully engaged in learning, interaction, communication, and classroom routines?
Outcomes:
Is the student making meaningful progress academically, socially, emotionally, behaviorally, in attendance, engagement, or other identified areas?
Importance:
Traditional intervention monitoring can focus heavily on whether adults completed the intervention. Implementation fidelity is important, but student experience and outcomes are equally important. Monitoring access, participation, and outcomes helps teams determine whether:
- Students are receiving meaningful access to instruction.
- Students are participating rather than simply being present.
- Students have opportunities to interact with peers.
- Supports are increasing engagement.
- Students are learning and using targeted skills.
- Students are experiencing greater independence.
- The intervention is producing meaningful outcomes.
- Supports are inadvertently creating isolation or dependence.
- Students from different groups have equitable opportunities for success.
The goal is not simply "Did we provide the intervention?" but "Did the intervention improve the student's experience and outcomes?"
Critical Features:
Effective monitoring includes:
- A clear baseline: What was happening before the support began?
- Specific outcomes: Define what successful participation or performance looks like.
- Access measures: Opportunities to receive instruction, materials, communication, peers, activities, and supports.
- Participation measures: Engagement, response opportunities, task completion, interaction, communication, or involvement in routines.
- Outcome measures: Academic, behavioral, social-emotional, attendance, engagement, or other identified outcomes.
- Fidelity measures: Was the support delivered as designed?
- Student voice: Does the student perceive the support as helpful, accessible, and respectful?
- Family input: What changes are families noticing across settings?
- Disaggregated data: Examine whether access and outcomes differ across student groups.
- Regular review: Data are reviewed frequently enough to make timely adjustments.
- Adjustment and fading: Supports are intensified, adapted, or faded based on student response.
Implementation Tips:
1. Establish a baseline
What is the student's current level of access, participation, and performance?
2. Identify a measurable goal
What change do we want to see?
3. Select efficient measures
Use data that teachers can realistically collect and teams can actually use.
4. Review frequently
Don't wait until the end of a marking period to discover that an intervention is not working.
5. Ask the student
Include the student's perspective about what is helping, what is difficult, and what could be changed.
6. Examine context
Look for patterns by class, activity, time of day, setting, task, or interaction.
7. Disaggregate when appropriate
Examine whether particular student groups are experiencing different access, participation, or outcome patterns.
8. Adjust the support
Maintain, adapt, intensify, or fade based on data.
9. Check for increasing independence
The goal of many Tier 2 supports is not permanent adult prompting. Look for evidence that students are increasingly able to participate successfully with less intensive support.
10. Celebrate progress
Share meaningful improvements with students and families and identify the practices that contributed to success.
Websites for Additional Information: