Description:
The Tier 3 Leadership Team is responsible for establishing, coordinating, and evaluating the school’s systems for delivering intensive, individualized supports. The team ensures that students with significant or persistent needs can access appropriate assessment, planning, intervention, and ongoing support. Depending on the school’s structure, Tier 3 leadership may operate as a dedicated team or as part of a combined Tier 2 and Tier 3 systems team. Its work focuses on the quality and effectiveness of the overall support system, rather than managing every detail of an individual student's plan.
Importance:
- Establishes a coordinated process for identifying students who may need intensive support.
- Ensures teams have access to the expertise, resources, and decision-making authority required for individualized planning.
- Connects school-level practices with district policies, professional learning, coaching, and community resources.
- Promotes consistent procedures for assessment, intervention planning, progress monitoring, and review.
- Uses system-level data to identify gaps, barriers, and opportunities to improve implementation.
- Supports equitable access to effective, individualized services and interventions.
Critical Features:
- Representative membership: Includes school administration, Tier 3 coordination or coaching, relevant educators, and personnel with expertise in behavior support, mental health, instruction, data, and other areas relevant to student needs.
- Clear roles and responsibilities: Members understand who coordinates the system, facilitates meetings, supports teams, manages data, and follows up on action steps.
- Applied expertise: The team can access expertise in functional behavioral assessment, individualized support planning, and other relevant specialized practices.
- Defined procedures: Establishes consistent processes for referral, assessment, team formation, intervention planning, and review.
- Resource coordination: Ensures staff have the time, training, materials, and administrative support necessary to implement plans.
- Data-based evaluation: Reviews system implementation, student outcomes, and access to supports.
- Family and student partnership: Establishes expectations for meaningful student and family involvement.
- Continuous improvement: Uses implementation and outcome information to strengthen the Tier 3 system over time.
Implementation Tips:
- Determine whether a dedicated Tier 3 leadership team or a combined Tier 2/Tier 3 team best fits the school’s needs and existing structures.Identify the expertise and representation needed to address academic, behavioral, social-emotional, mental health, and other intensive student needs.Define the team’s purpose, decision-making authority, meeting schedule, and responsibilities.
- Develop written procedures for referral, assessment, student support team formation, plan review, and escalation of urgent concerns.
- Establish a process for connecting student support teams with specialists, administrators, community partners, and other needed resources.
- Review data about access to Tier 3 supports, implementation quality, student outcomes, and patterns across student groups.
- Provide ongoing professional learning, coaching, and problem-solving support to staff implementing individualized plans.
- Review system-level progress regularly and document improvement priorities, responsible personnel, and timelines.
Websites for Additional Information:
Description:
The Tier 3 Student Support Team is a collaborative, individualized problem-solving team formed around a student who needs intensive, coordinated support. The team brings together people who understand the student’s strengths, needs, experiences, and environments, which may include family members, the student, school staff, relevant specialists, and community providers. The team uses data and assessment information to develop, implement, and regularly refine an individualized plan that addresses the student’s specific needs and promotes meaningful participation, positive outcomes, and greater independence.
Importance:
- Brings together multiple perspectives to develop a fuller understanding of the student.
- Coordinates strategies and responsibilities across adults, settings, and services.
- Connects assessment findings to individualized, measurable goals and supports.
- Ensures that those implementing the plan have input into its design and review.
- Provides a consistent process for monitoring progress and adjusting interventions.
- Promotes family and student partnership in decisions that affect the student.
- Helps coordinate the transition to less intensive support when data indicate it is appropriate.
Critical Features:
- Individualized membership: Team composition reflects the student's needs and the expertise required to plan effective support.
- Student and family participation: The student and family have meaningful opportunities to share perspectives and contribute to decisions.
- Relevant expertise: Team members can access appropriate assessment, behavioral, instructional, mental health, and other specialized expertise.
- Shared goals: The team establishes measurable outcomes that matter for the student's learning, participation, well-being, and independence.
- Coordinated planning: The plan identifies prevention strategies, skill instruction, reinforcement, environmental adjustments, and adult responsibilities as appropriate.
- Clear communication: Members understand their roles and how information will be shared.
- Ongoing review: The team monitors progress, implementation fidelity, and changing student needs.
- Transition planning: The team identifies when supports may be adjusted, faded, or transitioned based on evidence and student readiness.
Implementation Tips:
- Establish clear criteria and procedures for forming a Tier 3 Student Support Team.
- Invite the student and family to contribute to team membership and identify people who know the student well.
- Review relevant data, prior interventions, assessment information, student strengths, and family perspectives before developing a plan.
- Define the priority need and establish measurable goals.
- Assign clear responsibilities for each part of the plan, including implementation, data collection, communication, and follow-up.
- Schedule regular meetings based on student needs and the intensity of the plan.
- Use a consistent meeting process: review progress, examine fidelity, identify barriers, make decisions, document actions, and set the next review date.
- Ensure that all implementers understand the plan and have access to needed coaching or resources.
- Include the student and family in reviewing what is working and what may need to change.
- Plan for increased independence and reduced intensity when progress and readiness support that decision.
Websites for Additional Information:
Description:
Family partnerships are an essential component of effective Tier 3 support. Families bring valuable knowledge about a student's strengths, interests, communication, experiences, needs, and responses to support across settings. Meaningful partnerships establish families as active contributors to assessment, planning, implementation, and review rather than simply recipients of school updates. At Tier 3, teams work collaboratively with families to develop shared goals, coordinate appropriate strategies, address barriers, and ensure that individualized supports reflect the student's needs and family priorities.
Importance:
- Builds trust and strengthens communication between families and school personnel.
- Helps teams understand student strengths, needs, and behavior across different settings.
- Improves the relevance and feasibility of individualized support plans.
- Supports consistency and coordination between home, school, and community environments when appropriate.
- Ensures family perspectives inform decisions about goals, strategies, and progress.
- Helps identify barriers to participation, communication, and access to services.
- Promotes more equitable and culturally responsive support for students and families.
Critical Features:
- Two-way communication: Families have regular opportunities to share information, ask questions, and receive meaningful updates.
- Shared decision making: Families contribute to goal setting, intervention planning, review, and adjustment.
- Respect for family knowledge: Team members recognize families as important sources of information about the student.
- Accessible communication: Communication methods, language, scheduling, and meeting formats reflect family needs and preferences.
- Strengths-based collaboration: Conversations recognize student and family strengths and build on what is working.
- Clear expectations and roles: Team members discuss how the school and family may contribute without placing inappropriate responsibility on families.
Implementation Tips:
- Establish a positive relationship with the family before or alongside discussions about intensive needs and interventions.
- Ask families how they prefer to communicate, when they are available, and what would make participation easier.
- Share the purpose of Tier 3 support, the assessment and planning process, and the family's role in decision making.
- Invite families to share the student's strengths, interests, successful strategies, communication needs, and experiences across settings.
- Develop shared goals and discuss which strategies may be useful at school, at home, or in the community.
- Provide clear, jargon-free updates about progress, implementation, successes, and concerns.
- Ask families whether the plan is feasible and whether they are noticing changes that may help the team understand student progress.
- Address barriers to partnership, such as scheduling, language access, transportation, technology, or previous negative experiences with school.
- Document agreed-upon next steps and follow up on commitments made by both school personnel and family members.
- Review the quality of the partnership itself, including whether communication is accessible, respectful, and genuinely collaborative.
Websites for Additional Information:
Description:
Fidelity and outcome data help Tier 3 teams determine whether individualized supports are being implemented as planned and whether they are improving student outcomes. Fidelity data describe how consistently and accurately the agreed-upon strategies are implemented, while outcome data show changes in the student's behavior, learning, engagement, participation, or other identified goals. Teams review these data together to understand progress, identify implementation barriers, and determine whether a plan should be continued, adjusted, intensified, or faded.
At Tier 3, data are important at both the student and systems levels. Student support teams use individualized measures to guide decisions about a student's plan, while the Tier 3 Leadership Team examines broader patterns to evaluate the quality, accessibility, and effectiveness of the school's intensive support system.
Importance:
- Helps teams distinguish implementation challenges from an intervention that may not be meeting student needs.
- Supports timely, evidence-informed decisions about individualized plans.
- Identifies where staff may need additional training, coaching, resources, or clarification.
- Makes progress toward student goals visible and supports accountability for agreed-upon actions.
- Helps teams determine whether changes to a plan are producing meaningful improvements.
- Allows leadership teams to identify system-level strengths, gaps, and resource needs.
- Supports equitable review of whether students have access to effective supports and experience positive outcomes.
Critical Features:
- Clearly defined goals: Outcome measures are directly connected to the student's individualized goals.
- Meaningful baseline data: Teams understand the student's starting point before evaluating progress.
- Practical fidelity measures: Data collection focuses on the essential components of the support plan.
- Multiple relevant measures: Teams may examine behavior, replacement skills, academic performance, attendance, engagement, participation, independence, or other appropriate outcomes.
- Consistent collection: Team members know what data to collect, how to record them, and when to review them.
- Joint interpretation: Fidelity and outcome data are examined together rather than in isolation.
- Documented decisions: Teams record the evidence considered, the decisions made, and the next steps.
- Student and family perspectives: Quantitative data are supplemented with relevant observations and feedback.
- Systems-level monitoring: Leadership teams review broader implementation and outcome trends, including access and equity.
- Privacy and appropriate data use: Information is shared only with appropriate team members and handled according to applicable requirements.
Implementation Tips:
- Begin with the question the team needs to answer: Is the plan being implemented as intended, and is the student making progress?
- Identify the essential components of the plan and develop a manageable fidelity checklist or implementation measure.
- Define the outcome measures, baseline, collection schedule, and person responsible for each measure.
- Choose measures that reflect meaningful progress, such as increased use of replacement skills, improved participation, fewer disruptions, increased independence, or progress toward individualized goals.
- Graph or summarize outcome data over time so the team can identify patterns and changes.
- Review fidelity data alongside outcomes to understand whether the plan is being implemented consistently.
- Use the findings to guide decisions:
- Strong fidelity and positive progress: Continue the plan and consider whether supports can gradually be reduced.
- Limited fidelity and limited progress: Identify barriers and provide clarification, coaching, or resources before concluding the intervention is ineffective.
- Strong fidelity and limited progress: Revisit the assessment, hypothesis, intervention match, and plan components.
- Worsening outcomes or urgent safety concerns: Respond promptly and follow applicable school procedures rather than waiting for the next routine review.
- Document the team's interpretation, decisions, responsible staff, and next review date.
- At the leadership level, review implementation patterns, student outcomes, staff capacity, and whether students across groups can access effective Tier 3 supports.
- Use system-level findings to guide professional learning, coaching, resource allocation, and continuous improvement.
Websites for Additional Information: