Using Coaching to Support Classroom-Level Adoption and Use of Interventions Within School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support Systems

M any schools today have a prevention-based focus for working with academic and social behavior problems through the use of tiered approaches (Bohanon, McIntosh, & Goodman, 2011; Horner & Sugai, 2005). Through the use of levels of support, including a continuum of increasingly intensive support based on responsiveness to evidence-based core practices, resources are used more wisely and children are not provided interventions they do not need. The establishment of such tiers or levels of support takes extensive knowledge, effort, and time. Accordingly, experts in the area of schoolwide positive behavioral intervention and supports (SW-PBIS) caution school professionals against expecting change to occur quickly and emphasize that to implement SWPBIS with integrity, educators need to allocate resources, make it a priority, and be patient (Bohanon et al., 2011; Horner & Sugai, 2005). Understandably, waiting years to establish foundational systems prior to establishing Tier 2 and 3 supports may seem impractical to school professionals. However, it is imperative to remember one of the key principles of this preventionbased approach. Specifically, how do we know if a student is not responding to the least intrusive intervention (universal supports) if we are not sure the least intrusive intervention is in fact being implemented with integrity? There are strong measures for schoolwide implementation of PBIS at the universal level and promising tools for the secondary and tertiary schoolwide level (see www.pbis.org). But research indicates that less is known about factors that influence classroom-level implementation of key features of SW-PBIS. For example, in schools with high levels of implementation fidelity of SWPBIS according to the Schoolwide Evaluation Tool (SET), fidelity measures at the classroom level indicated that teachers’ implementation of key features of PBIS within their classrooms was not as high (Reinke, Herman, & Stormont, in press). Thus, more support may be needed for teachers to generalize the key features of SWPBIS that may be seen in nonclassroom settings. Overall, it seems clear that more effort should be devoted to providing schools with strategies for strengthening universal and secondary supports specifically within classroom settings. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of how a coaching model could be used to support teachers’ use of evidence-based strategies at the universal and Tier 2 levels of support specifically for students with externalizing behavior problems. First, a brief overview of consultation and coaching will be provided, followed by a brief review of universal and Tier 2 strategies teachers might use, along with a description of the ways that coaches might support teachers in the use of these strategies in classroom settings.