3-Step System to Identify Social, Emotional & Behavioral Issues Sooner

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Expanding RTI/MTSS to Provide Behavioral and Social-Emotional Support

RTI/MTSS Behavior Scenario:

Work Avoidance: Alice often finds excuses to leave her math class and misses substantial amounts of instruction. Her math teacher, Mr. Garbarino, requires that students who leave the classroom during instruction for any reason must sign out and sign back in on return.

Reviewing these daily sign-out sheets one Friday, Mr. Garbarino notes Alice’s frequent absences during math lessons and decides to conference with the student to find out the reason. Alice is evasive in her responses, so her teacher then talks with her school counselor about Alice’s trips from the classroom. Based on the sign-out log documenting her classroom absences and a follow-up conversation between the counselor and Alice, the RTI/MTSS Team decides to place the student in a school-wide mentoring program to help Alice to increase her confidence and performance in math.

Behavioral/Social-Emotional Schoolwide Screening: Data Sources

Teacher Nomination. Teachers and other school staff are an important referral source for mental-health services. In the classroom, students are expected to engage in schoolwork, follow rules for appropriate conduct and get along with peers . Teachers are well-placed to identify those students who struggle in any of these areas of behavioral functioning. Schools can simply direct instructional staff to flag and refer students whose behavior is of concern. However, teachers can increase the reliability of their RTI/MTSS-behavior referrals when they are first trained to recognize internalizing (e.g., depression; anxiety) and externalizing (e.g., inattentive/hyperactive; non-compliant) behavior problems.

Behavioral Questionnaires. Schools can purchase brief mental-health screening questionnaires that teachers can complete for all students. Depending on the product, these questionnaires may be print-based or computer-administered. While the majority of such RTI/MTSS-behavior screening tools are to be completed by instructional staff, versions also exist for student self-report and even parent report. Schools can review a range of potential behavior screeners listed on the National Center on Intensive Intervention behavioral screener and behavioral progress-monitoring tools chart pages.

A strength of these norm-referenced rating instruments is that any student’s results can be compared to published norms to determine whether that student is at elevated risk for social-emotional and/or behavior problems. One potential drawback of universal screening with these instruments is that teachers find themselves completing questionnaires for many students about whom they have no concerns.

Multi-Gate Screening: Teacher Nomination and Questionnaires. An approach that can substantially reduce teacher effort while still realizing the full benefit of school-wide behavioral screening is to combine teacher nomination and clinical questionnaires in a multi-step/“multi-gate” process.

In the first step (gate 1), every teacher is asked to nominate up to 3 students in their class/section with possible internalizing and up to 3 with possible externalizing behavior concerns. In the next step (gate 2), teachers complete brief, clinical behavior-rating questionnaires for only those students they previously nominated. In the final step (gate 3), mental-health staff (e.g., counselors, psychologists) complete classroom observations of those students scoring in the significant range on the behavioral questionnaire, both to verify the need for Tier 2/3 supports and to match these students to appropriate services.

RTI/MTSS Behavior Scenario:

Non-Compliance: Jake is a ‘frequent flier’ in the in-school Suspension Room. His school runs a report every 5 weeks summarizing student Office Disciplinary Referrals (ODRs) throughout the building. On the most recent ODR report, Jake is identified as presenting significant challenging behaviors.

An analysis of teacher comments on his ODRs shows that Jake fails to comply with teacher requests or complete work across multiple classrooms, a pattern confirmed in conversations with his instructors. On the strength of both his frequent ODRs and teacher feedback, Jake is referred to the RTI/MTSS Team, which coaches his instructors to use positive-communication tools to increase Jake’s compliance and academic engagement.

Archival Behavioral Information: Data Sources

Attendance. A student’s record of attendance is not a direct behavioral measure. However, frequent absences may correlate with academic underperformance and can be a red flag for social-emotional concerns such as school avoidance or lack of academic engagement. Ideally, schools have the capacity to record absences or late arrivals (skips and tardies) by class period, as well as full-day absences.

Office Disciplinary Referrals. In most schools, when a student is sent from the classroom for disciplinary reasons, the teacher also writes up an accompanying Office Disciplinary Referral (ODR) . The ODR is a form completed electronically or by hand that provides specific information about the behavioral incident resulting in the student being removed to be disciplined.

Schools can increase the quality of the behavioral data supplied by ODRs by including prompts on the ODR form for the referring educator to describe factors related to the problem-behavior incident such as possible triggering events, duration of the problem situation, steps taken by the teacher to deescalate the situation, etc.

Important factors that impact the quality of ODR data are the reliability of staff in completing ODRs for each significant disciplinary incident and the school’s ability rapidly to enter ODRs into an electronic database to allow these records to be easily reviewed, sorted and analyzed.

Non-ODR Class Removals/Absences. Although ODRs document when students are sent from the classroom for disciplinary reasons, it often happens in schools that other types of classroom removal or absence occur quite frequently yet are not reliably documented.

Examples include students who are sent to a neighboring classroom or to stand in the hall for a short time-out, directed to visit a counselor to calm down after an emotional outburst, or fail to return to class after a restroom break.

Students with a high number of classroom removals or self-initiated absences are more likely than peers to have social-emotional or behavior problems — and may also be at increased risk for academic failure because they are missing large amounts of instruction. One way that schools can track incidents of classroom removal/absence is by having students sign themselves out when leaving the classroom in mid-session and sign back in when returning to the room. (For younger children, adults can sign students out from and back into the classroom.)

RTI/MTSS Behavior Scenario:

Anxiety: Leroy’s anxiety about classwork undermines his academic performance, especially on tests. Three times during the school year, Leroy’s school asks teachers to identify any students who display concerning levels of problem behavior or social/emotional difficulties. Both his English and chemistry teachers flag Leroy because of his observed anxious behavior and the student’s comments about how anxiety interferes with test-taking. To assess the magnitude of Leroy’s anxiety symptoms, these two teachers are then asked to complete a brief questionnaire rating the severity of his behaviors. According to both teachers, Leroy falls within the ‘clinically significant’ range on this rating form.

Additionally, the school nurse confirms that Leroy has stopped by her office at several times during the school year to report an upset stomach, which she believes to be related to his anxiety. Based on teacher identification, results of the behavior-rating questionnaire, and corroborating information from the nurse, the RTI/MTSS Team decides to place the student in brief (6-session) counseling with the school psychologist to work on reducing and managing his anxiety on high-stakes tests.