Transporting Motivational Interviewing to School Settings to Improve the Engagement and Fidelity of Tier 2 Interventions

The majority of Tier 2 interventions are facilitated by specialized instructional support personnel, such as a school psychologists, school social workers, school counselors, or behavior consultants. Many professionals struggle to involve parents and teachers in Tier 2 behavior interventions. However, attention to the motivational issues for influencing parents and teachers’ decisions to participate or implement the intervention as it was intended are often missing. In this article, the authors describe their efforts to infuse motivational interviewing into a well-established Tier 2 intervention, First Step to Success. Specifically, they summarize the iterative process that they followed in order to develop this integrated model and the methods and results found in training coaches to implement it. Implications for practice and research are also discussed.