What Should Tier 2 and Tier 3 Supports for Student Aggression Look Like?
What Should Tier 2 and Tier 3 Supports for Student Aggression Look Like?
Effective Tier 2 and Tier 3 supports should give students more than a place to talk about their problems.
Students need structured opportunities to identify aggression, manage their emotions, understand what is happening in a conflict, and practice more effective ways to respond.
The people providing those interventions also need the right training and tools.
The Tier 2 Problem: Counselors Are Already Overloaded
One of the biggest mistakes we see schools making with Tier 2 supports is not having a structured curriculum.
Tier 2 support is often provided by school counselors through small groups.
That can be incredibly effective.
A small group gives young people an opportunity to navigate aggression while realizing that their peers are going through similar challenges.
The challenge is that school counselors are often dealing with crises throughout the school week.
They may not have the time needed to put together an entire lesson for every small-group meeting.
They also may not have received specialized training in aggression, resilience, or facilitating this type of group.
The answer isn’t asking counselors to work harder.
It’s giving them better tools.
Tier 2 Should Be Structured and Easy to Facilitate
SQUABBLES® provides two key resources in this area.
First, SQUABBLES® Certification gives counselors and interventionists the training needed to support students and building staff with competence and confidence.
Second, SQUABBLES® Circle™ provides a structured small-group curriculum.
It includes detailed facilitation instructions, video lessons, games, and discussion topics designed to make learning fun.
And it requires little to no preparation.
That means the counselor can spend their time facilitating the group rather than trying to create the curriculum.
Tier 3 Should Be More Than a Discipline Conversation
Tier 3 interventions are not only handled by counselors.
Often, they land in the principal’s or dean’s office after a student exhibits aggressive behavior on campus or online.
To understand how we should approach these conversations, it helps to first look at the meaning of discipline.
Many people associate discipline with punishment.
But discipline should be educational.
The incident itself presents a learning opportunity.
A student can grow as a result of the challenge and become a better version of themselves.
This does not mean students shouldn’t face appropriate consequences.
It means that punishment shouldn’t be our only teaching tool.
Research reviews of zero-tolerance school discipline have raised serious questions about relying on rigid punitive responses and recommend prevention, graduated interventions, and responses appropriate to the seriousness of the behavior.
What Should a One-on-One Conversation Accomplish?
A good one-on-one conversation should help students:
- identify aggression,
- manage their emotions,
- understand what happened,
- identify what motivated the behavior,
- take personal responsibility for their response or reaction, and
- learn skills for peacefully resolving future social conflicts.
This applies whether the student was the target of aggression or the aggressor.
SQUABBLES® One-on-One provides a framework for helping a grown-up walk a student through the conflict using simple questions, visual tools, videos, and resilience-building strategies.
The goal isn’t simply to resolve this incident.
We want students to learn a framework they can eventually use themselves.
Help Students Understand Why Aggression Happens
One of the keys to a productive conversation is helping students identify what SQUABBLES® calls the Meanness Motivation behind aggressive behavior.
SQUABBLES® teaches four motivations:
Bothering
The person wants to psychologically dominate someone else and receives an emotional payoff from making the other person feel small.
Joking
The person wants to make themselves—and often others—laugh. Someone else may become the butt of the joke.
Criticism
The person wants to point out a fault or shortcoming and get the other person to recognize it.
Hurting
The person wants the other person to feel pain, often because they’re struggling with pain, a deeply held belief, or an irrational thinking pattern themselves.
Once a student learns how to identify the motivation behind aggressive behavior, they can learn how to respond and defuse that behavior before the conflict escalates.
That’s empowerment.
Discipline Can Become Education
When a student appears in the principal’s office because of an aggressive incident, we have a choice.
We can simply ask:
“What consequence does this student deserve?”
Or we can also ask:
“What does this student need to learn so that this goes differently next time?”
Consequences may still be appropriate.
Physical safety still matters.
Accountability still matters.
But a consequence without education can miss an enormous opportunity.
Tier 3 intervention should help a student understand their behavior, recognize the problem, and leave with better skills than they had when they walked into the room.
Give Your Counselors and Administrators a Framework
SQUABBLES® provides structured Tier 2 and Tier 3 resources that help counselors, administrators, and interventionists reduce aggression while raising student resilience.
