What differentiates tertiary (individual) intervention from other systems of positive behavior support?
The main difference between tertiary and other levels of positive behavior support is the focus of the interventions. The defining features of Tertiary Prevention (i.e., identification of goals, data collection and analysis, summary statements, multi-element plans, and a monitoring system) address the needs of individual children. It is support that is focused on meeting individual needs; and the characteristics of individual students and specific circumstances related to them (e.g., differences in the severity of behavior, complexity of environment) dictate a flexible, focused, personalized approach. This means that Tertiary Prevention allows teams to vary features of the process (e.g., data collection tools used, breadth of information gathered, specificity and number of hypotheses generated, extent of the behavioral support plan, and degree of monitoring) to provide the most individualized behavior support possible.
