Spring Conference 2026: Creating Conditions for Student Success

Spring 2026 SCASP Conference Schedule

Thursday, March 12, 2026

8:00 AM – 8:30 AM              Continental Breakfast/Coffee and Registration

8:30 AM – 4:15 PM              Full day Workshop 

11:30-1:00 PM                    Lunch (on your own)

Presenter: Howie Knoff, PhD, NCSP, is an international consultant on school improvement, behavior, and multi-tiered systems of support. Howie was a university professor (22 years), and State Department of Education grant director (13 years). The author of 25 books and 100+ articles/book chapters, he was the 21st president of the National Association of School Psychologists.

Howie is the President of Project ACHIEVE Educational Solutions which has implemented his nationally-known, evidence-based (through SAMHSA) school improvement program—Project ACHIEVE—in thousands of schools or districts over the past 40 years. An international expert on school safety and discipline, classroom management and school-wide behavior MTSS systems, student engagement and achievement, and interventions with behaviorally challenging students. 

Title: Behavioral Interventions for Disobedient, Disruptive, Defiant, and Disturbed Students

Effective school districts implement comprehensive multi-tiered systems for students demonstrating social, emotional, or behavioral challenges. This workshop discusses selected Tier 2/3 (strategic/intensive) interventions for students to address their school and classroom needs, connects these interventions to the “Seven High-Hit Reasons” for these challenges, and demonstrates how to use AI to facilitate the intervention implementation process.

NASP Domains: 1, 4, 6, 10

Description: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESSA) requires districts and schools to develop multi-tiered systems of services, supports, strategies, and interventions for students who are at-risk, underachieving, unresponsive, and/or unsuccessful.  Relative to students’ social, emotional, or behavioral interactions, this often requires functional assessments that lead to (what are sometimes called) Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions that sometimes involve comprehensive school-based mental health supports.

There are many reasons why students demonstrate angry, aggressive, and acting out behavior in their schools or classrooms—or anxious, withdrawal, and “checking out” behavior.  The U.S. Surgeon General’s office and Institute of Medicine have recognized that one in five students will experience significant social, emotional, or behavioral problems during their school-aged years.  Yet, two-thirds or more of these students do not receive the social, emotional, or behavioral services needed to help address their difficulties—sometimes because schools do not understand why their problems are occurring, and what to do about them. 

This presentation will focus on the Tier 2 (strategic) and Tier 3 (intensive) interventions that schools need to implement to assist challenging students who are demonstrating social, emotional, and/or behavioral challenges in their classrooms or across their schools.  In focusing on these interventions, ways to translate the research that typically underlies these interventions into practical and realistic classroom-based strategies will be particularly emphasized.  Thus, the interventions discussed will be evidence-based, teacher-friendly, and field-tested. We will also integrate AI and effective AI prompts into the problem-solving and intervention generation and implementation process.

Initially, the presentation will provide a context for the three tiers in a multi-tiered system.  Briefly, at the prevention (Tier 1) level, we will discuss the essential importance of teaching social skills and the behavioral principles underlying skill-based training.  A differentiation between teaching through incentives and consequences will follow, along with a brief discussion of the negative effects of punishment and zero tolerance policies.  Finally, the importance of different facets of consistency will be presented and how inconsistency can undermine the entire approach to prevention and instruction.

Strategic intervention (Tier 2) will be defined as services, supports, and strategies that groups or individual students need to directly address their classroom functioning and interactions.  Here, the presentation will discuss the limitations of diagnostic labels, and the importance of determining why (especially at Tier 2) students are demonstrating social, emotional, and/or behavioral challenges, and how to link functional assessment to strategic or intensive interventions.  To this end, given the advances of the past 30 years, a “21^st Century” functional assessment approach will be briefly described that identifies the “7 High-Hit Reasons” for students’ challenging behavior, and how these high-hit reasons align with the specific challenging behaviors and interventions below. 

Intensive or crisis-management (Tier 3) interventions will be addressed as those (a) that are similar to Tier 2 interventions, but require more-intensive or more-clinical implementations; and/or (b) that involve a more comprehensive mental health perspective and/or community-based health and mental health partnerships.

Given this multi-tiered context, the remainder of the presentation will sample and discuss in detail Tier 2 and 3 interventions that address the following range of challenging student behaviors:

• Not following classroom or school expectations

• Not demonstrating effective interpersonal skills

• Not complying or accepting consequences

• Not exhibiting self- or emotional-control

• Not motivated to make good choices or to change bad choices

• Behaving inconsistently across staff, settings, and situations

• Stress- and trauma-related student emotions and interactions

The interventions themselves will be organized in those that:  Increase or Establish New Student Behaviors; Decrease or Eliminate Inappropriate Behaviors; Teach Attention and Engagement Skills; Teach Social, Self-Management, and Self-Control Skills; Increase Student Motivation; Enhance Peer Engagement/Initiation and/or Peer Response/Management Skills; and address Student Stress or Trauma.  

Among the specific interventions that may be sampled for discussion will be:

Increasing Behavior: Prompting, Cueing, Stimulus Control (Full), Positive Reinforcement/Schedules of Reinforcement, Group Contingencies—Intervention Examples, Good Behavior Game, and Self-Management/Self-Control

Decreasing Behavior: DRO/I/L/A, Thought Stopping, Extinction, Overcorrection, Response Cost, and Time Out

Stress and Trauma: Cognitive-Behavioral Interventions/Therapies

For each intervention discussed, participants will learn:

• How to implement the intervention step-by-step

• The behaviors that the intervention will most successfully change

• Which interventions to use with what age levels

• How the intervention will work with behaviors that differ in their frequency, severity, or intensity

• How to evaluate the short-term and long-term outcomes of the intervention

Learner Objectives:

1. Why interventions need to focus on students’ social, emotional, and behavioral needs, and not their diagnostic labels

2. A range of social, emotional, or behavioral interventions that schools need to implement to assist students who are behaviorally challenging in their classrooms or common school areas.

3. To recognize the interdependence of student, teacher, instructional, curriculum, and other “environmental factors” that must be considered when implementing interventions. 

4. What information and data need to be collected as part of the Problem Identification and Problem Analysis steps of the functional assessment process so that the right interventions are selected for implementation.

5. The seven “high-hit” reasons for students’ social, emotional, and/or behavioral challenges, and how these link to a range of research-based interventions. 

6. The specific characteristics and implementation steps of a number of selected interventions that increase or establish new student behaviors; decrease or eliminate inappropriate behaviors; teach attention and engagement skills; teach social, self-management, and self-control skills; increase student motivation; and enhance peer engagement/initiation and/or peer response/management skills.

7. The differences between Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions.

8. How to integrate AI and effective AI prompts into the problem-solving and intervention generation and implementation process.

This presentation will provide case examples as appropriate.  Discussion and participants’ school-based applications of the interventions with their own challenging students will be strongly encouraged.

Friday, March 13, 2026

8:00 AM – 8:30 AM               Continental Breakfast/Coffee and Registration

8:30 AM – 4:15 PM               Full Day Workshop

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM                   Lunch (on your own)

Presenter: Dr. Andrew Shanock, is a Professor of School Psychology.  Dr. Shanock specializes in cognitive and academic assessment.  He has served as President of the Trainers of School Psychologists (TSP), NY Association of School Psychologists (NYASP), and the Trainers of School Psychologists: New York (TSPNY). Dr. Shanock is the chair of the NASP Bilingual Interest Group (BIG).  Dr. Shanock has been a featured speaker at the national and state level for a variety of educational professionals, including school psychologists, speech language pathologists, and administrators. He consults with school districts around the country to promote issues such as collaborative assessment, MTSS/RtI, and instructional support team building.  Dr. Shanock’s presentations are informative, entertaining, and interactive.  

Title: Collaborative Assessment and MTSS within a Science of Reading Framework: Identification and Intervention for EL and monolingual children 

NASP Domains:1, 3, 8, 10

Description: Although the scientific evidence base for effective reading has existed for decades, the term “the Science of Reading” has gained traction in the last few years, leading to some misunderstandings. Strong core instruction grounded in Science of Reading principles is crucial. But in isolation, even that’s not enough. To be powerful and effective, a literacy system needs to bring together assessment, curriculum, intervention, and personalized learning, all of which must be done with a comprehensive understanding of language development in monolingual and bilingual learners.

This full day workshop will address components of reading, including language development, and the issues in developing an efficient and effective MTSS process whereby data collection, communication, and appropriate interventions occur. Procedures on how to organize/perform a collaborative cross battery assessment between the SLP and school psychologist and how it can assist in data collection, collaborative interpretation, and intervention development will be discussed in detail. Participants will gain a strong working knowledge of and ability to differentiate between dyslexia, and SLD, using the Simple View of Reading framework. Throughout the workshop, there will be in-depth discussions on how to addressing the appropriate assessment methodology and interventions for English Language Learners. 

Learning Outcomes: 

1. Attendees will have a practice-ready Patterns of Strengths and Weaknesses (PSW) model on how to organize, interpret data from all school-based service providers. Report writing templates will be shared. 

2. Attendees will have a solid knowledge base on how to incorporate the Cultural Linguistic Matrix Interpretive Matrix (CLIM) in interpretation of assessment data. 

3. Attendees will have an understanding on how monolingual and bilingual professionals can effectively evaluate an English Language Learner to determine dyslexia. 

4. Attendees will have gain a step-by-step process on the consideration of assessments and appropriate interpretation of data. 

5. Attendees will have a well-rounded understanding of systemic issues that impact the implementation of MTSS policies and procedures.

6. Attendees will know which research and evidenced based brief assessments to use for progress monitoring and determining which reading skill that needs to be addressed. 

7. Attendees will be able to immediately locate on the web free academic intervention resources to address reading, writing, and math skills.