Social Communication as Behavior Support: A Language Professional-Led,Schoolwide Approach in Inclusive Schools

Abstract

Many classroom behaviors reflect communication breakdowns, not defiance. When students lack the words to ask, refuse, or negotiate, behavior becomes their message. This article reframes pragmatic communication, how language is used for social purposes, as a core element of schoolwide behavior support. Drawing on developmental science, interdisciplinary evidence, and inclusive education policy, the author describes how teachers, speech-language pathologists, and psychologists can teach and reinforce social communicative routines within Multi-Tiered Systems of Support and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports frameworks. Practical tools, a tiered framework, and a classroom self-check resource illustrate how communication can replace conflict. It is argued that embedding social communication at every tier can transform behavior support from reactive management to proactive inclusion.

Classroom behavior is often viewed through the lens of compliance, discipline, or emotional regulation (Wettstein et al., 2023). Yet a substantial body of evidence demonstrates that what educators label as “behavior” is frequently an attempt by an individual to communicate without the pragmatic language skills necessary to do so effectively (James et al., 2020). The social use of language in context, or social communication, shapes how students request help, negotiate turns, manage conflict, or refuse politely (Hutton & Hodge, 2022). When these skills are underdeveloped, students may instead shout, withdraw, or act out, which escalates into behavioral incidents that burden teachers, exclude students, and strain systems of support (Adams & Gaile, 2024). This article argues that social communication can be recognized not only as a target for speech-language pathology but as a schoolwide behavior support strategy, with interdisciplinary relevance across inclusive education. This article starts from the vantage point of school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in collaboration with educators and psychologists, while intentionally drawing implications for all professionals who support students with, or at risk for, behavioral difficulties.

The context for this argument is particularly pressing in contemporary inclusive school systems, where policy frameworks bring together students with diverse cultural, linguistic, and developmental profiles in shared classrooms (Bourke et al., 2023). Studies have shown that adolescents in specialized behavior schools display markedly lower narrative, structural, and social communication skills compared with their peers in inclusive education, and that externalizing behaviors correlate negatively with these language skills (Lee et al., 2016). These findings underscore the double bind, that is, communication difficulties heighten behavior risk, while behavior problems reduce opportunities to practice communication. Teachers, psychologists, and SLPs alike, therefore, face the same challenge, supporting communication as a preventive lever for behavior.

Pragmatic skills refer to the ability to use language appropriately for social purposes, that is knowing what to say, how, when, and to whom (Alduais et al., 2022). Difficulties in this domain are often described as social communication disorders (Han et al., 2025), a diagnostic category that captures challenges in using verbal and nonverbal communication for social interaction. Within inclusive education, these two terms overlap conceptually and practically. That is, both refer to the capacity to use language effectively to build relationships, navigate routines, and manage emotions and behavior. Across culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) classrooms, I use the terms pragmatic skills and social communication interchangeably to denote the broader set of social communicative abilities that underpin successful participation and positive behavior in school settings.

The interdisciplinary significance of social communicative skills in inclusive education, therefore, cannot be overstated. For teachers, communication is often the hidden curriculum: the unspoken rules of how to join a group, ask a question, or signal discomfort. For school psychologists, social-pragmatic competence intersects with social-emotional learning (SEL), peer relations, and self-regulation. For SLPs, social communication is a core clinical domain, yet it cannot be remediated in therapy rooms alone. Collaboration across these fields is essential if schools are to create environments where communication supports behavior.

Despite the clear overlap between social communication and behavior, not all schoolwide models explicitly integrate social communication into Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS; Nitz et al., 2023) or School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS; Walker et al., 2023). Evidence from cognitive-based social communication interventions shows that adolescents can improve their perspective-taking, problem-solving, and conversational flexibility (Tripp et al., 2024) when pragmatic skills are explicitly taught, with benefits generalizing across home and school environments. Similarly, classroom-level communication climates, such as how peers respond to requests or refusals, have been shown to influence the trajectory of challenging behavior (Laister et al., 2021). Yet these insights remain largely siloed in clinical research or special education rather than embedded in mainstream schoolwide behavior support frameworks. This gap motivates this article.

The aim of this article is not to present a fidelity-bound program or protocol but to synthesize insights from speech pathology, education, and behavioral science into a practical framework that schools can adapt. Three interlocking premises guide this framework. First, communication and behavior must be understood as reciprocal. That is, social communicative competence supports participation while positive peer and teacher responses create opportunities to practice communication. Second, intervention must be tiered, beginning with universal routines that normalize help-seeking, repair, and refusal, and scaling up to targeted and individualized supports for at-risk students. Third, equity and inclusivity demand that pragmatic goals are culturally responsive and language-affirming, particularly for CALD students, for whom social communicative norms may differ from mainstream expectations (Wang et al., 2017).

For practitioners, the significance of this article lies in its translation of research into actionable practice. Teachers will find concrete ways to embed pragmatic scripts into classroom routines and behavior matrices. Psychologists will see how social communication aligns with social-emotional and behavioral goals. Speech-language pathologists will gain a model for positioning their expertise within MTSS/SWPBIS, moving from pull-out therapy to whole-school capacity-building. Together, these perspectives reinforce the idea that supporting social communication is not an “add-on” but a fundamental behavior support practice.

In positioning social-pragmatic communication as behavior support, I respond to calls for more integrative, interdisciplinary approaches to inclusive education. Australia provides one such policy context in which debates about special schooling and inclusion are particularly visible (Cumming et al., 2024). It builds on evidence that social communicative difficulties are both highly prevalent and functionally significant in students with emotional and behavioral disorders (James et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2016), that pragmatic interventions can improve outcomes across school and home (Tripp et al., 2024), and that school communication environments shape behavior trajectories (Laister et al., 2021). By weaving these strands into a unified, schoolwide approach, I advance a vision of inclusive classrooms where communication is recognized, taught, and reinforced as the cornerstone of positive behavior.

The remainder of this article is organized into three parts. First, I outline theoretical, empirical, and practical reasons why social communication must be made explicit within schoolwide behavior frameworks. Second, I describe the core components of a schoolwide model that embeds social communication across tiers of support. Third, I illustrate how this model can be implemented by teachers, SLPs, psychologists, behavior specialists, and school leaders, and identify priorities for future research and system-level work.

Why Social Communication Belongs at the Center of Behavior Support

In this first part, I outline the theoretical, empirical, and practical reasons why social communication needs to be foregrounded within schoolwide behavior support frameworks.

Why Social Communication Matters for Behavior

Teachers, psychologists, and allied health professionals frequently recognize that behavior has communicative intent. Yet in practice, behavior support systems often foreground emotional regulation strategies (Vitale & Bonaiuto, 2024) while overlooking the communicative competencies that underpin them. Social communicative skills, including how language is used to initiate, maintain, and repair interactions, are critical for students to participate successfully in learning and peer contexts. When these skills are underdeveloped, behaviors of concern emerge as substitutes. For example, a child who cannot negotiate turns or is unable to express discomfort may escalate to disruptive or aggressive acts. Recognizing these as social communicative breakdowns shifts the focus from compliance to communication, reframing behavior as an opportunity to teach functional language. Supplemental Table 1 outlines how behaviors are reframed through social communication. Empirical evidence underscores this connection. Adolescents educated in specialist behavior schools, for example, demonstrate significantly poorer narrative, structural language, and social communication than peers in mainstream education, and externalizing behaviors are closely linked with these communication difficulties (Lee et al., 2016). Similarly, classroom-level communication climates influence behavior trajectories. That is, students with stronger communication skills show reductions in self-absorbed and socially disruptive behaviors across the school year, and classmates’ communicative competence indirectly supports these gains (Laister et al., 2021). These findings show that social communicative skills are not only an individual asset but also a collective classroom resource that shapes peer interactions and behavioral outcomes.

From a psychological perspective, social communicative competence aligns with SEL (Hosokawa et al., 2024; Santos et al., 2023). Being able to label emotions, express refusals, and repair misunderstandings are communication moves that parallel SEL targets of self-awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. However, SEL curricula often prioritize emotional vocabulary and regulation strategies without explicitly teaching the pragmatic scripts that translate emotion into action. Integrating pragmatic goals bridges this gap, providing students with tools they can use in real time to prevent escalation.

Speech-language pathologists bring clinical expertise to this endeavor, but their role cannot be siloed. A purely therapeutic focus on social communicative deficits in individual sessions risks limited generalization. Instead, SLPs working within schoolwide frameworks can model strategies for teachers, embed pragmatic moves into behavior matrices, and co-develop routines that make communication expectations visible and rehearsed. For example, “asking for help,” written into a school’s Tier 1 expectations, could be taught alongside classroom rules and reinforced through peer modeling. By embedding social communicative goals into the universal tier of behavior support, SLPs can increase the likelihood that communication is not an add-on intervention but part of the school’s cultural fabric.

The implications for inclusive education are clear. Students from CALD backgrounds or those with neurodevelopmental conditions are disproportionately represented in exclusionary discipline statistics (Hussain et al., 2023). Many of these students also experience unrecognized social communication needs (James et al., 2020). Addressing behavior solely through regulation or discipline risks compounding disadvantage by missing the communicative origins of difficulty. By contrast, social communicative teaching offers an equitable pathway, enabling diverse students to express needs, navigate social rules, and build relationships on their own terms.

In sum, social communication matters for behavior because it provides the linguistic means by which students engage with the social and instructional life of the classroom. Weaknesses in this domain are associated with an elevated risk of externalizing behavior and peer conflict, but when schools teach and reinforce socially appropriate communicative moves, they can create protective environments that prevent escalation. This intersection of communication and behavior is where interdisciplinary practice, spanning education, speech-language pathology, and psychology, finds its strongest rationale.

Developmental Foundations

Understanding why social communication serves as a lever for behavior support requires grounding in developmental science. A key insight is that social communication pathways are both biologically prepared and environmentally shaped (Rakesh et al., 2024). This dual influence means schools have real leverage in that everyday classroom experiences can either strengthen or constrain pragmatic skills that directly affect behavior.

Research in developmental psychology shows that infants’ orientation to faces and eye gaze, the earliest building blocks of joint attention, is experience-dependent. Senju et al. (2015) demonstrated that the frequency and quality of caregiver interactions shape how infants allocate attention to eyes, with cascading effects on their later capacity to interpret intentions. These findings matter for classrooms because they confirm that social attention is “plastic” (Del Bianco et al., 2021; Falck-Ytter et al., 2023). In other words, students’ readiness to notice, interpret, and respond to communicative cues can be enhanced through frequent, structured opportunities.

Evidence from pre-emptive interventions reinforces this principle. The iBASIS-VIPP (Infant-British Autism Study of Infant Siblings—Video-Feedback Intervention to promote Positive Parenting) trial (Whitehouse et al., 2021), for example, showed that when parents of infants at elevated likelihood of autism were coached to respond more sensitively to their child’s social communicative signals, children demonstrated reduced autism symptom severity and lower odds of a clinical diagnosis by age 3. The lesson for schools is straightforward. Shaping environments to support communication changes developmental trajectories. Teachers and peers, like parents, are powerful agents in building social communicative competence if classrooms make these moves explicit and frequent.

The malleability of social communicative skills persists beyond infancy. Cognitive-based social communication interventions with adolescents have demonstrated measurable improvements in perspective-taking, conversational flexibility, and problem-solving, with benefits observed both at school and at home (Tripp et al., 2024). These results highlight that social communication can be taught and reinforced across developmental stages, and that interventions are individualized when embedded in naturalistic environments, such as classrooms.

From a behavioral science perspective, these developmental findings align with functional approaches. Many behaviors of concern, refusal, aggression, and withdrawal serve functions that can be replaced by social communication (Rubin et al., 2009). What developmental science adds is the confidence that students can learn these replacement skills when provided with consistent models, structured practice, and supportive responses. Thus, the pathway from social attention to social communicative competence to behavior regulation is both theoretically grounded and practically actionable.

Importantly, developmental evidence also underscores the need for tailoring. Attention-bias modification studies suggest that not all students respond uniformly. For example, children with co-occurring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder may show attenuated benefits from interventions that train attention to faces (Hofmann & Müller, 2022). This cautions against a one-size-fits-all approach and reinforces the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration. Psychologists can identify comorbidities, teachers can adapt routines, and SLPs can individualize social communicative goals within broader behavior plans.

For practitioners, the developmental message is empowering. Communication and behavior are not fixed traits but outcomes of interactional experience. By embedding social communicative routines, such as teaching refusal scripts, modeling repair moves, or creating structured opportunities for peer negotiation, school professionals can harness the same principles that drive developmental change in early childhood. In doing so, they reframe classrooms as engines of social communication growth, with downstream effects on behavior and inclusion.

Equity and Cultural and Linguistic Diversity

If social communication is central to behavior support, it follows that pragmatic goals must also reflect the linguistic and cultural diversity of students in inclusive schools. Yet behavior frameworks often assume a single set of communicative norms, leading to practices that inadvertently marginalize students from CALD backgrounds (Hernandez et al., 2023; Molla, 2025). An equitable approach requires affirming home languages, recognizing culturally specific social communicative forms, and resisting deficit assumptions that conflate difference with disorder.

Evidence from bilingualism research provides strong reassurance. For example, a longitudinal study of children with autism demonstrated that bilingual participants made comparable gains in social communication and language outcomes to their monolingual peers (Wang et al., 2017). Similarly, a randomized trial of a pre-emptive parent-mediated intervention found no empirical basis to discourage home language use. That is, children from bilingual families showed intervention gains on par with monolingual families (Whitehouse et al., 2021). For second language learners, research has shown that when students lack efficient syntactic-semantic (Han, 2020, 2024, 2025b) or pragmatic (Han, 2015; Tra et al., 2025) strategies for negotiating demands, repairing breakdowns, or seeking assistance, they are more likely to rely on less adaptive strategies to express these needs, which underscores the importance of foregrounding social communication within schoolwide prevention efforts. These findings directly challenge the persistent myth that home languages interfere with intervention progress. For schools, the implication is clear. Behavioral support anchored in social communication should not only tolerate but actively support bilingual and multilingual practices.

In many inclusive classrooms, where many immigrant and minoritized students bring distinct social communicative repertoires, this principle has particular resonance. Politeness conventions, patterns of turn-taking, and storytelling traditions vary across cultural groups. For example, refusing a request may be expressed indirectly in some cultures, while in others, a direct “no” is normative (Lu et al., 2025). If behavior matrices or pragmatic scripts only reflect mainstream Anglo norms, students may be penalized for following the social communicative rules of their community. Embedding culturally responsive scripts, developed with families and community partners, can increase the likelihood that social communicative goals align with students’ lived realities.

Equity considerations also extend to how behavioral incidents are interpreted. Research consistently shows that students from CALD backgrounds are over-represented in school suspensions and exclusions, in part because their communication behaviors are misread as defiance or disengagement (Siyambalapitiya et al., 2022). Positioning social communication at the heart of behavioral support provides a corrective. That is, rather than punishing difference, educators can teach, model, and scaffold communication in ways that respect cultural norms while giving all students tools to succeed in mainstream classrooms.

From an interdisciplinary perspective, equity requires collaboration. Teachers need guidance on recognizing culturally variable pragmatics, SLPs need to draw on sociolinguistics and community knowledge, and psychologists need to ensure that behavioral assessments are not biased against linguistic minorities. In this sense, equity is not a discrete add-on but a thread that runs through every tier of schoolwide support.

What a Communication-Driven Schoolwide Model Looks Like

To move from principle to practice, social communication must be embedded within the same tiered frameworks that schools already use for behavior, such as MTSS or SWPBIS. A tiered approach (i.e., Tier 1: universal supports; Tier 2: targeted supports; and Tier 3: individualized supports) increases the likelihood that communication support is not confined to students already identified with difficulties but is taught, modeled, and reinforced across the whole school. This can create a protective environment where all students learn social communicative tools for participation, while those at risk receive targeted and intensive support. Building on this rationale, this section describes the key components of a schoolwide framework that embeds social communication within existing behavior systems.

In terms of policy, for example, Tier 1 aligns with universal supports on school wellbeing and inclusion, where MTSS or SWPBIS frameworks explicitly emphasize prevention, equity, and access to instruction for students with diverse learning and behavioral needs (U.S. Department of Justice, 2015). At the universal level, classrooms should be designed to make social communication visible and rehearsed. Teachers can incorporate pragmatic scripts, such as how to ask for help, refuse politely, or repair misunderstandings, into the school’s behavior matrix alongside academic and social expectations. For example, “Use kind words” can be expanded into specific scripts like “Can you say that again?” or “I need help, please.” Embedding visuals for these scripts in classrooms and common spaces can reinforce consistency. Evidence shows that when communication routines are modeled and normalized at the classroom level, students demonstrate fewer socially disruptive behaviors and greater peer engagement (Laister et al., 2021). The role of the SLP here is capacity-building, that is, co-creating routines, training staff, and modeling social communicative moves within classroom lessons.

These universal communication routines also reflect the preventive logic of functional communication training (FCT; Tiger et al., 2008), in which students learn socially appropriate, efficient alternatives to behaviors that may otherwise escalate. Although FCT is often associated with individualized intervention, its core principles, that is, modeling functional communication, prompting appropriate requests, and reinforcing communicative attempts, are equally relevant at Tier 1. For example, recent work highlights that learners with communication needs and other health comorbidities benefit from schoolwide approaches that explicitly link communication, identity, and participation, with communication routines serving as an important equity mechanism within inclusive systems (Han, 2025a; Han & Wang, 2025). Therefore, when these elements are embedded universally, teachers reduce the likelihood of escalation by ensuring that all students have access to simple, effective ways to get their needs met (Johnson, 2002). For teachers, this means that everyday classroom prompts, visuals, and language routines become proactive behavior-prevention tools, not just communication supports (LaRue et al., 2009).

For students at elevated risk of behavior difficulties, small-group interventions at Tier 2 can provide explicit practice in social communicative skills such as turn-taking, negotiation, and perspective-taking. Cognitive-based social communication programs for adolescents, for example, have demonstrated improvements in conversational flexibility and problem-solving that generalize across school and home (Tripp et al., 2024). School professionals can adapt such approaches into short, regular group sessions that fit within timetables, often delivered by teachers or learning support staff with SLP guidance. Peer-mediated approaches, where students practice pragmatic moves in structured play or discussion groups, are especially powerful, as they extend practice into authentic social contexts.

At the intensive level at Tier 3, pragmatic goals should be written directly into individual behavior support plans. Functional behavior assessments often identify the purpose of a behavior, such as gaining attention or escaping a task, but replacement behaviors are not always framed as communication acts. Reframing goals in pragmatic terms (e.g., teaching “I need a break” instead of reducing “refusal”) ensures that replacements are both functional and generalizable. Studies in special education contexts demonstrate that communication-focused goals are associated with reductions in challenging behavior and improvements in social participation (Laister et al., 2021). Speech-language pathologists can play a key role in selecting appropriate replacement forms which are spoken, gestural, or Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC)-based. These specialists can also coach staff to prompt and reinforce these replacement forms consistently.

A communication-informed tiered system requires that teachers and SLPs work in clearly defined, complementary ways across universal, targeted, and intensive supports. At Tier 1, teachers play the central role in establishing predictable, communication-rich classrooms. They introduce, model, and reinforce pragmatic routines that all students can use to seek help, negotiate turns, repair misunderstandings, and participate successfully. These routines are embedded across daily lessons so that communication opportunities occur naturally and frequently. Teachers also provide whole-class visual prompts, shared scripts, and consistent language for expectations, and ensure that students experience communication as an accessible tool rather than as a reactive strategy used only when problems arise. Within this universal tier, the SLPs contribute by co-designing or reviewing scripts and routines, supporting teachers in identifying the communication demands of classroom activities, and helping to ensure that universal practices are linguistically inclusive for diverse learners.

At Tier 2, teachers and SLPs collaborate more closely to support students who need additional practice or scaffolding. Teachers typically implement short-term, small-group practice sessions in which students rehearse pragmatic scripts, receive guided practice, and experience increased modeling of functional communication. Teachers also use simple data tools to track students’ communicative success in real time, such as noting whether the student can initiate a request or complete a conversational routine with minimal prompting. The SLP supports this work by refining scripts, aligning them with communicative functions, and offering coaching to ensure that instructional language and prompts are clear, accessible, and responsive to the student’s developmental profile. In this tier, the partnership focuses on ensuring that targeted routines genuinely serve as efficient alternatives to escalating behavior.

At Tier 3, teachers and SLPs work jointly to embed communication goals inside individual behavior support plans. Teachers carry out daily practice of individualized communication scripts, including AAC-based routines where appropriate. They document successes, challenges, and contextual factors that influence the student’s ability to use the strategy effectively. Speech-language pathologists take the lead on designing high-support communication routines, monitoring AAC use, analyzing communicative function, and adapting scripts so that they remain meaningful and efficient for the student. Together, teachers and SLPs coordinate with psychologists and behavior specialists to ensure that communication goals and behavioral goals are aligned, not competing. Tier 3 thus becomes the point where communication and behavior planning converge most explicitly, where the teacher ensures consistent daily use, while the SLP ensures communicative fidelity, accessibility, and functional relevance.

Across all tiers, this shared division of labor emphasizes that communication is fundamental to behavior support. Teachers provide the daily instructional presence, while SLPs bring the specialized knowledge needed to analyze communicative demands and design accessible alternatives. When these roles are integrated coherently across the continuum, school professionals can proactively strengthen students’ communication repertoires and reduce escalation before it occurs.

Therefore, by embedding social communication within a schoolwide tiered model, educators can prevent escalation, reduce inequities in discipline, and build inclusive environments where every student has the tools to participate. This integration marks a shift from reactive behavior management to proactive communication support, an interdisciplinary practice that is both evidence-informed and practically achievable.

How Educational Professionals Put Communication Into Action

This section turns to implementation, focusing on how teachers, SLPs, psychologists, behavior specialists, and school leaders can work together to embed social communication within behavioral support practices.

In many jurisdictions, inclusive education is underpinned by disability and education legislation. For example, in Australia, it is legislated through the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Attorney-General’s Department, 2018) and the Disability Standards for Education 2005 (Attorney-General’s Department, 2005); and in the United States through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004), which mandates access to appropriate supports and services within general education settings. Under such frameworks, SLPs, psychologists, and educators share responsibility for ensuring equitable participation and behavior support for all learners. However, while behavior interventions have proliferated, social communication rarely features in these systemic approaches.

Embedding social communication into schoolwide behavior support, therefore, is not the responsibility of any single professional. It depends on structured collaboration between teachers, SLPs, psychologists, and families. Without a clear framework for how teams share information and plan together, communication goals risk remaining peripheral to behavior interventions. Sustainable practice requires tools and routines that make collaboration predictable, practical, and inclusive.

One promising approach is the use of structured review tools to guide team meetings. Tripp et al. (2024) showed that when teachers and allied health staff used action-oriented review formats, they were able to maintain focus on communication targets, behavior goals, and student progress simultaneously. In line with SWPBIS (Konstantinidou et al., 2023) and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines (National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, 2015), such reviews work best when they are person-centered and interdisciplinary, which increases the likelihood that communication goals are considered alongside environmental modifications, health needs, and family priorities.

In many school systems, interdisciplinary teams typically include teachers, SLPs, school psychologists or counselors, behavior specialists, special educators, and school administrators, often supported by paraprofessionals or instructional aides (Childress, 2019). Collaboration across general education, special education, related services, and administration is central to MTSS and IDEA implementation. School professionals can adopt a simple traffic-light template to guide discussion. Teams identify what is working well (green), what requires monitoring (amber), and what needs urgent action (red) across domains such as communication, behavior, environment, and family input. This structure keeps meetings efficient and action-focused, while reducing the risk of communication being sidelined by immediate behavior concerns. Importantly, the tool should be flexible, that is, educators and families emphasize that rigid agendas undermine person-centredness and responsiveness to local context. Allowing flexibility while maintaining a shared structure can strike a balance between consistency and adaptability (Siyambalapitiya et al., 2022). Supplemental Table 2 includes illustrative examples to support teachers in observing, prompting, and documenting communication–behavior interactions in everyday classroom routines.

Collaboration must also extend beyond formal meetings. Informal coaching, co-teaching, and quick debriefs are critical for embedding pragmatic practices across tiers. For example, an SLP might model a refusal script during a classroom activity, while the teacher observes and later practices prompting the same script independently. Psychologists can contribute by mapping how social communicative routines align with SEL goals, therefore, increasing the likelihood of consistency across supports. Involving families closes the loop, too, in that parents can reinforce scripts at home, while providing feedback about cultural fit and generalization.

The interdisciplinary payoff is also significant. Teachers gain tools to address behavior proactively rather than punitively. Psychologists see social-emotional targets supported through functional communication. Speech-language pathologists extend their impact from individual therapy sessions to whole-school practice. And families experience a coherent, consistent approach across home and school. This convergence can strengthen outcomes for students, reduce duplication, improve efficiency, and foster a shared sense of accountability.

Ultimately, teamwork is the mechanism by which social communication becomes behavior support. Without collaboration, pragmatic targets risk being isolated clinical goals. With collaboration, pragmatic targets become everyday classroom practices that are taught, reinforced, and valued across the school community.

To support teachers and school teams seeking accessible, evidence-informed guidance on social communication and behavior support, Supplemental Table 3 summarizes key practitioner resources from international professional bodies, behavior support organizations, and speech–language associations. These resources offer practical tools, examples, and training materials that align with the schoolwide framework discussed in this article.

Following a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach, schools need assessment practices that allow them to see communication and behavior as interdependent rather than as separate domains. When communication is foregrounded, measures of progress must move beyond traditional academic or behavior counts to reflect the communicative functions that students use across the school day. Hollo and Chow (2015) demonstrated that many challenging behaviors commonly observed in students with high-incidence disabilities serve identifiable communicative functions, yet these functions are rarely monitored systematically within schoolwide frameworks. Their work highlights a crucial implication for practice. That is, when teachers and school teams understand why a student is using a particular behavior communicatively, they can plan Tier 1 and Tier 2 supports that anticipate needs rather than simply respond to escalation.

A communicative lens, therefore, requires data systems that capture both the behaviors students use and the communicative alternatives they are learning over time. This dual focus allows teachers, psychologists, behavior specialists, and SLPs to track whether students are gaining access to more efficient, socially acceptable strategies to get help, negotiate tasks, or express refusal. Embedding communication within measurement also supports a more equitable approach for CALD learners, for whom behavior may be misinterpreted when communicative intent is not explicitly assessed. Rather than relying solely on frequency counts or office discipline referrals, school teams benefit from simple, classroom-based tools that reveal whether a student is able to use a functional communication strategy and whether that strategy is effective in reducing behavioral escalation. These data offer a practical and accessible form of progress monitoring that aligns with universal prevention, small-group instruction, and individualized supports.

The interdisciplinary focus also underscores the need for tools that teachers can use easily during daily instruction, not only during formal meetings or assessments. Short, observable indicators, such as whether a student can request help without escalation, repair a communication breakdown, or negotiate a turn, provide a richer and more instructionally relevant picture of progress than behavioral counts alone. They also provide the evidence required for timely instructional adjustments across tiers of support. When teachers, psychologists, behavior specialists, and SLPs use shared indicators of social communication growth, teams develop a unified understanding of student needs and a coherent pathway for decision-making.

Even with strong interdisciplinary collaboration and communication-based monitoring tools, there is substantial room for research to refine and strengthen this approach. Hollo and Chow (2015) argue that although communicative functions of behavior are well established conceptually, much less is known about how school teams can reliably identify and respond to these functions within routine classroom practice. Research is needed to clarify the most efficient and feasible indicators of communicative progress at Tier 1, where preventive work has the greatest impact but is least studied. There is also a need to examine how dual-tracking systems influence teacher decision-making, intervention fidelity, and the sustainability of practices over time. For CALD students, further studies should investigate how communication-focused measures can reduce disproportionality in behavior referrals and support a more accurate understanding of communicative intent.

Future work should also examine how interdisciplinary implementation unfolds in varied school contexts. While this article outlines a conceptual model for integrating communication and behavior within schoolwide frameworks, research is needed to determine the supports, training structures, and leadership conditions that enable teachers, SLPs, psychologists, and behavior specialists to use these practices consistently and collaboratively. Implementation studies could explore how schools build shared professional language, how communication-informed strategies are adapted for students with complex communication needs, and how schoolwide systems can ensure consistency across general and special education settings.

A final area for research relates to the efficiency and impact of universal communication instruction. Although there is emerging evidence that universal pragmatic instruction can strengthen students’ access to the curriculum and reduce behavior escalation (Alduais et al., 2022), large-scale studies examining its effects within SWPBIS or MTSS frameworks remain limited. Understanding how Tier 1 communication routines interact with Tier 2 and Tier 3 supports, and how teams can use data to adjust the intensity and focus of instruction, will be critical to refining this model. Hollo and Chow’s (2015) emphasis on functional communicative intent provides a compelling rationale, and future research has the opportunity to extend this work by evaluating schoolwide practices that explicitly teach and reinforce communication alternatives across diverse classrooms.

Overall, these considerations point to a significant need for continued inquiry into the communication–behavior interface at every tier of support. A schoolwide model that embeds social communication has the potential to reduce escalation, strengthen relationships, and improve equity for diverse learners, but its success depends on sustained interdisciplinary teamwork and robust evidence that guides implementation. Strengthening the research base in these areas will help schools build the capacity needed to deliver communication-informed behavior support that is both practical and effective.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-bbx-10.1177_10742956261420834 – Supplemental material for Social Communication as Behavior Support: A Language Professional-Led, Schoolwide Approach in Inclusive Schools

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-bbx-10.1177_10742956261420834 for Social Communication as Behavior Support: A Language Professional-Led, Schoolwide Approach in Inclusive Schools by Weifeng Han in Beyond Behavior