SUSTAINing Special Educators to Serve Students with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders: An Intervention Development Study

Special education teachers’ working conditions are associated with instructional practices, burnout, and retention. As such, working conditions represent a malleable factor which can support a robust special education teacher workforce. To our knowledge, however, there exist no comprehensive interventions designed to both identify challenges for special educators’ working conditions and generate feasible solutions. We provide an overview of the process by which we adapted an existing working conditions intervention for employees in other fields to be relevant for special educators of students with emotional and behavioral disorders, who often report unmanageable workloads. With the goal of informing researchers’ intervention development efforts, we detail our implementation of a design-based research process to guide our rapid iterative development cycles. Through interviews and surveys with constituents, we generated initial answers to our design-based research questions. We provide these findings as well as key takeaways from the iterative design-based research process for intervention development.