Reaching Struggling Learners
Reaching Struggling Learners
#91: Exploring the Layers of Support: A Deep Dive into the Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) Framework
Embark on an educational journey with me, as we unravel the complexities of the Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework, a cornerstone in supporting the diverse needs of students. Guaranteed to enlighten educators and parents alike, this episode is a deep dive into the world of MTSS, where we break down the essential tiers that frame a student's learning environment. From the all-encompassing Tier 1, which sets the stage with core curriculum and behavior expectations, to Tier 2's targeted strategies for students needing that extra push, we leave no stone unturned. With an emphasis on refining core instruction to enhance support for every learner, particularly in critical areas like phonics and math fluency, this conversation promises to arm you with the insights necessary for building a robust educational foundation.
As we progress through the tiers, the spotlight turns to the often-overlooked champions of education: paraprofessionals and aides. Despite the absence of certification, their role in delivering individualized, data-driven support through Tier 3 interventions is instrumental in helping students who are significantly trailing their peers. And while we acknowledge the hurdles educators face, especially in sourcing quality interventions for math and writing, the conversation is imbued with appreciation for these dedicated individuals who often lead the charge in driving student success. Make sure to tune in for a heartfelt tribute to those who shape our learners’ futures, and a sneak peek into our next discussion that aims to dispel common misconceptions about the MTSS framework while celebrating the continuous advancement of our students.
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5 Steps to Getting Started with Progress Monitoring
If you're involved in education in any way, shape or form, you probably hear a lot about MTSS or maybe in your school it's RTI the different data meetings and you know you have to go to those meetings MTSS meetings. You got to collect the data, you have to report on it. You have to report on it. But what exactly is MTSS? There's a lot of incorrect information going on around out there and there's a lot of assumptions about MTSS that I'd really like to clear up today. Hi, I'm Jessica Curtis of Teaching Struggling Learners. I'm a boy mom and a veteran teacher. You're listening to the Reaching Struggling Learners podcast, where we talk all about helping students succeed academically, socially and behaviorally. Thank you so much for tuning in. So the straight up definition of MTSS is it's a multi-tiered system of support. What it really means is MTSS is just a framework, a system that helps schools to identify students who are struggling and then provide appropriate supports for those students based on what those kids actually need. It's three different tiers of support. What a lot of schools or a lot of support. What a lot of schools or a lot of misunderstanding with MTSS is. Believe it or not, every single student in a school is a part of quote-unquote MTSS, and the reason for this is every single student, whether they're a student with special needs, a student who is just has to be provided tier one instruction. Every single student gets tier one curriculum. That's the basic curriculum, that is the standards that every single teacher has to teach. That is what every single student in the school is exposed to and expected to learn. And so, for example, if you're, you know, a second grade teacher, the second grade curriculum, whatever that is is that's your tier one. By the way, this is also true for behavior. So a lot of schools are implementing, like PBIS, instruction for behavior. So if you have a school-wide or a class-wide, you know money program or rewards program or something for behavior, that's a tier one intervention. That's something to kind of keep in mind. If you're sitting in meetings talking about ways that you know you've supported your students. If you have, you know, like a class box or a treasure chest, or if the kids earn, you know, so many behavior points, they get to have an ice cream every quarter, whatever it is, that is that's a tier one thing. If it's something that every single student in the school, or the grade level or the classroom, depending on what level you're looking at. If every single kid is participating in that, that is a tier one intervention.
Speaker 1:Now, I've talked about it in previous, the last couple episodes. I truly believe that one of the things we have to do is we need to start implementing a whole lot better tier one program. The curriculum, the base curriculum, needs to be improved in reading. One of the things and I know we're starting to really get into this now, but we need to have phonics. There has to be phonics instruction. That should be a basic part of ELA, starting in kindergarten, and go on up For math. We need to get back to doing fluency. I know we've, you know, gone over the whole drill and kill thing, but the reality is the students don't know how to add and subtract fluently and that's making it really hard on them later on. That should be a tier one instructional thing. We need to beef up our tier one, but right now I'm not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the whole MTSS process. But the big thing to remember tier one for MTSS is every single student in the school. For MTSS is every single student in the school, it's every student in the classroom. Tier one is grade level differentiation. If you're sitting in, you know your reading class and you've got your little groups, that's tier one. If the basic information is still at the grade level, even though there's high, medium and low within the grade level band, that's a tier one intervention.
Speaker 1:Okay, next up is tier two, and this is for students who have been identified, usually through your pre-mid-post universal screeners that you do at the beginning, middle and end of the year. But these are students who need a little bit extra help. These kids aren't super low, they're still within the grade level band. They're probably doing okay in class, but they're struggling a little bit. They're having a hard time with reading. They're not able to keep up with the reading because they need a little bit extra, which is what the tier two interventions should be providing. And so this would be for students who need maybe two or three extra, a little bit of support to fill in gaps during the week. So maybe they need to have some phonics lessons retaught to them and then you need to figure out okay, maybe they need a little bit of extra practice with their math fluency, those kinds of things.
Speaker 1:It shouldn't be massively different from what is happening in the classroom, the subject area, I should say the skills. Now, obviously, as you get older and older and older, if you're working with high school students who are not able to read, well, obviously you're not going to be in tier two, you're not going to be working on Shakespeare, but you definitely do still want to have at the lower grades. It should be pretty close if a student is only working at tier two, close if a student is only working at tier two. Again, with tier two, you have to identify the skill gaps. You figure out what is the most foundational skill gap and you start to work. You figure out what program or what activities would help most quickly fill that skill gap.
Speaker 1:You work on it and you check the progress and every six to nine weeks you report and say hey, either this intervention is really working, the student is right on track and hopefully won't need this intervention soon, or you're going oh, it's not really working the way we wanted it to. The student isn't making enough progress. We should talk about more intensive interventions. Progress we should talk about more intensive interventions. Most states, schools, districts, they require that you do an assessment, a progress monitoring task, for tier two at least once every other week. So bi-weekly checks to see is that student making progress, and part of that is because it's not as intense of a intervention as what they'll get at tier two, but also because or get it tier three, I should say, but also at tier two the students are a lot closer to grade level. Usually if they're just working at tier two then they're usually it's usually working at closer to grade level. So take a little bit more for them, a little bit longer to catch up, but they should still be making good progress and hopefully wouldn't would be making enough progress that hopefully soon, you know, within the next six months or so maybe wouldn't even need tier two intervention, wouldn't need this intervention anymore. That would be the hope.
Speaker 1:Then we have tier three. This is for students where tier two wasn't enough. The students were not filling those gaps far quickly enough. Maybe they're a couple years behind grade level and so they're far enough behind that they're really, really struggling to do what they need to do in the classroom setting, in that tier one classroom curriculum setting, and so for those students to be able to get those gaps filled they need, more than a couple times a week, 30 minutes of support. They really need it four to five days a week and they need a smaller group setting because they're they're they're farther behind.
Speaker 1:We've got to be intense with this, with they're at tier three, because these are kids that are they're far enough behind that, hey, when it comes down to it, these babies really can't, they can't do what they need to do in the Tier 1 curriculum because they have so many or such deep skill gaps that we have to fill, and these are the students that we really, really, really got to work with. So the work that we're going to do in this Tier 3 intervention setting, it's going to be more individualized, with that smaller group setting and because it's so much more intense and it's so much more individualized for that child, that's when we're also going to be collecting data more regularly. We're going to collect data at the tier three level on a weekly basis because, man, these kids at tier three, they're the ones that are really, really struggling If they're not making progress over a two or three week period. We got to change our intervention because these babies don't have time to waste sitting floundering. We got to get them going, okay. So that's really the difference between tier one, tier two and tier three. That's really the difference between tier one, tier two and tier three, and that encompasses that whole, all of those groupings of kids. That encompasses every single student in school at tier one. And then you got the kids who are they're struggling a little bit. We got to help them, and then you got the ones who are really struggling and we really need to help these babies. So, but that's the whole system kind of broken down.
Speaker 1:And a lot of times MTSS is depicted as a triangle and you have, you know, the base with the most amount is tier one, which is everybody. Tier two is usually, you know, a smaller area in the middle, but it's not a massive chunk of the population. And then, of course, tier three should be a minimal amount of students. Now, if you're thinking back to the last couple podcast episodes where we were talking about, you know like 70% of our students are, they are struggling. Well, that's not the way that MTSS was ever meant to deal with that. It's basically at that point you've got almost a flip triangle where you've got a very small amount of the student population that doesn't need additional supports and you have a whole bunch who do need extra support and do have some significant skill gaps there.
Speaker 1:So when it comes to MTSS, with the testing and the meetings usually weekly meetings to talk about student progress and all that most schools focus on reading. And there's a lot of reasons for that, the main one being, quite frankly, there is a lot more money, school budgets and all that put toward reading. There have been historically, way more laws and resolutions and things passed by states and school boards and all that that focus on reading. And you know that's, let's be honest, where the money goes, that's where the focus goes. So there are a lot of reading interventions out there that are available for schools and districts to buy. There are way fewer for math.
Speaker 1:It's hard, I'll be honest. It's hard to find good quality math interventions. But it's even harder to find writing interventions. Now, behavior interventions, those can either be really good or really bad, those as a school district and all that you really want to figure out what you want to invest your money in. But I'll be honest, it is. It is really hard. I can't even think of a single good, high quality math intervention program or writing intervention program that I would recommend at this point. Would recommend at this point. But again, part of the reason for that is there's just not money in that. So the schools don't have a whole lot of extra money to throw for math interventions, that kind of thing and therefore you know the curriculum companies aren't going to create that. It's sad but it is true.
Speaker 1:States and districts all have different rules for who can lead the intervention groups. They also have rules on what interventions they're allowed to use and all that stuff. But especially when it comes to who can provide the interventions themselves, sometimes they also have rules on you know how long the interventions go for, how long the intervention time is. They have rules about how often. Some school districts are only required tier two to be two to three days a week. Some I've seen that tier two had to be five days a week. It just depends on what your district has going on and some districts even will mandate the specific reading interventions or progress monitoring that they're supposed to use.
Speaker 1:My own personal opinion on that, based on what I have seen in multiple states we are wasting really good resources by limiting who leads these groups. A lot of states and districts that I have been in they have said you cannot have, you have to have a teacher, a certified teacher, teaching intervention programs, teaching tier two and tier three classes. Because of that, I can also say that there have been some fantastic aides who, quite frankly, were better at teaching interventions than the intervention teachers that were not allowed to lead intervention groups. There are some absolutely fantastic paraprofessional aides out there in schools who are they are just reading or math or writing gurus. They are absolutely fantastic, partially because they've been working with students with special needs. They've been working with struggling students for so long. They get into their little minds and they know how to teach these kids and how to get the point across, how to get them moving to the next level.
Speaker 1:I really think that if we really get serious about thinking outside the box when it comes to fixing MTSS and making this entire system more doable and more effective, we have to start trusting some of the amazing people that we have in our schools and stop looking at, hey, this person has this amazing degree. Therefore, they absolutely must be the only person that teaches this. Absolutely must be the only person that teaches this. Well, I mean, quite frankly, I have sat in high schools where the reading specialist teachers they didn't actually know how to teach kids how to read. They knew how to teach kids who could read, who had the basics, who could decode and who could did have sight words and all that. They could teach them how to improve their reading and improve their comprehension, but they did not know how to take a child from illiterate to literate, whereas we also had a couple aides in the building and in the district who were fantastic because they had worked at elementary levels, in the kindergarten, first grade classrooms and they had watched years and years of children learning how to read. They knew how to bridge that gap, they knew how to teach those kids how to read, but they weren't allowed to be the tier two and tier three interventionist. So those kids really missed out, not because their teachers, the certified teachers, were bad, but that's not what those certified teachers went to college to learn how to do.
Speaker 1:I really think we have to really start looking at being smarter about this and, quite frankly, especially for the districts that mandate hey, this is the intervention program that you should use. As long as it's someone who is cleared by the school district. Obviously we don't want, you know, just Joe Schmo coming in off the street, but as long as they are someone who is, we have said yes, you are allowed to work with our students. We believe that you are a good candidate to work with our students. They're trained, know how to use the intervention. As long as they're seeing results, I'd say we should just be thankful we have them and let them teach what they are passionate about.
Speaker 1:Because, let's be honest, whether it's a certified teacher or a teacher's aide, a parapro, whatever it is, if they're good at teaching kids how to read or how to do basic math or how to do writing, why in the world, with so many students who are struggling, why would we stop them from doing that? It just doesn't make sense. So I really think we have to kind of get outside the box a little bit. Stop thumbing our noses at people who are maybe they don't have the certification, maybe they don't have the advanced college degree and all that, but if they're really good at what they do, maybe we should appreciate that. So next week we are going to talk about the purpose behind NTSS and yeah, it seems pretty obvious, but we're going to talk about that because there are some misunderstandings when it comes to that. Until next time, may your coffee be strong, your students calm and, of course, your students progressing. Bye.