Reaching Struggling Learners
Reaching Struggling Learners
#94: Streamlining Success for All Learners with MTSS Insights
Ever wondered how educators can pinpoint and tackle the unique challenges faced by struggling students? Join me on the Reaching Struggling Learners podcast, where we unravel the mysteries of educational interventions within MTSS and RTI frameworks. We delve into what it takes to set realistic student progress expectations and the art of crafting targeted goals that connect with the core of a student's learning gaps. With the right interventions in play, we observe the transformative journey of student improvement, where meaningful strides become noticeable in as little as six to nine weeks. But what happens when improvement stalls? We'll explore the common pitfalls and how to steer clear, ensuring that your teaching strategies are not only effective but also adaptable to the evolving needs of every learner.
So, pull up a chair, pour that much-needed coffee, and let's prepare to close out the year with strategies that aren't just theories but practical tools for real classroom heroes like you. Together, we're setting the stage for success, not just for the final stretch but for the journey ahead.
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Links Mentioned in the Show:
https://teachingstrugglinglearners.com
5 Steps to Getting Started with Progress Monitoring
So MTSS and RTI have been touted for years as the way to student improvement, but how quickly can we really expect progress? At what kind of rate of improvement should we even be looking for? That's what I'd like to talk about with you today. That's what I'd like to talk about with you 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. The core question that we should be asking ourselves in every meeting is how do we know if what we're doing is effective? There has to be no doubt in everyone's mind that the intervention that we're using is effective or not, because if it is, there's going to be significant progress over time. The chart, the data, all the information that we collect from the progress monitoring if we're doing it right again, it all should be going up and it should be going up pretty quickly. For example, if our goal is that the student will be able to identify X number of letters or letter sounds, that student should be making pretty quick progress on that. They should be learning a few more letters or letter sounds a week. If our goal was that the student would be able to do X number of math facts weekly or X number of math facts in a minute, we should be seeing weekly or biweekly progress on that on the graphs. All of that is dependent on how good our goals are and whether our goals are targeted at the correct skill gap the most foundational skill and if the intervention that we have chosen is most effective for that skill. Now, if you have questions about how to progress monitor, I want to encourage you to pick up my five steps to beginning progress monitoring. There's also a whole bunch of podcast episodes and I will link them in the show notes today, but you need to go back if you have any questions whatsoever on how to choose your goals, how to write effective goals, how to figure out what skill you want you really, really need to be focusing on Today. When we're talking about the rate of improvement, I am assuming that we've made good goals. I'm assuming that you have that under your belt and that you know how, that you're following the procedures for collecting consistent data and the data you're collecting is on the skill gap that you're focusing on. All of that, if you take all of that into consideration, if you have a goal that is focused on what the student actually needs to work on the most significant foundational skill and you are progress monitoring that skill and your intervention is focused on filling the gaps for that foundational skill, you should see pretty fast improvement. The fact is, if we are honed in on the correct thing, the students are really primed to make really fast improvement. We should see pretty quick improvement. We should see significant gains over a six to nine week period.
Speaker 1:Now if the data is stagnant or goodness knows if it's going down Again, assuming that nothing crazy is going on, for example oh goodness, hopefully not a TBI or there's something going on at home, something you know, a divorce, or something just ridiculous is going on. Assuming that everything else is pretty normal, then a couple things could be happening. Either the skill focus for the goal or the intervention was wrong or we are using the wrong intervention. That's really all it is. Assuming that the student has, you know, average intelligence. Kids learn quickly. So over a nine-week period they really should see some significant improvement. Now I realize that that can be different for different things, for example, and it also depends on the age that you're working with. If you're working with elementary school students and you're working with letter sounds, you should see some pretty quick improvement. If you're working with high schoolers and you are working on them understanding the different definitions for prefixes and suffixes, that might take a little bit longer because that's a little bit more complicated skill that you're trying to teach the students. But again, over a six to nine week period you should see those graphs or the progress monitoring data going up pretty, pretty quickly. It should not be a real stagnant line If the goal and the intervention are focused on the skill that you are working on. So yeah, we've all heard that whole whole thing. Yeah, slow but steady wins the race. Not here, not here, it doesn't Not here. If the skill that we're working on is truly a foundational skill gap and it's broken down into the small section that it should be, then progress on that skill should be really significant.
Speaker 1:Now, a couple reasons that we might not see progress again is when the goal is muddy or unclear. So meaning we have lots of skills in it and if you go back to previous podcast episodes, we do that fairly regularly that we'll write a goal that has a bunch of different stuff in it. We'll say that we want the student to be able to identify all the letter sounds and be able to read CVC words. Well, no, which do you want? Which is your actual goal for the student? Do you want the child to be able to read CVC words? Well, you shouldn't be asking them to blend CVC words unless they know all their letter sounds. So your goal really should be that the student will be able to identify all the letter sounds. You should not be mixing multiple goals into one goal, because again, that just muddies the water for what you're trying to progress monitor.
Speaker 1:Another reason that you might see less progress is the intervention tries to work on too many skills at once. So there are a lot of especially reading intervention programs out there and they want you to do a little bit of everything. They want you to spend 10 minutes on phonics and then they want you to spend 10 minutes doing sight words, and then they want you to spend 10 minutes doing fluency, and then they want to divide up the time. Well, the reality is, if the child is working on, or you have identified that the child is struggling with, letter sounds, then that's what we should be spending our time on. We should be working in small time frame spurts of very intensive work on that skill gap. We shouldn't be trying to spend all this time on things that we haven't identified as the struggle for the student. We need to be focused in our interventions. The interventions are just kind of when you see an intervention that is trying to do all the things at once in a very short amount of time. That's not helping anybody move forward. It really isn't.
Speaker 1:If we really want our students to make fast progress and fill those skill gaps, we have to be laser focused in our intervention time only on working on that skill gap, which means they should be making progress pretty quickly. Because, again, we should be very intense in our work in that skill gap area. We should be spending the entire time that we have set aside to teach the student the new sight words, if that's the goal, or teach them to blend sounds together, if that's our goal. But that's what our time should be. We shouldn't be doing this array of intervention time things just to fill the time.
Speaker 1:If we have identified that the child is struggling in phonics, well by golly gee, we should be spending our time on phonics. We shouldn't be working on sight words, fluency and comprehension at the same time, they can get that stuff in the classroom. We have to focus on the very specific skill that that we have identified as the root of the problem. So if the intervention doesn't focus on the skill or goal at all which I have sat in some meetings where there's been a lot of confusion, mostly for me where the school has said we are going to use this intervention program, but then the teachers have identified that the goal, the skill that the child is missing, is missing, not covered by that intervention program. Well then the teachers look at me and go well, what are we supposed to do? Well, you're supposed to work on the skill that we've identified.
Speaker 1:If we never address the skill that we have identified as the root of the problem, the child is not going to make progress. It's just not going to happen. It doesn't matter how many times you work on trying to blend CVC words or teach kids digraphs or anything blends, whatever it is, if they don't know their letter sounds, you're not going to make progress, you're not going to make the progress. You're not going to make the progress that the children need or deserve to make. So we have to make sure that the intervention that we choose focuses on the skill and doesn't just disregard it.
Speaker 1:Another example of this is sometimes we will see at the high school level, students unfortunately right now don't know their phonics because we didn't teach it to them for various reasons back in elementary and middle school and at the high school level I have had teachers look at me and say, well, we can't work on that, that's for elementary school. We have to work on that. That's for elementary school. We have to work on comprehension. Working on comprehension is not going to help your student who can't sound out words. It's not going to.
Speaker 1:So if you want the child to make progress, you have to focus on the skill area that is the root of the problem. Again, if you have any questions on how to identify these things, there are a lot of previous podcast episodes where I've talked about getting to the root of the problem. You can use screener data to figure out where you want to start and also again pick up my freebie the five steps to getting started with progress monitoring. That is an excellent place to start with all this, but the reality is we got to make sure that we are identifying the correct skill and then working on that skill. And then, finally, another reason, the final reason that we might be seeing less progress than we really should or it's not as quick as it should be, is the goal. Or skill wasn't the most foundational skill gap? So, if you're finding that, if you're looking at it and going, yeah, we had a goal, the goal that we set is addressed by the intervention program that we have in place. The intervention program is absolutely working on that skill. We've been collecting our data so we don't understand why the child isn't making progress. And they're an intelligent child. We need to make sure that the goal that we chose originally is the actual foundational skill.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we kind of assume, a lot of times we assume that the children are struggling because we'll I hear it a lot, especially at the secondary level they need to increase their fluency. We need to get their fluency rate up. Okay, what is causing the fluency rate to be low? Oh, is it because they can't sound out words? Is it because they don't know their sight words? We got to look at it, you have to. And then when you realize that, oh, we've been working on fluency, or, let's be honest, a lot of times it's we've been working on fluency or, let's be honest, a lot of times it's. We've been working on comprehension and you start to dig into it. Well, the comprehension is bad because the fluency rates are so low. The fluency is slow because the students don't have decoding skills. The students can't decode words because they don't know their basic phonics, the letter sounds. They don't know the sounds that the digraphs make. They don't know how to blend the sounds together. They never learn these things. Oh well, they're struggling with the letter sounds because they have a hard time hearing the different sounds in the words. We're getting down into phonemic awareness at that point.
Speaker 1:So you have to make sure even though it doesn't matter what grade you're talking about or what age you're talking about, you have to make sure that the goal that you are working on is the most foundational skill gap, because it all builds. Working on is the most foundational skill gap because it all builds. I've said it, I don't even know how many times I've given the analogy of you would never buy a house that only had 80% of the foundation. You want your house to have 100% of the foundation so that you can have 100% of the walls, so that you can have 100% of your roof. You have to have all those things that don't seem significant. We don't, on a daily basis, think about the foundations of our house until our foundation starts settling and cracks start forming. We have to make sure that we have a good, solid foundation for our students and if they don't have that, then we have to dig in and we have to shore it up. We have to fix those skill gaps so that our students can be successful.
Speaker 1:So I will link a whole bunch of previous episodes that I have done talking about you know how to get started in progress, monitoring how to choose your goals, how to choose your skills. And again, if you're really getting started with this or think that this might be an area of weakness for your MTSS team especially, check out the episode where we talk about how to use screeners, how to use those screeners to choose your goals, to choose your foundational skills. They can definitely be very helpful in identifying those weak areas for your students. So next week we're going to start talking about MTSS as a system and how it should look in the school as a whole, and I can't wait to start talking about that because we're going to start breaking down MTSS and what it should look like in the different subject areas and how it can really be helpful for all of our students.
Speaker 1:And even next month I want to I've actually started writing it down I want to start talking about absenteeism and MTSS. So we've got some really interesting things coming up in the next few weeks that can be really helpful as we end this school year and you can start, we can start thinking about how we will make MTSS what we want it to be as we go into the next school year. Until next time, may your coffee be strong, your students calm and the end of your year successful. Bye.