As a new teacher, you will be expected to understand and join school-wide initiatives that are meant to support the learning of all students. Our talk with Colleen Pringle, data coach at Haslett Middle School, was an awesome introduction to those practices as they exist in our host school.
MTSS, which stands for Multi-Tiered System of Support, is a system meant to track progress for all students--but with particular attention to those students who have traditionally fallen through the cracks. As this article explains, MTSS is "the practice of providing high-quality instruction and interventions matched to student need, monitoring progress frequently to make decisions about changes in instruction or goals, and applying child response data to important educational decisions."
MTSS has both an academic component and a behavioral or social component. On its academic side, it has incorporated a movement called RTI (Response to Intervention). On its behavioral side, it has incorporated a movement called PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports).
On the academic side, MTSS' most fundamental characteristic, and the one that most departs from past school practices, is universal screening. What we mean by this is that the progress of every child is monitored, mainly in the key areas of literacy and numeracy. We saw that HMS does this three times a year. Depending on how a child performs, there are various levels of intervention that will take place.
On the behavioral side, MTSS has encouraged schools to adopt uniform procedures for school life: school codes that set up expectations for how classroom routines will play out, for what a responsible learner and citizen looks like, and for how teachers will gain student attention ("clap if you hear me") or regulate student talk ("voice levels").
If a child is more-or-less on grade level in terms of their academics, and is not struggling behaviorally, they are in tier one. Tier one is thought of as normal classroom instruction. However, "normal" here does not mean business as usual, but rather as the embracing of certain school-wide instructional norms: the use of bellringers and exit tickets as powerful formative assessment strategies as well as consistent use of constructivist literacy strategies, such as "talk to the text." Every teacher plays a role in tier one strategies--especially social studies teachers, who do so much with informational text.
Tier two is where we target particular groups of students to help bring them up to grade level. At HMS, this happens when students are encouraged/advised to take reading or math support classes as an elective--one that is in addition to their core class (in that way, avoiding blatant tracking).
Tier three is for those students experiencing the greatest troubles in school. Often, this means a combination of behavioral and academic struggles. Here is where administrative attention is focused on bringing teachers, parents, and other support staff together to talk with and about the child, to search for strategies that might most benefit the child. The whole school works as a team to support the child.
The move away from marking periods and grades is a good thing. We need to help students formulate goals and help them keep in constant sight how they are doing as they reach for those goals.
The downside here is that we start valuing only what we assess rather than assessing what we value. MTSS has focused on literacy and numeracy as important skills in a child's life. PBIS gets us toward a shared culture of behavioral norms. But we are far from helping kids set goals that go beyond academics and helping to cultivate their individual talents and gifts.
We have made a good start. It will be to the next generation of teachers to keep it going.
PS: To think more about what role data plays in today's schools, you might check out this podcast I made as I talked to a teacher, a parent, an administrator, and a comparative educational researcher about this issue.
No comments:
Post a Comment