Multi-tiered systems of support fall under Turnaround Practice Three, student specific
supports and instruction, which is research-based guidance that has been shown to effectively
turn around underperforming schools in Massachusetts. Grew Elementary is a turnaround school that
has implemented a strong system of multi-tiered supports. The Massachusetts Tiered System
of Support Identifies three major drivers for building a strong system of tiered supports.
Leadership drivers include responding to adaptive issues, such as removing barriers and building
consensus, paired with technical support, such as finding time and resources. Competency
drivers revolve around building educator capacity to affect positive student outcomes. And Implementation
drivers are designed by facilitative administrators to create organizational systems and support
system interventions. When you come into a building and you have a significant number
of students that are falling below benchmarks, you can't rely on tier two or tier three,
instruction at that point you have to realize that tier one is where you need to start.
To be able to improve core instruction across all areas in the building you really have to
create systems and teams that can work together to be a part of that improvement process.
So we've had four different leadership teams in the building that work together on different components
to ensure that students are growing academically, social emotionally, behaviorally, and just overall
to create happy and engaged learners. The instructional leadership team is really responsible
to think about improving teaching and learning; so the instruction really around tier one.
And then considering to support others with tier two interventions. And we’ll talk about
as an ILT what needs to be done either for specific students, or at specific grade levels.
We’ll generally do some kind of inquiry cycle where we’ll implement some kind of
intervention for students over a period of six to eight weeks, collect data again at
the end of that inquiry cycle, and bring it back to ILT to see what kind of progress was
made. We've created spaces for flexible scheduling, where students needs come first. We have a lot of professional
development time here. With that professional learning opportunity comes, observations,
peer observations, debriefs, teams going in and looking in a classroom. And so that rapidly
creates a coherent tier one experience. Right from when we first started as a year one turnaround
school, we had the August professional development week. And developing that common language of
like what high quality instruction looks like was huge for launching the start of
like the turnaround process. We started to also think we needed to do some tier two work.
We started with some guided reading instruction and some other small group instruction that
would help our students who were in most need at the time. We then really needed to consider
our tier three work and that took a little bit of figuring out the assets of each of
our individuals in the building, and then we were able to tap into each other's knowledge.
Our first year, you know we really were focused on that the tier one and thinking about what
we need academically, and then it moved into thinking about, okay, what do we need now
tier one social-emotionally, and so we started our second year with the CBHM team. Our team,
the comprehensive behavioral health model team, we are looking at student behavior and
how do we teach typical or normative behaviors that would assist students in becoming good
learners, having the social skills they need to develop and change. I think the family
and community team is meant to, it's a group of people that's meant to think more critically about
how as a school, we can engage the larger community, that be students, parents, our
partners in the community as well. One event that we have every year is a student growth celebration
and it takes place at the midpoint of the year. And we inform families about the progress
that students have made over the course of the year, school-wide, class-wide but also individually.
We have been capturing kind of who is going where and when, to see, to progress monitor,
and make sure we're tracking to see that students aren't stuck, in a certain tier
for the whole year. And so we've come to this place now in year three where our systems,
our structures are set up to support using the data effectively and knowing where to
find the right supports for what the data tells us.