Multi-tiered systems of support fall under Turnaround Practice 3, 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 uh, you can't rely on tier 2 or tier 3 um, instruction at that point
you have to realize that tier 1 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, um, four different leadership teams in the building that work together
on different components to ensure that students are growing academically, social emotionally,
um, behaviorally and just overall, um, 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
uh, 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.
So we take a look when we do our universal screening at where students are.
We look at what students may have certain needs that the core curriculum will address,
and we take a look at which students in, who might need more support, are they actually
moving tiers when we rescreen them.
Are they moving up, are they making progress, are they stagnating, and we can do progress
screeners throughout.
Remember eyes on the word, get ready for your pointing finger, let's read together.
Go.
We've created spaces for flexible scheduling, where students needs come first.
So for example, we do some progress monitoring and we have a group who's in need of tier two
extra dose of something, we will flip people's schedules.
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.
So right from when we first started as a year one turnaround school, um, 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, there was a cycle of launching it, trying it learning more about
it having peer observations with our instructional foci and cycling back to measure its effectiveness
within our common planning times.
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 and to ensure that all of the people are,
in the building are responsible for working on moving all children forward.
that was part of the evolution of our MTSS, where we had more clear tier three supports,
more clear tier two supports, and more clear tier one expectations.
So 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.
There is the student support team which is really geared toward planning the tier three supports
for students who may need them, so that's more of a targeted, individualized team
that brings families and students to the table, and other teachers and support people
to come up with a strong tier 3 intervention plan for a student.
the student support team is sort of divided into two levels, there's the grade level SST
which is, as it sounds it's the grade level team getting together on a weekly basis,
and then there's the whole school SST which is made up of um, team members from across
grades and across disciplines At grade level student support team, the
classroom teachers work together on grade levels and identify a student who may be
struggling in a certain area.
They would create a plan during their common planning time, identify what the needs are for each
student, and come up with a plan to intervene either academically or socially, for six
weeks.
And hopefully the student would have made progress through this plan and there would
be no need to go to school wide student support.
And when a child is brought to the whole school student support team, the parents
are called and they're invited to come in and we come up with a team plan.
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
So for example one event that we have every year, um, 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, so that families are
really able to understand, this is where my student began at the very beginning and
this is where they are now, also where they're heading, and where they should be
at this point of the year. 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.
We should be making the right moves, and making the right adjustments, by looking
at the data to make sure that they're not stuck in some space.
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