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MTSS for Reading Improvement with Stephanie Stollar and Sarah Brown

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Episode 232

We know MTSS can feel like one more acronym and maybe one more thing on your plate. But what if it was the thing that helped everything else run more smoothly instead?

In this episode, we chat with Stephanie Stollar and Sarah Brown, authors of MTSS for Reading Improvement, who help us rethink what strong systems of support actually look like. Together, we explore how to move beyond one-off interventions and start building aligned, school-wide systems that  support every reader. 

You’ll hear:

  • The difference between MTSS and intervention
  • Why Tier 1 instruction is your most powerful lever for change
  • What it looks like to work within your reality, not around it
  • How class-wide supports and smart teaming can lead to huge growth
  • Ways teachers (even without formal leadership roles) can spark change

RESOURCES



We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

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Melissa:

If you're like us, you've wondered what strong systems of support actually look like in practice. Schools need efficient, aligned systems that support all learners and lead to real growth. But how do Tier 1 instruction and Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions all work?

Lori:

together. In this episode, stephanie Stoller and Sarah Brown, authors of MTSS for Reading Improvement, help to break it all down. They'll clear up common misconceptions about MTSS, share success stories and offer practical tips to help your systems run smoothly so you can start seeing the growth you've been working toward. Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa:

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori:

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.

Melissa:

Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today how to teach reading and writing. Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi everyone, stephanie, we are so excited to have you back on the podcast and you brought a friend and your co author today. Sarah, we are so excited to talk to you both today. All about MTSS.

Stephanie Stollar:

Thank you both so much for inviting us.

Lori:

Thank you, Of course. Well, let's jump right in. I would love to just ground our listeners and ground this conversation in what we mean when we say systems level support. Right, we're talking about MTSS, multi-tiered systems of support. What do systems level support or what do? What does systems level support mean?

Sarah Brown:

So imagine that we heard about an accident, a car accident at an intersection in our town. Right, we could ask questions about. The first things that might pop to our mind are oh, was the driver distracted? Was somebody else right illegally in the intersection, like what happened? Right, we could ask questions like that. We could also take a step back and ask some questions from a system perspective and we could say you know how many accidents have been at this intersection this year? How does that compare to other intersections in our town with similar traffic patterns? And that's really what we're talking about when we talk about in this book, taking a system level perspective. So the individual questions about individual students and how they're doing and how their programs are working, what they need next, are really important to have. But to get school-wide sustained improvement, we also need to really be honing in on some of those larger picture questions that are going to tell us overall what our system needs to support educators better, to help all learners be successful readers.

Stephanie Stollar:

Yeah, I think it's those systems of support that need to circle around the classroom teacher and his or her students.

Stephanie Stollar:

So you think about the things like the daily schedule, things like how others in the school support the classroom teacher. You think about things like time to plan and meet together in teams, things like instructional materials, things like materials and processes around intervention that teachers can access for their students, the interaction between special education and general education or multilingual support and general education. So those are some examples of some of the systems of support that surround that classroom. So, as Sarah said, we're sort of zooming out and not expecting teachers to manage the success of their students on their own, but to think about that classroom as nested within these interacting systems within the school environment. And so we want to get people to think about and talk about how are the ways that they're doing business in those systems impacting that individual student learning and how do we take an approach that's not just focused on one student at a time, but zoom out and get our systems lined up in place for every student to be successful.

Melissa:

That is really helpful. And my next question for you is about the difference between MTSS and intervention, and I feel like they're often used synonymously. Right, they're the same thing. Mtss is intervention. But even just what you just shared in that little bit, I'm thinking that MTSS is this bigger picture zoomed out. More than intervention might be included in that, but it's even more than that. Am I on the right track?

Stephanie Stollar:

Yes, that's exactly right. So some people use response to intervention or RTI and MTSS interchangeably, but we sort of think about response to intervention cases as a set of forms, a set of meetings, a set of procedures for moving students through tiers of intervention. And you can't actually do that unless you have all of these other aspects of your school system functioning correctly, effectively aligned with each other and aligned with the research and what students need. So yes, you hit it right on the money.

Sarah Brown:

You'll see the different components key components of an MTSS framework as different things, but we think of them as things like the targeted interventions at every tier of support, right, so it might be tier one interventions as well as those interventions that you mentioned. Part of it is collaboration and teaming and leadership around that. Part of it is the assessments that we have that help us answer the question and address our needs, where we have them at the right time, and how we're making decisions using those interventions, and so there are different pieces. How they look in each school will be different, which is sometimes the tricky part, right, but but it's also, I think, part of the beauty in an.

Sarah Brown:

MTSS is that it can look differently depending on your system and your resources. But but how? But those components are there every time. I my hobby is girls trips and I often say, like the framework of a girls trip right, like it's going to look different every time. But there's some things that we have to do every time. We have to decide where we're going to stay. We have to decide how we're going to get there. I personally have to decide where are we going to eat. Those are my favorite parts, and so those we're always going to have to. We can't skip any of those decisions. Those all have to be part of a successful girls trip, and the same is true for an MTSS. If you're going to see a successful MTSS, you have to address each of these pieces of the framework, but how they look in your school might be different.

Lori:

Yeah, sarah, I think so much hits home for me there. I love the analogy, that's fun and also very true. But that's that's, to me, the stuff that is very frustrating to teachers. Like I think, when we hear from a lot of teachers, the things that they're frustrated with are not necessarily the classroom teaching right, like the majority of teachers that come to me and Melissa asking questions and I'm sure come to you all I see you nodding Like they love working with students, like teachers love teaching, and I will say the same too.

Lori:

You know, when I was in the classroom, the part that was frustrating was typically not the teaching part. It was all the other stuff surrounding it that were broken systems that were very, very tricky to work with, because you're working within a broken system and then it broken system and then broken systems don't necessarily function to the highest quality. So I'm thinking now we've kind of set this foundation and understanding here of systems and of MTSS versus intervention. So we thought we would jump into some questions from listeners, questions that we're hearing from teachers every day. Does that sound good to you both? Yes, all right, sounds great. So we hear teachers asking this question. We've learned about the science of reading, but I'm not seeing results translate into student growth. What do you suggest?

Stephanie Stollar:

Yeah. So the part that is central to MTSS that we don't always see schools doing is elevating the barriers. So for classroom teachers to surface what's in their way and for the rest of the educators in the school and district to understand that their role is to help eliminate those barriers for the teacher to be successful in their classroom. So for us we use a specific database decision-making framework in our book the collaborative improvement cycle. That is the meat and potatoes of MTSS. And again, it's something we don't always see happening. Even when schools or districts say they're doing MTSS, they're not getting together in these collaborative teams to use their assessments in a structured decision-making process. So our book is really oriented to support people to make that shift and lots of tools, meeting agendas, templates for having those conversations.

Stephanie Stollar:

There are often meetings in schools but people are not talking about this and we want to really direct people to surfacing the barriers. What would teachers say is in their way? Why are they not getting better results? What's in their way, and then systematically as a collaborative group, writing action plans to eliminate those barriers. We don't want the science of reading to be these one-off actions Like all we have to do is get some professional development and then we're done, we're good to go. All we have to do is adopt some new program and then everything's going to be different. That's what people are experiencing is not happening and from our experience we could have told you that would be the case. So we want people to have the right expectations that it's not these simple actions. You can't expect to continue to operate in the same way in your school and expect a different outcome.

Sarah Brown:

I think everything Stephanie said I agree with the other another thing that I see like in terms of why schools aren't getting outcomes and and teachers, reading specialists they're frustrated by that right, Like they've done the things.

Sarah Brown:

They've invested a lot of time and money in this work.

Sarah Brown:

I see two things happening regularly.

Sarah Brown:

One is that teachers, we haven't necessarily connected the learning that teachers have done through about science of reading to their curricular materials, and so if you are an expert, if you are listening to podcasts like this fantastic one, right then you might be thinking about that and doing that naturally on your own, but it takes work to do, and so how are we as a system as Stephanie's saying right supporting teachers to be able to do that?

Sarah Brown:

The second thing that I see is that we're still approaching supporting students student by student, and so in schools where we have large numbers of students who need additional support, who are at-risk readers, we're still trying to provide all of them additional intervention, when, in reality, in order to get really large gains as a system, we also need to look at what we're doing as tier one, in terms of what I would call tier one intervention intervention at that first class, wide level in order to accelerate overall learning. So those are two common barriers that I see and I agree with everything. Stephanie said that I would use data and conversations with teachers to identify what are the specific barriers in our school and how do we do that. Those are two common ones, I see.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's great, and I'm also. I'm thinking now, you know, another question we get a lot is about, you know, I'm trying all these things, I'm doing, we're doing all these interventions, but the data isn't showing it and or, like we try to, and like the data even went down, like there was a little dip in our in our data. And I'm wondering. Oftentimes, I feel like what we hear is people like, okay, what's next? Right, like we're going to throw those things out and we got to try a new thing. But I'm wondering, like, what should people be doing differently in terms of, like looking at their data, if they're not seeing the success that they hoped for by implementing these things that they thought were going to work?

Sarah Brown:

So the first thing I would say is stay the course. If you're using something that is evidence-based, then let your data, and then the conversations around those data, help you identify specifically what are the barriers to those things being successful right now and how can we address those barriers. When you started by talking about intervention, I'll just give a brief example from our book about how we would suggest doing that. So, instead of starting intervention conversations, looking at student by student and saying, ok, this student didn't make enough progress, what do we need to change? Ok, this student didn't make enough progress. What do we need to change? Look at the intervention as a whole and say, ok, if there were seven students getting this intervention and five of them didn't make enough progress, we actually need to talk about the intervention itself, not about these students. Right, and figure out what the barrier is.

Sarah Brown:

Maybe the interventionist was being pulled regularly to sub and we just weren't getting through an intervention. Or maybe we can only meet a couple times a week for 15 minutes a day because we have so many students we're trying to serve and we're really only getting through about a lesson a week. Right, I wouldn't expect really great growth from that. And so, thinking about and taking a step back and looking at what are our data and why are we seeing success? Most of the time there's something related to implementation or because schools are hard, complex places, or dosage, like being able to get enough of that really good stuff. We're teaching that. We see there are other things too, but those are two really common ones.

Lori:

And it's the reality of it, right, Sarah? That's the real stuff. Like you can put the stuff on paper and the goals, but then in reality it's like, oh, there's somebody out sick and we need to pull this person for that, and then we're not getting the dosage that we thought we were. And on paper it looks like this, but then reality says this and there's a big gap. So I'm so glad that you pointed that out, because I feel like that's the reality of every teacher's life, right?

Stephanie Stollar:

And it's no one's fault. No, I was just going to add that in the book we try to help people understand that the reality isn't going anywhere. Your reality isn't going to change. You have to work within your reality. Oh, so good, so good. Sometimes people throw up their hands like we can't even do MTSS in our school because of our reality, and we want people to understand. This is the process of continually revisiting your data, revisiting your implementation and making adjustments and improvements over time to get a different result. So I think just being very upfront about that is important.

Lori:

I think of it so much in terms of like the analogy of like a health and fitness right. If you're looking to add some exercise to your schedule and you only have, you know you've 30 minutes a day but you're not doing any at this point. You don't start with those full 30 minutes, you start with five or 10 and you build up from there and you get momentum and you work within your reality and then perhaps once you've got 30 going, you're like for a long while you're like, oh hey, I actually could do a little bit more, because my systems now have shifted and now I, you know, or maybe 30 is good and maybe I want to tackle something else. So that's such a good point, to work within your reality and I think that that's actually the thing that is a big barrier, that is the miss right.

Stephanie Stollar:

So if you're trying to adopt those healthy behaviors, you would have some way of measuring Did you make any progress? You might have a coach. You might have to adjust your schedule. You might buy some new equipment that helps you right Like to accomplish that. You might have some incentives built in to that or some consequences built into that. All of those supports will help you make that behavioral change and everybody can relate to that with some kind of you know analogy, like some healthy behavior. Same is true for changing the way we teach reading and our reading outcomes in schools.

Lori:

Yeah, and such a good point, Like you know, say there's a day where there's a miss, that doesn't mean that then every day forward we're just like well, whatever it's like, make a plan for failure, right, Because there will be that failure there. And how do we?

Sarah Brown:

create the culture where it's okay to say I planned on 30 minutes a day for this but it's really not happening. And I have this group and I'm really trying to get them some extra practice in reading connected texts and I'm and I'm just not getting to it, or, or you know, it doesn't seem like they're ready for these books or whatever it is Like. We need to create a culture where we feel confident to say I'm winning right, like here are my wins, but also that we feel confident saying like here are the things that are that are hard for me right now and I need I need help.

Lori:

Okay. So for me right now and I need help, okay. So, along those lines, I think this is kind of a difficult question I'm going to ask you but we get this question and I'm sure you do too how do leaders, how do you recommend leaders respond when people in the system are not doing what they said they would do or what they agreed to do? You know, I know there's those meetings that happen and it's like we're going to invigorate everyone to do this, and then, you know, people are like, oh my gosh, yet again there's this other thing that's happening and I really want to do this.

Lori:

So I guess, how can we be supportive of teachers and support staff who, like, might be the only ones who see a path forward? Right, there's maybe there, there's a teacher listening who's like I am one of the only ones doing what I said I would do, and then there are teachers around me who perhaps aren't. And I think this is tricky because we say no or yes to things for a variety of reasons. So I just want to say that, like, not there's no shame in this question, just it's an honest question. So how do we respond as leaders and how can we support teachers to who are out here listening Like I'm one of those yes people and I'm I'm on board, but there's other people around me who perhaps aren't.

Sarah Brown:

As a leader, the first thing to think about is is this the same way we would with students? Is it a student issue or a system issue? The same thing I'll ask about implementation of change. Is it one or two teachers who are struggling to implement or is it most? Teachers need right and when we think about doing new things like I'm just going to go back to, like motivation theory, right, expectancy, value and cost.

Sarah Brown:

So do our teachers expect that they will be successful if they implement and make these changes? And there's lots of reasons we can expect that it might not be successful. Maybe I'm not confident with the skills or the materials that I have, or the time that I have to teach it in, or the student needs in my class. Maybe I don't expect it because I haven't ever actually seen it be successful. I've never actually seen students who started the year at risk grow enough not to be at risk right. So that's the expectancy. Value is how valuable is this to me to do so? Like is it worth my effort? And then cost is what am I giving up? And I think thinking about all of those things as a leader is important to consider. Okay, if we've identified that this is a system level issue in our building, then I need to identify what are the reasons that teachers aren't able to talk to teachers and listen to them and then build the supports and give them what they need in order to be able to support students.

Stephanie Stollar:

Yeah, I agree with that. I think the leaders have to set the vision and they have to stay the course. They have to have a way to get everybody on board with the urgency for change, and just about every school in our country has that urgency because so many students are struggling readers or at-risk readers. So, setting the expectation, setting a vision for change, creating a plan that people have had input in so that they're going to buy into it it's not something that's put upon them from the outside or from the top. So giving teachers and all educators a voice into what is the plan, but then really sticking to it and the administrator not changing course when people are disgruntled or unhappy or pushing back or not doing what everybody agreed to do, but recognize, as Sarah said, that that just is. It means the conditions around those folks are not such that they are supported to do the thing, for whatever reason.

Stephanie Stollar:

So, as Sarah said, ask them why they're not doing it. Ask them what they need to do it, what they need to do it. Don't let them just cycle and complaining and, you know, spinning their wheels, but remind them that this is what we all agreed that we were going to do. But how can I support you to do it, because it seems to be a struggle for you for whatever reason. So those are the kinds of conversations I've found to be most helpful, because change is hard and, as we've already said, changing people's behavior about teaching reading is not any easier than any other behavior change. So we shouldn't expect that just because we have a new district policy, everybody's going to jump on board gleefully doing all the new things and know what they should stop doing so that they can start doing the new things. Like we just have to get our expectations lined up and realistic.

Melissa:

I really love that idea of just you know, asking teachers and listening to the why, Because, like Lori said earlier, I mean, teachers want to do a good job. No, no one shows up at their job every day and says like I'm just don't want to do it right, If they're not doing a thing, it's because there's definitely probably a reason behind the why they're not doing it. So to hear it instead of, I mean, I feel like what happens usually is people just say like they like, say it louder, like you have to do this thing and like that's not going to work, Just telling me more and more that I have to do this isn't helping. The whatever it is that's getting in the way of me actually being able to do it. Whether it's time or people or resources, something's probably getting in the way.

Stephanie Stollar:

That's the purpose of those collaborative teams and, using the collaborative improvement cycle, that is the venue for people to speak up and for the ask of why are you not doing the thing that we plan? And for the additional supports to be put around those teachers.

Melissa:

And I'm so curious about. I know most of our listeners are teachers and I'm wondering you know this sounds like leaders have a huge role in making this work, but if you're a teacher in a place where you want this to be going well, right, you want the systems to be going well, but they're not. Do you have any advice for teachers about how they can, you know, maybe step up or talk to their leaders or do do something within a place where it's not working well?

Stephanie Stollar:

Yeah, we wrote the first section of the book, the first three chapters, for school leaders who maybe haven't had the same opportunities to learn about the science of reading or learn about MTSS. So that's a resource that teachers can point their school leaders to. In my experience, what's worked well for teachers to sort of light, a spark for change in their system is two things Find a buddy so that it's not just you, because when you feel like you're the lone ranger who's trying to make this change, it's very lonely and it feels very discouraging. So find somebody else who's like, minded, who's interested in in facilitating this change, and then find out what your school leader is interested in. So again, asking leaders to change is not any easier than asking teachers to change. So you have to understand it from their perspective.

Stephanie Stollar:

One of the things that happens when teachers learn about the science of reading is they get on fire, like. I've seen this over and over and over again. They have learned a bunch they know more in some cases than their building administrators and district administrators about the science of reading and they get so excited about it and then they sort of bulldoze over people. They want them to know all the things at once and they want to implement all the things at the same time and that doesn't work because that's threatening to the school leaders in many cases, because it points out, maybe, the gaps in their knowledge and it's putting a lot of change in front of them that they might not be comfortable to lead. So, recognizing what is it that the school leader is already setting for themselves as a goal? So all building principals have, like reading, achievement goals. Every district administrator has some kind of literacy improvement goal. District administrator has some kind of literacy improvement goal.

Stephanie Stollar:

Many states are putting these kinds of accountability frameworks on schools and districts. So if you can find a way to connect the change that you'd like to see in your school to the existing goals that your school leaders are already trying to accomplish, then you will not be this annoying, overbearing, threatening force in the school. You will be seen as the person who is trying to help that leader meet their existing goals. So maybe that sounds manipulative. I don't look at it that way. I think it's just human nature that every educator is busy and potentially overwhelmed. You don't want to contribute to that with your enthusiasm about the science of reading. You want to become the person who is a trusted, knowledgeable partner who can sort of come alongside those leaders.

Lori:

That's so smart. I hear you saying too that like MTSS is very efficient and will be helpful at all levels, right, so if I'm a teacher, I'm looking to help. I'm going to just zoom in on what my administrator, what my district leader they're already focusing on so smart. So when I think about efficiency, I also think about classroom teachers listening and doing this work, and they might be feeling overwhelmed. So how can teachers do this work so it's like the most efficient and not overwhelming to them? So maybe, like, let's elevate that triangle of efficiency here.

Sarah Brown:

Yeah, a couple ideas.

Sarah Brown:

So one is I would, I would lean on, lean on a collaborative network, right.

Sarah Brown:

So it might be like, like Stephanie said, right, your buddy who's kind of working like you're doing this with, but also your grade level team, assuming you have right that or kind of cross grade level team if you're at a single section school and and really be using so we provide agendas and data protocols in the book.

Sarah Brown:

I think that takes a lot of the kind of prep work out of those conversations, right, if I'm using universal screening data three times a year and I'm running every day to plan and do things I don't necessarily be knowing you know, which report am I supposed to pull up? What questions do I want to ask as I look at these screening data, right, what that looks like, and so we've tried to help teams by providing some of that to make it a little bit more doable. And then for the day-to-day, I would be like using that collaborative network that I have. I find in most schools that I go to around the country that teams are really used to talking about standards and what they're going to teach, but less used to having conversations about how they teach and then like day to day what that's going to look like and that can be a huge support to teachers to make their planning more efficient, to make their outcomes more effective, when they're able to have those types of conversations within their grade level team or their PLC.

Stephanie Stollar:

One of the great efficiencies in the MTSS model is the fact that we zoom out and don't just look at individual students. So I would encourage teachers to adopt that perspective and, rather than looking at their screening data to identify the individuals who are struggling, to look for the patterns. So what percentage of students in your class are struggling to read text for meaning? What percentage are struggling with basic decoding or phonemic awareness? So look for those trends and patterns and then approach the magnitude of that problem either with a class-wide strategy or with grouping students who have the same concern.

Stephanie Stollar:

You know, in many of the old RTI applications, teachers would look at screening data and then make a referral for intervention for every individual student Right, and that is surely overwhelming. It's overwhelming to the teacher, it's overwhelming to the intervention system. So the alternative to that that we really elevate in MTSS is does anybody else score in this same way? And again, look in your classroom. But also, if you have a partner first grade teacher or a grade level team, ask during that meeting hey, you know, I've got two kids who are really struggling to read text accurately and fluently. Does anybody else have kids who are struggling with that? Right? And so then take that on together, rather than each individual teacher thinking that they have to support individual students. Look for the opportunities to build in those class-wide routines and approaches to instruction when you see patterns and multiple students who have the same need.

Melissa:

Yeah, and this comes back to what I talked about, mtss and intervention often get, you know, put in the same bucket, whereas and I think oftentimes we don't think of what do you do for tier one in this right and you guys mentioned that this intervention and differentiation can happen in tier one right you don't have to wait until tier two and tier three and have it all happen there Because, like you said, that's just too many students to do all that work. It's too overwhelming and not efficient in any way.

Stephanie Stollar:

The best approach is to consider tier one instruction first. It's the place where students spend most of their reading instructional minutes and actually its job in MTSS is to reduce the number of students who need intervention. That is like the stated role of tier one reading instruction, so we don't have enough conversations about that.

Sarah Brown:

And I've seen schools in one year's time get incredible growth 30% of student like, increase in percent of students who meet target benchmarks in one year by implementing class-wide intervention. It's an evidence-based strategy. That's amazing.

Melissa:

Easily, but yeah, yeah, closing gaps between student groups and so much easier than getting more interventionists and more people to support outside. I mean, you're doing it right there in your actual instruction not only easier, but it actually works better.

Melissa:

Yeah, it's like a double bonus, yeah, so you? So you all talked about I mean, we're talking about efficiency here, but I know another thing that you all brought up was this idea of prevention. So how, how would a school, if they're focusing on prevention instead of you, know what happens? I taught this and it didn't work. Now, what do I do? How does that look different if they're going in with this like lens of prevention instead of what's? What's a word I'm looking for here? Not prevention, but intervention, intervention, reaction.

Lori:

Yeah, um how did proactive versus a reactive? There you go.

Melissa:

I think you're getting it exactly so how does this proactive prevention um lens look different for schools?

Sarah Brown:

yeah. So a lot of it is in the questions that we ask. I mean, that's some of the most important things that we do are the road that we go down. The path that we go down is going to be different depending on the questions we ask. When I talked about I give that analogy right of an accident. If I'm asking questions about how that accident happened that time, that's what I'm going to react to. If I ask questions about the intersection as a whole, it's going to take us down a different road.

Sarah Brown:

So I think that's a big piece of it is asking some questions about how, if it's kindergarten in the fall, I want to compare, I want to get those screening data right away, right, and then I want to compare how this kindergarten class's patterns look compared to our previous years, because that's going to tell me how intensive our tier one instruction needs to be in order to help students be successful and make the most growth in kindergarten as possible. And so a lot of it is the perspective that we take and the questions that we ask. I mean, universal screening is a preventative practice in and of itself. I don't see schools make dramatic improvements in reading outcomes without having universal screening in place, so not only having it. A place to start would be, if you have universal screening data, seeing how you're using it right. Like a number of schools that I work with have had these data for years and they haven't really had the resources, the protocols, the conversations to really take action with those data in a proactive manner.

Stephanie Stollar:

So asking the question after universal screening, how many students are at risk, how many students scored low on screening? How many students scored low on screening? That's the key for me to focusing on prevention. So making sure that that's the first question, not which students are at risk, but how many students are at risk or struggling readers. Other actions that lean towards prevention would be things like putting resources into kindergarten and first grade, putting resources into pre-K. Not putting all of your resources into the testing grades, third grade and above right. Another action would be not waiting until students are behind. So this can be enacted in things like not making students go through tier one, tier two, tier three to get intensive support so noticing in the data when students might need very intensive support from the very beginning, even from the beginning of kindergarten, from the beginning of kindergarten, and not making kids, you know, fail before they get intensive support. Not waiting to take action.

Stephanie Stollar:

Sometimes kindergarten teachers are reluctant. Well, this is their first school experience. I shouldn't, you know, do anything, maybe I shouldn't even screen until the middle of kindergarten, and I disagree with that. I think that kind of thinking is from that old approach of something outside of the classroom in an intervention framework is going to happen as a result of the screening, and so we're asking folks to shift their thinking there and use the screening data even at the beginning of kindergarten to take action through classroom reading instruction first and foremost, and to not wait and see. That's what got us in trouble in the past, because we know that reading is not just going to magically emerge from students. We have to take an active role in guaranteeing that literacy for all of our students. So acting early, acting in kindergarten and early in every single grade.

Melissa:

And Stephanie, you're not saying that. You know we should be pushing our kindergartners to be able to read early fall, but what I'm hearing you say is we're screening them for things like letter names, letter sounds, you sounds, phonemic awareness, things like that that are really going to help them when they're learning to read.

Stephanie Stollar:

Yes, we're screening on those things because they are predictive of reading comprehension, right, like they are the age or grade appropriate indicators of the student being on track or not on track, and we should pay attention to that. It's the reason to spend all of that time doing universal screening so that we don't just say, oh sorry, you're not predicted to be okay, I'm sorry for your luck, you know. But that we actually act on that information with age and grade appropriate instruction, not pushing the curriculum, you know, ever downward, earlier and earlier, but supporting them with lots of language and then lots of print as well.

Sarah Brown:

So, for example, if we saw in kindergarten in the fall that we had a large number of students who didn't have the phonemic awareness skills that they should have at the beginning of kindergarten, right, they were identified as at risk. I'm not looking to label those students. I'm not saying all of these students need to be pulled out from the classroom for reading instruction, right, and let's make some referrals for special education evaluations Absolutely not. We're asking about the system right now of kindergarten instruction. And so what I'm going to say is oh, this year I'm not going to do the same intensity of phonemic awareness practice that we did last year. I'm actually going to add in some more.

Sarah Brown:

So when we're walking in the hallways, when we're standing at the, you know like, maybe I did it once or twice a week before and we were standing waiting for the bat, Now we're going to do it every single time, right. And so it's telling me, as a teacher and the grade level really, what do our students need this year in order to grow enough to be on track at the end of this year? But nobody's looking to make, nobody wants to make kindergartners or kindergarten teachers cry Like that's not the goal, that's not, that's never the goal.

Lori:

And so much of what you're both talking about is going to come out later this month too. We have a kindergarten interventionist, I guess SLP, who talks a lot about this idea of proactive kindergarten work, and I'm so glad that you brought that up. And then we also talked with I guess we'll talk with, if you're listening Michelle Hasp, and she talks a lot about making sense of reading, assessments and like this idea of universal screener. So if you're listening right now and you want to hear more about what Stephanie and Sarah are saying about universal screeners, be sure you tune in for the rest of the month and also grab their book that will link in the show notes.

Melissa:

All right, before we wrap up, I know we know we talked a lot about some, some misunderstandings between like what is what is actually MTSS? And I know that you all probably hear way more than we do about some misunderstandings of MTSS and what it is and what it's not. So I'm going to just open the floor for you all to talk about. What are some things that you hear come up that you're like we want to just dispel that rumor. Now, that's not what MTSS is. So what are they?

Stephanie Stollar:

Well, I'll start with one. Mtss is not a rigid set of procedures that must look the same in every school, grade level or every district. It is not a set of procedures that you put in a binder or a flow chart and then push out to everybody and expect consistency in. It is a framework and, by design, there are these components Sarah mentioned earlier that might be called different things, you know, based on different people implementing MTSS, but those core components exist in the school, but how they look, even, will vary grade by grade within a school, because it's all about making decisions based on student data and students look different. The resources are different in every school. What it takes to get change to happen will look different in every school. So I would encourage people to recognize that this is, by design, a flexible framework and they need to contextualize what's in the research to the reality of their school and the needs of their students.

Sarah Brown:

I love that. Stephanie, one of the things that I hear often is confusion about the pyramid, and it circles around a lot of this conversation that we've had today. But the MTSS pyramid we often think of as containing the students in our schools. So we hear school leaders and educators say all of our tier three students or our yellow students, or we have an upside down pyramid, right, and we know exactly what that means. We can see the picture in our head of what I know what that means for that school. It changes, though it's not at all. It's not what an MTSS is intended to be, and if we shift to a different perspective, it actually is more effective and efficient.

Sarah Brown:

The pyramid does not contain students. It contains our resources, and so when we think back to those classes, melissa you mentioned earlier, it's an interesting way to think about class-wide intervention to your one intervention, as opposed to getting more interventionist right. If I think I have an upside-down pyramid, then I think I need more interventionist right and more time and a different schedule. Maybe I need all of that If I take the perspective of oh, we have a lot of students who have a lot of needs. Where do we have the most resources in our system, tier one. So now we're going to look to see how we can support with the resources that we have. That also includes then. It helps in several different ways because it also keeps us from thinking about oh, the student's getting tier three, there's a tier three student so they don't need tier one, some of those other things that are kind of encompassed in that. But that's a big thing that I see that I think is helpful to reframe.

Lori:

That's groundbreaking. I know I'm sure a lot of teachers out there are listening like, oh my gosh, my school has been putting students into those categories. And yeah, let's think about it in terms of resources. I love this.

Sarah Brown:

You're not alone. If your school is doing it, you're not alone. But the podcast isn't all about the pyramid and so I don't want to go. But we start to expect and accept that some students are going to be forever at risk in reading because they're tier three students, as instead of our tier two and our tier three resources, we put a lot of time into and a lot of work into and a lot of like love into for our interventionists and our folks who support right Like in those resources, and so we need. We do that because we need to accelerate student progress, not because they're a tier three student and they're always going to be a risk.

Lori:

All right. Well, I know one thing that is important to all of us. This is a really tough conversation in terms of like understanding for teachers. Right, we have teachers out there listening who might feel like, okay, I'm in my classroom, I have a broken system around me, I'm going to think about what I can control within my own system. Maybe there's a teacher listening who's thinking, okay, I'm in a system that's, you know, trying to trying to work. It's maybe on toward working toward the right track here, you know we're work. It's maybe working toward the right track here, you know we're all on board, we're going for it. So there's a variety of listeners out there. But I think it might be helpful for everyone, regardless of where you are in your MTSS journey, to think about what's working, and you two are the best people to share because you're out there doing this work with schools and districts all the time. So I'm hopeful that you can share some bright spots around strong systems and what works within those systems, like what's going well.

Stephanie Stollar:

Yeah, thank you for asking this because I don't think we bring those bright spots forward enough and Sarah and I are really privileged and honored to get to be working and walking alongside of schools that are getting tremendous results. So, just off the top of my head, some of the things that I see working are individual teachers being brave enough to just start something right, and sometimes this happens in a kind of revolutionary, rebellious way, like you all know, just close your door and do something different, and sometimes it's more part of a school-wide effort, right, but showing the results. So teachers who will do something different demonstrate improvement, better outcomes for their students, and then they will quietly share that, maybe just with other teachers at their grade level, maybe with a trusted interventionist or school psychologist within the school, maybe with the principal, and then people take notice, right, like what are you doing over there? That's getting results? I have kids just like yours and I didn't get results like that. You know what are you doing over there? That's been really powerful.

Stephanie Stollar:

Like Sarah mentioned earlier, we see school systems that are getting tremendous improvements across one school year, even doubling their percentage of students who are on track. And don't be afraid to start small in your own classroom or do something like a pilot. I've seen this be very, very effective. If you are a school leader or you're working with a school leader who's willing to give this a try, demonstrate at a single grade level that you can improve outcomes, or just within your school, and then take that success to the rest of the district so that you don't have to try this like across the board at every grade level in every school in your district as a starting place. So I've observed that sort of incremental change, sharing the success stories, sharing the data improvement, to be a really effective strategy.

Sarah Brown:

I also really appreciate you asking this question, so I'll just share this year one of the schools that I was. I was a special education director in my last role in a school district and I never get like celebration emails and now in my current work as a consultant I get some celebration emails and it's really exciting for me. So one of those this year was a school that I work with that shared their data and they had gone after having learned they had. Everybody was trained in the science of reading several years ago. They've had a research-aligned good program as part of their Tier 1 for several years now and they've been using screening and progress monitoring for several years and they were seeing pretty stagnant growth. And this year they put in place two things. So one, they did class-wide intervention, which we've talked about, and two, they really did intentional data team meetings, like supporting and having conversations not just about the data but what to do next, helping teachers move past kind of looking at the data to taking action on it. And then, when they did have celebrations, attributed those celebrations and just said look at what we achieved, but here's what we did to do it right. Like asking that next question of oh, what did you do in your classroom to get that, so that we don't just attribute it to students? It kind of finally clicked right for the student but like, oh, we worked really hard, let's talk about that so that we can replicate it.

Sarah Brown:

And in this school they managed to. They had a four-section kindergarten. They grew their percent of students who were on track between from the last several years it was stagnant to over 30% growth in one year and every single section reached over 80% of students. Every single section had at least like 13% or 15% of student growth because of one year of change. And they talk about obviously, celebrating the student outcomes is the best part, but they also talk about that having the conversations as a team and building that teamwork around data use and taking action and reading also has changed their culture around reading, improvement and data use to help them support, support their students, and so I think both of those things are huge celebrations that I've heard, obviously from that school that I described, but other schools too that I also am very fortunate to to get the opportunity support. But those are. Those are things that I see that I think are helpful for students but also great for the system right and great for teacher teachers happiness and wellness.

Melissa:

Yeah, I just have to say I mean you all, I know MTSS can. Even for me, sometimes it's like okay, this is getting ready for this podcast. I was like this feels like a daunting topic, right, it does feel like it's a little more intense, right, it always feels that way and this conversation really made me realize like it is hard, right, but the reason it's hard is like because we're asking people to make changes and I love the things you said and they're probably all through your book of like, if we're asking the right questions and we're thinking about MTSS in this big systems way and what's working and what's not working, and being open to making those changes, doesn't have to be as daunting and it can really lead to some great success. So thank you all for sharing everything today and helping me feel like MTSS isn't as daunting as it seems sometimes.

Stephanie Stollar:

Well, thank you for inviting us and for asking such great questions. It was a pleasure to talk with both of you.

Sarah Brown:

Truly a pleasure, thank you.

Melissa:

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Lori:

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Melissa:

Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.

Lori:

We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us. Thank you.