How to Explain MTSS to Almost Anyone

This article was written by Jaime Harris, co-founder of eduCLIMBER and Product Manager at Illuminate Education, Inc. It was originally published on the Illuminate Education blog.

Understanding MTSS

A multi-tiered system of support or MTSS is a framework with a tiered infrastructure that uses data to help match academic, social-emotional, and behavioral assessment and instructional resources to each and every student’s needs.

In this tiered, data-informed framework, educators work to ensure that the majority of students respond to core instruction. Students who need additional supports for enrichment or remediation are identified by data and provided that support with the right focus and intensity. MTSS helps educators to be thoughtful about using resources appropriately and impactfully, and use data to continually monitor and improve the effectiveness of their actions. MTSS makes the district-wide system more effective and ensures we’re supporting the needs of every student.

MTSS streamlines and brings cohesion to the good work and best practices that are already happening in a district, so that those efforts are no longer happening in isolation. MTSS also helps districts to fill gaps in their standard practices that might exist due to common challenges, like limited resources, difficulty collaborating, and a lack of visibility in program effectiveness.

To better understand MTSS, let’s look at an analogy.

An MTSS Analogy: The Dentist’s Office

Each day, we are all providing universal, general care for our teeth in the form of brushing and flossing. Most communities also resource a dentist office, where general practitioner dentists are staffed to provide regular cleanings. These high-quality, universal best practices—flossing, brushing, and regular cleanings—are intended to be effective for the vast majority of patients.

They are also intended to prevent a high number of patients who need advanced care, such as oral surgery. Oral surgery is an intense treatment, demanding more resources, more training, and specialized staff. Data (such as pain or medical examinations) may reveal that some patients truly need that intensive care, in which case it’s important to provide support that is well-aligned to the patient’s need in a timely manner. But if there are many people who need that intense treatment, our available resources are exhausted by the demand. By providing, monitoring, and continually improving our universal supports and preventative actions, we’re able to better care for all patients and limit the need for intensive treatment.

In schools, MTSS is similar. Educators work to have highly effective instruction in the classroom so that fewer students need intensive interventions to be successful. And if we have a smaller number of students who need additional supports and services, we have the resources needed to provide it—and the data needed to align our actions to the need.

What Do MTSS Frameworks Look Like?

There is no one correct approach to MTSS. As a result, there can be quite a few differences in the frameworks adopted by various states and districts. One state might refer to a “Multi-Tiered System of Support” while another to a “Tiered System of Supports for Students.” Districts and states can adopt different essential components within their frameworks or see variance in the specific verbiage used to define or describe those components. Yet, there tends to be more similarities than differences among MTSS frameworks.

Here is a general MTSS framework that depicts the fundamental processes, tools, and practices that are generally included in MTSS from a national perspective and show the importance of fitting these previously disparate elements into a cohesive framework.

Essential Components of MTSS

Matched Assessment, Instruction, and Intervention

Assessment, instruction, and intervention are interconnected, effective, aligned to student needs, and informed by data.