End of Year MTSS Review

As the school year comes to an end, it is a good time to reflect on student learning outcomes. In addition to reviewing individual student progress, educators can examine how well all students did over the school year.

Considering group learning outcomes is important in relation to developing effective systems of support that benefit all students.

When a school provides multiple layers of instruction in relation to group and individual and learning needs, it is often known as a Multi-Tier System of Support (MTSS). The strength of such supports will influence all students’ learning because every student will participate in one or more of the instructional services.

This post will provide suggestions about how to examine group learning outcomes in order to evaluate an MTSS.

MTSS Data Review Procedures

Schools will benefit from having a uniform system for reviewing group learning outcomes. The levels at which such review can happen include classrooms, grades, schools, and the entire district. In a webinar hosted by FastBridge Learning,® Dr. Jose Castillo recommended developing answers to the following guiding questions.

1. What are our priorities?
2. What is our buy-in or consensus for this work?
3. What is our capacity to implement?
4. How are we doing with implementation?
5. What are our student outcomes?

Answering the above questions will identify the school’s or district’s specific goals and capacity to reach those goals.

At the end of a school year, a first step can be to examine outcomes first and then discuss and plan steps to improve practices for the following year.

Outcomes. Importantly, data review for the purpose of evaluating an MTSS system should focus on group outcomes. Such review should consider the effects on all students, including those participating in instruction or intervention at Tiers 1, 2, and 3.

Due to the fact that an MTSS can only be as strong as the effects of Tier 1 practices, the best starting point is to review group-level screening data. Here is an example of a district-level FastBridge report for the measure aReading, a broad measure of reading skills.

This example suggests that, for the district as a whole, the students started the school year with better reading skills than they ended. The percentage of students who started the school year at high risk for reading problems was 22% but increased to 35% by the end of the school year.

At the same time, the percentages of students meeting or exceeding the benchmark goal went down. In order to make sense of these data, the district team needs to look at the specific results for each of the schools as well as each grade level.

By reviewing the aggregate student outcomes on a regular basis, school teams will be able to evaluate whether their efforts to address students’ most urgent learning needs were effective in the closing school year and what needs to be done in the upcoming year.

Priorities. One of the biggest challenges facing teachers is that students need to learn more than we can teach in one day, week, month or school year. And each student’s need will be different from other students. This means that educators must identify the most important learning outcomes and focus on those as priorities.

Each teacher might have different priorities for students, and this could lead to confusion among students. And, when teachers have different priorities, it will be harder for them work toward common goals.

For this reason, an important step in creating effective student supports is for teachers to come together and identify the most important student learning priorities. Spring screening data can provide important information about students needs for the fall.

Consensus. Alongside identifying student learning priorities, it is also important to recognize the effort required by teachers to support the learning goals. Effective teaching is very hard work and when educators have shared understanding about the effort and steps needed to support effective practices, students will benefit.

To this end, taking time to build consensus among the teachers in a grade and/or building about what steps are necessary to reach the identified priorities is time well spent. Consensus sometimes requires compromise by all involved in order to move forward on the most important goals.

Capacity. Once specific goals are prioritized, and the steps required agreed upon, another important component of reviewing the team’s likelihood of success is to examine its capacity to deliver the desired solutions.

Such capacity will be determined by the resources already invested in student success and the deployment of additional supports in response to the team’s priorities.

This is a very important aspect of long-term MTSS success. It is one thing to draft a plan that provides support to all students when they need it, but another to map out a detailed schedule for all steps that include:

1. Universal screening;
2. Team review of screening data to identify instructional needs, including Tier 1 enhancements;
3. Setting up interventions and progress monitoring plans;
4. Providing daily intervention sessions and weekly monitoring; and
5. Monthly review of progress data to see if interventions are working.

In order for tiered supports to be truly effective and beneficial, the team must review its capacity to provide the supports with integrity and make changes to daily practices in relation to the established goals.

Implementation. Once teams have worked through setting priorities, building consensus, and reviewing or improving capacity, the real work is to implement student supports on a daily basis. This is the heart and soul of an MTSS and requires daily attention to intervention integrity and data collection.

It is important to note that implementing tiered student supports is a marathon and not a sprint. Teachers need to be patient and give time for effective practices to work. That said, having regular times set aside to review student data at least monthly is important. Such data reviews help teachers know which practices are working and what needs to be changed.

Implementing tiered supports that address all students’ learning needs is hard work. In order for such efforts to be effective, schools are encouraged to develop and use a consistent process which focuses on student learning, collaboration, and results.

In addition, school teams will benefit from time spent identifying specific student learning priorities, building consensus and capacity to achieve these goals, investing in high quality implementation, and spending time examining student outcomes.

These steps will lead to developing new priorities as well as improved implementation procedures.

FastBridge offers many resources that support effective MTSS implementation. Learn more about our MTSS solution here.