Jesse Steif: Welcome, everyone. Thanks again for joining us here in the middle of the day, on your lunch break, or your lack of lunch break, as you are doing paperwork or filling out an FBA or doing any other of the millions of tasks that you do while you’re gobbling a sandwich or something. We appreciate you spending time with us.​

My name is Jesse Steif. I am a literacy content manager here at the University of Florida, Lastinger Center for Learning. Welcome to today’s Webinar, Making MTSS Work: clarifying tiers, interventions, and common pitfalls. This is webinar number two in our series of three. If you missed the last one or if you’d like to review it, it is on the Lastinger Center’s website. There’s a Lastinger technical assistance page that links to our YouTube channel where you can find the recording.

​For today’s content, MTSS is being implemented across the state, but challenges certainly abound, and MTSS is a complex topic. There are challenges sort of everywhere you look, and there’s certainly not enough time to go into all aspects of MTSS implementation in just our short 90 minutes together. So we chose a few key pieces of knowledge and common pitfalls to focus on here.

But if you’re wanting more information, certainly we’ll be putting out additional MTSS information in the future. But there are other fantastic organizations where you can go specifically, there’s a fantastic organization in the State of Florida. The PSRTI project out of the University of South Florida works with school districts to implement MTSS. Folks should absolutely check them out and communicate with them because they do really really good work around MTSS.

​So let’s kind of get into it here. Today, we’re going to do a couple of things. We’re going to clarify some distinctions between Tier 1 and Tiers 2 and 3.

​Back in my teacher prep, this was one of the areas where I didn’t get super solid training, probably because it was a very long time ago. Now, at this point, we weren’t as far along as we are now with MTSS, but it’s still very helpful.

​We’re going to highlight a few key MTSS challenges, focusing on both challenges for teachers and leaders in the audience that are here watching live or after the fact. We’d like for you to leave with practical strategies for strengthening, reading instruction across any tier.

​So first, we always want to start out with a reflection question to sort of prime your thinking, and this is for both teachers and other folks who might be in the audience, principals, district staff, etc.

​Everyone has different spheres of influence within an MTSS. Everyone has different roles to play, and to a larger or smaller extent, can exert some influence and some change on their system.

​I wanted to ask if you are in the context of your school or district: Do you have regular structured processes for reviewing student progress in Tiers 2 and 3?

​And is that process team-driven, meaning it’s not just incumbent on individual teachers to make decisions about Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention? Team-driven multidisciplinary teams are comprised of administrators, leaders and teachers contributing to data analysis and able to provide support if and when a change to an intervention or instruction is needed.

​It’s part of a solid, multi-tiered system of support, or team-based and process-oriented. Are those processes timely meaning? We have time built into our master schedule on a monthly basis for teams to review data and engage in good, deep, data-based problem solving for students who are at risk?

​And are those data meetings action-oriented, meaning, are teams empowered not only empowered to, but knowledgeable enough to make the necessary changes to the different tiers of instruction based on how students are responding and what proportion of students are responding?

​This question kind of gets at the complex kind of system oriented nature of a multi-tiered system of support.

​Teachers are on the front lines and delivering the instruction and delivering the intervention on a day-to-day basis, and are certainly at the core of a multi-tiered system of support, but are often not in positions to affect change within that system, which is why leaders and administrators need to be intimately involved in implementing a multi-tiered system of support at at really every level.

​So one of the first and sort of most basic questions that we get is what the heck is it? What is an intervention? What distinguishes? Tier 1 instruction from Tier 2, or Tier 3 intervention? Is it small group? Is it something else? We get a lot of questions. And so let’s kind of talk about it here.

​As a really quick recap of some specific aspects of the MTSS model of support.

​Starting at the bottom Tier 1 is provided to all students and encompasses both whole group and small group instruction that happens within the reading block tier. One is also referred to as primary prevention of reading difficulty.

​I think that’s a really apt phrase, because it should be sufficient for the majority of students. Now, this is in an optimized world, and that’s certainly not the case. In many districts, 80 to 85% of students are not proficient in reading just with core instruction alone, but because that’s not the case across many places in the state and across the country Tier 1 is kind of the rightful area of focus for making improvements to the effectiveness and the and the efficiency of instruction. 

Tier 2 is in addition to, or on top of Tier 1 provided to students who are identified via screening as at risk on FAST, and in need of intervention to prevent further reading issues to prevent them from falling further and behind.

​Further, behind the content of Tier 2 intervention should focus on what’s identified as areas of difficulty, on diagnostic assessments; things like decoding surveys, spelling inventories, other sort of qualitative observations and fluency checks.

​What is impeding the student or this group of students from accessing grade level text and meeting grade level standards? Tier 2 intervention provides more opportunities to respond, receive corrective feedback and is most often done in small groups.

​Tier 3 is, in addition to Tier 1 and Tier 2 outside the reading block, which to be fair, is an absolutely huge amount of support for students to receive. It’s so super intense because it is so individualized, and also on top of existing supports, which is the reason why systems with too many students receiving Tier 3 are unsustainable.

​Tier 3 at that level of intensity cannot support more than 5% of your students. And if you have more than 5% of your students receiving Tier 3 you are straining your intervention system. You’re straining your instructional resources too much, and you’re not able to provide them the support that the model really sort of calls for.

​That sort of action that is called for by that situation is changing Tier 1 instruction to be more intensive, further differentiated in a whole group, if necessary, to meet more student needs.

​So that’s just a quick sort of broad overview of what the three tiered model of instructional support looks like. And we’ll kind of go into some more detail for these key questions.

​So what is an intervention? There’s actually no bright dividing line between the content of what’s taught in Tier 1 and the content of what’s taught in Tier 2 or Tier 3 intervention.

​The content of what’s taught may or may not be the exact same thing, but if it is the same, it’s taught more intensively, and we’ll talk about what we mean when I say that the instruction is more intensive.

​So there are situations where Tier 2 may be a pre-teach or a reteach of specific Tier 1 content. For example, K, 2 phonics instruction. I know we have elementary, middle and high school folks here. We’re going to focus for a second on elementary.

​Don’t fret. We’ll have middle and high school content here for you as well.

​With something like kindergarten through second grade phonics instruction, it can often be the case that appropriate Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention is a reteach of, say, specific aspects of the Tier 1 phonics lesson.

​And this is definitely the case. If you have a good, strong, evidence-based core phonics program like, say UFLI foundations.

​You know part of that model work. How that model works is a Tier 2 intervention may be taking specific components of the lesson and doing a reteach of that in smaller groups to give students that higher level of intensity.

​That is a good, strong, evidence-based approach to providing intervention to some students. Other scenarios where a pre-teach, a pre-teach of Tier 1 content  might be appropriate for Tier 2 intervention would be students in grades three through five or secondary grades, who are maybe generally accurate readers that don’t need intensive, decoding instruction, but they might struggle with language based skills that impede their access to grade level text like recognizing text structures or needing more practice with the vocabulary that appears in their grade level text or needing needing help, navigating through a particularly challenging and dense sentence structure with a lot of clauses and phrases.

It’s really challenging for a lot of kids in the secondary and intermediate grades. So intervention might look like isolating those skills and teaching small groups of students in the context of the text that they already need to read, and can be really effective. 

And there’s a lot of research out there, studies that have been done with adolescent students, intermediate and secondary students that show that pre-teaching Tier 1 content with explicit comprehension, strategy work and this good, strong language support, particularly in science and social studies and content areas, can be effective for adolescent students. You don’t necessarily need a whole other program to layer on top of it with its own scope and sequence and instructional routines.

​And actually, our next webinar, we’ll be talking about how we align the tiers of instruction. We’ll go into a lot more detail about that.

​But Tier 2 content may also be different from Tier 1 content.

​For example, say, we have a fifth grade student, or groups of third, fourth and fifth grade students, who are missing first grade decoding skills. We were absent a ton with Covid, or there’s a lot of there’s a lot of missed instruction, or we had sub after sub after sub in first grade and we just didn’t get good instruction in phonics, and we have a ton of we have a ton of holes.

​Well, then, yes, we would want to go back and provide Tier 2 intervention in those skills. And by the time students are in fourth and fifth grade, we’re no longer teaching basic decoding skills in Tier 1, and so that Tier 2 content would have to be different than your Tier 1 instruction and would be in addition to their grade level content.

​Other examples might be, and say, an eighth grade student with some more significant and widespread issues who may need a little bit of everything might be relatively solid in their early decoding skills. They can decode most single-syllable words, but they really struggle with multi-syllable word reading that appears a lot in their content area textbooks. They’re pretty disfluent readers, and they have a little vocabulary issues and some comprehension strategy work. 

There are good evidence-based intervention programs out there that will teach these skills to students and are supported by strong research that can be implemented in the context of, say, an intensive reading course in addition to the students’ Tier 1 instruction in ELA and other content areas.

​So you know, that’s about as clear as mud and is a challenging sort of system to navigate. But you know, MTSS can be a little complex. I think we sometimes make it more complex than it needs to be, but the end message here is that the content of intervention isn’t necessarily what makes something an intervention or Tier 1 instruction. It’s a couple of other things, namely, the intensity of the instruction. So intervention is more intensive instruction in some way that is on top of, or in addition to Tier 1.

​So what do we mean when we say intensive instruction?

​I wanted to introduce this, this concept of dosage. Just like in medicine, the dosage is the strength of the intervention, or how much of the active ingredient is packaged into an intervention session, just like how much ibuprofen is packed into a pill, dosage refers to just how much of an active ingredient is in a session.

​How many words are students reading and practicing, how many opportunities for, say, active processing of vocabulary are planned in a session? How many more times can a student practice a key comprehension strategy within a lesson?

​These are all things that contribute to the dosage of an intervention. So you know I would if I’m providing a Tier 2 intervention to a student with phonics difficulties and they’re reading 20 words with that feature of phonics pattern, that’s a higher dosage than an intervention lesson that would have them read 10 words, for example. 

Doing more sessions or implementing sessions over a longer period of time is one way of increasing dosage, and that’s kind of the classic way that we think about increasing the intensity of an intervention. We do it more days a week, we do it. We make the group a little smaller to give students more individualized attention. That is a way of increasing dosage. But there are other ways that I would encourage folks to think about to make an intervention more effective than just adding days or making the group smaller.

​For example, more explicit modeling for students who continue to have accuracy issues with reading words or remembering vocabulary. Integrating more of the I do and we do into initial instruction in an intervention can be a really good way of intensifying the intervention.

​Even doing things like actually promoting, teaching or modeling of self-regulation, strategies like staying on track, doing more self-talk just to remain focused and bring down your levels of frustration. Modeling those sorts of self-regulation strategies have actually been shown to improve effectiveness of intervention as it relates to explicit modeling.

​More opportunities to respond, if you attended our first webinar, we introduced these concepts of masked and distributed practice, which is basically going back to this concept of dosage. Incorporating additional words for students to read in a scaffolded way from a word list, when we teach a particular pattern, if we’re working on fluency, we’re building in repeated reading of a passage. More opportunities for that student to read and receive that feedback from the teacher.

​Additional processing opportunities for vocabulary words, things that can be built right into a lesson again, without having to add additional sorts of lessons.

​Then, more corrective feedback. What we mean when we say corrective feedback is important. It affirms the behavior that students do accurately and then provides really specific instruction to help them to help kids sort of examine what they did incorrectly, so that they can correct the error.

​For example, if a student decodes the word had as hid. There’s a million different ways that we can respond to that and correct the error, but not all of which are equally effective. In my earlier days as a teacher, I taught second grade. I might have said something just like, try that word again, or that wasn’t right. Let’s look at that word again, or what might have made sense?

​But now I know we could. Probably we could get a lot more specific with that corrective feedback, and we could say things like, Oh, yeah. Well, you sounded out the H and the D correctly, but check your vowel sound, right? That’s a lot more helpful to a young student than prompting them to try again. And with corrective feedback, we always want to have the student respond correctly after we’ve corrected their behavior or their error.

​So intervention intensity. These are some of the core components of what we mean when we say intensifying instruction.

​So we’re gonna compare the Tier 2 lesson structures for two small groups of students in the primary grades who need intervention in basic reading skills. So issues with foundational skills, like phonological awareness and phonics and fluency, are some of the most common reasons that kids need Tier 2 intervention, particularly in the elementary grades, certainly in the secondary grades, although needs become a lot more complex in secondary grades. 

But it’s important that teachers, leaders, everyone is able to discern lesson structures that are more or less appropriate, or more or less targeted to a particular skill deficit, because not all interventions are created equal. And we want to be really specific and targeted and purposeful in our intervention lessons.

​On the left here, you’ll see. Lesson A, you might recognize this as a sort of a generic guided reading lesson.

​We would start with a review of some previously taught sight words. The teacher would then introduce the new text to a student, the kids read the text and there’s sort of incidental prompting that the teacher then goes from student to student and listens to them, read for a bit and provides some sort of corrective feedback, but it’s incidental. Then there’s a teaching point that students that teachers can choose from maybe they choose chunking big words.

​We end with a word study where we were there’s often some choices that teachers have, so we’ve chosen a more decoding oriented one where we use elkon boxes and teach kind of one to three words.

​Compare that to Lesson B. This sort of structure is not from any particular curriculum, no particular program, but it appears across a variety of foundational skills related curricula. We might start with a phonological warmup where students blend and and segment in in pretty quick succession, five to 10 words.

We move into a cumulative review where there’s some we do and you do where kids read 15 to 20 words that have previously taught letter sound correspondences. There’s some explicit instruction that may get additional 20 to 30 reps in there. For the specific decoding skills that students need there, we’re working in spelling where we’re incorporating additional modalities. Moving into some connected text of reading with decodable books. 

But you can see that lesson. B, just contains a significantly larger dosage of words that students read and are aligned with the skills that they’re learning tons more opportunities to respond and receive corrective feedback. It’s also more systematic as the words the students read and spell are aligned with what was previously taught and what’s currently being taught versus lesson A where the text is a little bit less controlled and there may be words that students don’t know how to and haven’t been taught how to read quite yet.

​So this is not to say that a guided reading style lesson is inappropriate for all students. It’s not. It’s certainly appropriate for some students, particularly students, who are moving past sort of decoding being the primary impediment to their reading comprehension.

​And then, guiding a student through a piece of complex text can actually be really effective. But it underscores the importance of us being better than our intervention tools and understanding which tools are appropriate for which students based on their current skill gaps.

​So we kind of talked about this. We’ll just talk about this briefly, because I mentioned this a couple times. One of the misconceptions that we see out there about intervention is that all small groups count as Tier 2 intervention we’re kind of regardless of when it occurs. 

If your small groups are occurring during your reading block, then they are considered Tier 1 instruction, and rightly so, because effective Tier 1 instruction does include small group, differentiated instruction.

​Now I know that there is very precious little time outside the reading block, and that everything that you add outside the reading block pushes something else out. That’s also really really important.

​But this and this sort of underscores. The reason why Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention are such valuable instructional real estate. And those interventions have to be laser focused, really well paced and designed to accelerate students as quickly as you can out of them, so that kids can get back into back into just Tier 1 instruction. Your system just cannot sustain tons and tons of kids in, 20-30% in Tier 3.

​So Tier 2 and Tier 3 must occur outside the reading block, because it supplements not supplants your Tier 1 instruction.

​So Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention focus on a more targeted sets of skills compared to Tier 1 instruction.

​Your intervention programs can focus on skills. So skills that tend to group together and represent the core of kids’ difficulty and the reason why they need Tier 2 instruction tend to be your students with basic decoding issues, phonological awareness, decoding, spelling and fluency issues. 

Kids who struggle with reading and spelling single syllable words and who struggle with reading comprehension because they just can’t read the words accurately enough and their written expression is constrained by their spelling. Oftentimes their handwriting is also an issue. 

Another kind of set of skills that tend to group with one group together are students who, all their early decoding skills are pretty intact. They can read and spell most single syllable words, but what they really struggle with is advanced, decoding. Reading multi-syllable words, that’s really a big struggle which negatively influences their fluency.

​These often occur with vocabulary issues, too. There’s a phenomenon of what’s called late emerging, reading difficulties where students in kindergarten through second grade look like they’re totally fine, and they are.

​They never pop up on your screening assessments. They’re fine on FAST in K-2, and all of a sudden we really really crash into a wall starting in third and fourth grade.

​Oftentimes the core of the difficulty there starts with their ability to read complex text that is impaired because they really struggle to read more complex, multi-syllable words. This affects their fluency and starts to affect their more complex vocabulary skills and doesn’t tend to show up in their day-to-day spoken language. Your basic interpersonal conversation skills are fine, but then, when you peel the more advanced language layers back, students in this kind of profile tend to struggle to understand more academic vocabulary terms.

​And then there are students who, their decoding accuracy is generally pretty solid, but we’re struggling with the language side of reading comprehension.

​Vocabulary kind of runs the gamut here throughout a lot of the profiles, but understanding text structures, things like compare and contrast, description, chronology, text structure, instruction and understanding is super key to reading comprehension. They may struggle with understanding syntax and long, dense sentences. They tend to lose track of what they’re reading about. Once you get to a sentence that has maybe two or three clauses in it, and they need instruction in how to decompose these sentences and kind of keep track of who the subject is in the sentence or what that subject is doing.

​This tends to come along with difficulty with other language skills like making inferences.

​These are not the only profiles of reading difficulty that exist. Kids are not widgets. Every student is different.

​These are issues that kind of tend to group together, and that a lot of good, strong, evidence-based interventions can target. It underscores the importance of matching the focus of our intervention to the skill difficulties of a student.

​So whenever we’re talking about explicit instruction, we talk about examples and non-examples. Right?

​We get questions about what does and does not count as interventions. We often will review intervention plans for students and see things like seating changes. A change of seating as an accommodation or maybe just a general classroom strategy that can be effective for students. It can help keep students on track. We move an inattentive student away from a friend, or move them to a place where you can, you can correct and prompt them more frequently, but in and of itself it is not an intensification of instruction. There’s not anything different that we’re doing.

​Kind of under the same umbrella, there’s extended time again. It’s an accommodation, not an intervention.

​Again, a very important accommodation that helps tons and tons of kids with disabilities, and certainly should be part of what we consider for students who are struggling, but not not in and of itself an intervention.

​We also see things on intervention plans that are a little vague, like incorporating graphic organizers or independent conferencing.

​Again similar to seating changes and extended time, graphic organizers and providing an individual conference, a check-in, can be absolutely effective instructional tools if they are integrated into a larger and more cohesive course of instruction, but in and of themselves, additional graphic organizers, or independent conferencing, that kind of lack a clear and cohesive direction of the instruction.

​So again, you can use graphic organizers extremely effectively, and we would say that every classroom should be using graphic organizers to facilitate comprehension and written expression. You can do so very effectively as part of your Tier 1 instruction, or in a way that causes some disjointed instruction, particularly if you’re using just a ton of one off sort of graphic organizers, and you never revisit them again.​

Then there is additional reading practice. So providing students more time, or additional opportunities for reading practice.

​Again, reading volume is super important. Kids do not get better at reading without large volumes of reading but intervention and instruction needs to have an explicit instructional component to it. So again, we would not argue that independent reading is not important. It’s actually, it’s differentially effective for groups of students.

​We all know those students who go to our book nook, or we could have the coziest reading corner in the world, but a lot of students with reading difficulties can get really good at looking like they’re reading without actually reading. And we’re not increasing the dosage at all of the number of words that they’re reading at best.

​At worst we have kids who might throw a chair or get into an argument to get themselves kicked out of class to avoid reading time. So explicit instruction and intensity is kind of the key here for what makes an intervention.

​That is just kind of scratching the surface about MTSS. MTSS has to do with tons of other systems within a school. It’s very much impossible to kind of give a broad and deep overview of MTSS in something like even 90 minutes, or even a full day, so we wanted to choose some of the most common questions that are out there and kind of address them. And similar to misunderstandings and challenges, there’s a whole wide variety of them, so this is kind of a sampling of what we’ve seen being asked among our partners.

​So the first one is that MTSS is the road to ESE.  We want to consider interventions, our system of support, to be finding the right level of support for a student that will that will get them on track, whether that is spending some time receiving Tier 3 interventions for that to be faded back down to to Tier 2 (and hopefully back down to Tier 1,) or we provide good, strong Tier 3 instruction and find that students need more, or what what has been provided that has been effective can’t be maintained with general education resources alone.

​But the tiers are fluid. And just because a student is in Tier 3 shouldn’t mean that they are about to be tested because not all students who are receiving Tier 3 interventions have a disability, or should be suspected of having a disability. 

In fact, most students receiving Tier 3 interventions don’t have a disability, and their issues are because of things that would exclude them from being found eligible for a specific learning disability like having missed instruction, lots of absences. I mean, there’s a million different reasons why students can be struggling and have risk for future reading failure. 

Literacy is an endpoint of a large system of factors that students are exposed to on a day-to-day basis. And so we should not be suspecting that a student has a disability just by virtue of them needing to have Tier 3 instruction. 

Also, not all students with disabilities require Tier 3 intervention.

​So there’s a wonderful resource out there from our friends at the PSRTI project about specially designed instruction, and where it is provided. Specially designed instruction, like students get through IEPs can be provided at Tier 1 at Tier 2, or at Tier 3. Now it’s the current reality that a lot of students who have IEPs  fall into that level of severity that indicates they need Tier 3 intervention. But there’s nothing inherently about having a specific learning disability that dooms you to a life of requiring Tier 3 intervention, and I know that language is strong, but it’s but I think it’s appropriate, because for many students, especially with milder learning disabilities, strong, evidence-based Tier 1 instruction with some Tier 2 intervention can be what meets their needs.

​We need to work as teams to indicate, to determine what is it about our current level of support that’s not meeting the student need, and whether that is making something more intensive, more individualized at Tier one or Tier 2 can be very effective for students with disabilities.

​The purpose of Tier 3 is not to keep students out of ESE either. So we shouldn’t be saying, something like, well, if a student has a disability, an MTSS should effectively suss out the level of support that they need, and if and if they need something more intensive than Tier 3, well then, yes, that would be a reason to find a student eligible for special education. 

So it’s not the fast track to ESE. It’s not. It’s not the roadblock that keeps students out of ESE. It’s about finding the right level of support for a student, whether that’s Gen. Ed. intervention or Tier 1 or specially designed instruction. 

​I kind of got him ahead of myself there.

​So response to intervention data as part of MTSS–that’s the purpose of it. It’s used to improve the effectiveness of instruction primarily, but we can use it as part of a comprehensive evaluation if we suspect that a student has a disability.

​So implementing an MTSS is not something that teachers can do themselves. Like I said before, teachers are definitely the primary drivers of instruction, but it takes multidisciplinary teams at both the school level and the district level with a detailed vision for MTSS to really make it work.

​So a lack of clarity, a lack of understanding about effective implementation of an MTSS for leaders is one of the biggest challenges for districts and schools in implementing a good, strong, multi-tiered system of support.

​For leaders who are on this call, leaders who are watching this after the fact: we need leaders to engage in their own professional learning on creating and managing effective MTSS systems.

​So there’s professional development that everyone needs. Everyone is always in need of professional learning themselves. We need for that strong content knowledge to be in place, so that leaders can effectively and clearly communicate expectations and processes for MTSS implementation.

​Just like teachers need coaching on implementing a particular curriculum,  intervention or instruction in general systems, multidisciplinary teams and schools need modeling from their leaders and coaching from leaders to to engage in effective database decision making and problem solving within schools.

​MTSS related oriented leadership are there, providing coaching, modeling and leadership. Leaders also should be investing in and providing professional learning for all stakeholders.

​We didn’t talk about this, but in the introduction, but I mean part of a strong MTSS  is all staff, all educators, teachers, paraprofessionals, speech, language pathologists and principals, getting the professional learning and ongoing job embedded coaching that they need. A system doesn’t run without that sort of continuous level of improvement.

​There must be investment in and provision of professional learning for all stakeholders, and that includes folks who are running those systems.

​And we need to create and prioritize time for staff to implement MTSS. So time built into the day for grade level teams to engage in data analysis for their Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention groups to engage in data analysis, led by an instructional leader on their Tier 1 instruction during the school day or or hour after school, if it’s paid and in the contract to do the work of good database problem solving.

​And this happens with creation of monthly meeting schedules that are orderly and organized where everyone understands what they need to do and the data they need to analyze.

​Some critical sort of self-reflective questions that leaders can be asking themselves on a regular basis:

​How are we supporting the adults? Implementing MTSS. MTSS is about more than just providing instruction and intervention to students and progress monitoring. It’s also about supporting the adults through coaching professional learning and feedback and ongoing feedback.

​Do we have database decision-making processes that allow for timely and actionable review of our Tier 1 instructional data? Our Tier 2 and Tier 3 progress monitoring data have all those built in and modeled.

​How do we ensure alignment and continuity between Tier 1 instruction and our Tier 2 and Tier 3 Intervention? We want to have this sort of guidance enshrined in easily accessible technical assistance for teachers and school leaders.

​So that folks aren’t out there just kind of wondering what to do next or implementing sort of disjointed pieces of instruction?

​And do we provide that explicit guidance on diagnostic assessment and intervention selection for Tier 2? We talked a lot about how Tier 2 intervention needs to be very targeted to a skill gap of the student that’s affecting their ability to read complex text and meet standards. Do we provide decision-making criteria for how to determine what a student is struggling with and how to align, and a menu of intervention resources that we may have at a school or within a district with those particular skill gaps?

​Another challenge, other challenges for teachers. Of course, implementing interventions without support.

​School and district plans should definitely include ongoing professional learning on both general MTSS and specific intervention implementation.

​Schools and districts can have menus of beautiful fantastic interventions that are evidence-based and beautiful resource rooms, but results aren’t going to change without strong initial training and regular coaching, just like with Tier 1 curriculum implementation.

​We can’t have what I lovingly call a drive by PD, where a box of curriculum materials gets dropped off to a classroom, and teachers are expected to sort of pick them up and use them without sufficient training.

​Teachers need both access to evidence-based interventions for students needing Tier 2 and Tier 3 and ongoing implementation support and coaching just like they would with Tier 1 instruction.

​On the student side of things, students need to receive interventions that are implemented as designed and as studied. Again, you can have a good, strong, evidence-based intervention, but if you haven’t received the training to actually implement the intervention, you may be missing a key component. You may not be implementing it in the manner that was intended.

​We shouldn’t be surprised if and when students’ results aren’t coming, even if we have good, strong instructional materials in place.

​Plans should clearly outline the services that both students and teachers will receive. There are districts out there when we’re writing, say, Tier 2 or Tier 3 plans for students, it includes not just what we’re doing for the student, but also how the teacher will be supported. You know what sort of observations and support and training and professional learning around intervention implementation will be provided, because that I would argue is just as important as having the right intervention in place.

So, some common sort of we will call them pitfalls, because these are the issues that we’ll address. Here are ones that sometimes lead to things like parent complaints or due process procedures that are around a multi-tiered system of support and response to intervention. So we’ll address a couple of things. 

One of the things that we did want to address was dyslexia.

​Folks are a lot more aware of dyslexia in the past, say, five/eight years. Dyslexia is a term that now appears, I think it’s about 44 times in the reading endorsement competency standards now. And it’s in multiple pieces of literacy oriented legislation and kind of continues to be something that is on many  educators’, parents’ and families’ radars, particularly now, as opposed to maybe 10 or 15 years ago. So it’s not surprising to know that across the state and really across the country.

​Dyslexia shows up in some areas that can cause issues to school districts and schools when it comes to MTSS and RTI implementation. So we wanted to dedicate a little bit of time to talking about dyslexia, where it fits in with response to intervention and MTSS. 

Because ultimately, what I hope that folks kind of come away from this section of the presentation with is that there are misconceptions about what dyslexia is, but it’s not actually super complicated.

​The existence of dyslexia in schools is not something that should cause us to change our MTSS and RTI-related processes because dyslexia identification specifically can fit very nicely within our current specific learning disabilities identification processes in the state of Florida.

​So we’ll talk about what we mean when we say that, and hopefully we will, folks will leave here with a little bit of additional clarity around how to respond. If a parent talks about dyslexia or engaging in conversations around dyslexia in their schools, the start point with some common pitfalls, not just with dyslexia, but in MTSS in general, can be communication gaps with parents.

​One of the most common reasons for complaints to a district or due process proceedings is this phrase of MTSS or RTI being used to delay or deny comprehensive ESE evaluation.

​Oftentimes parents are not aware of just how much intervention is being provided.

​If we’re going six weeks, 12 weeks or more, without necessarily communicating to parents, parents will kind of default to thinking, “well, nothing in particular is being done for my student,” and incorrectly, of course.

​And so our processes when providing Tier 3 intervention, it should definitely include active efforts to meet with parents, that we know can be challenging sometimes, but to co-create plans and goals, inviting them into regular meetings and communicating when follow-up meetings are going to be held, particularly when we’re doing intensive individualized intervention. 

For students, if that kind of work is happening behind closed doors, parents aren’t necessarily aware of all the work and resources that are going into that. Well, they should be, not only to avoid complaints and other things, but just so that parents are really aware of all of the good hard work that is being done to meet struggling students’ needs at schools.

​Miscommunications happen. We know that. At the end of the day, there aren’t any kind of criteria for the amount of time that intervention is provided before schools initiate an ESE evaluation so often.

​A common issue that happens is students are receiving Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention for a year, two years, maybe, and there have been conversations that happen between a parent and a teacher, a parent and a school counselor, or a principal where the parent indicates I’m really concerned about my student. We’ve been at this for a year or two years, and they’re still struggling. What’s going on? And they may be told, “Well, we need to implement intervention for this amount of time,” or “Well, they need to go through Tier 2 before we can provide Tier 3 intervention to them.”

​But that’s not the case. There may be good, well-intentioned reasons for not zooming students through all the tiers of instruction. Of course. Tier 3 is not the answer to all or most students’ needs.

​But on the other hand, if a parent says, “Hey, I’m really concerned, we need to do some additional testing,” or if you, as a school district employee, says, “Oh, boy, I suspect that there might be a real learning issue going on here,” we probably need to do some testing. Legally speaking, there’s nothing in the law that says no, they must have Tier 3 intervention for X number of weeks, or we must have gone through X number of intervention cycles before considering the student for a comprehensive evaluation.

​The results of that evaluation may indicate that the student doesn’t have a disability for a lot of different reasons, but we should not be using moving through an MTSS or RTI process as a reason to delay or deny that evaluation.

​So, this is part of State law. If a parent suspects a disability and requests an evaluation, and that request can come in a lot of different forms, schools have the legal obligation to hold a meeting with the parent within 30 days of the request and to do one of 3 things:

​One, present the parent with a consent for evaluation. Say we agree. There is a basis for suspecting that there is a disability, and moving forward with a comprehensive evaluation, you move forward with your typical consent process.

Or you would formally deny the evaluation and also document that on a prior written notice. A common reason for later sort of lawsuits or due process sort of procedures is that they retrospectively find out that they were denied an evaluation. They may not have realized it at the time when a school or a team indicated. No, we’re not going to evaluate, but they were never provided with that documentation.

​But that is an obligation that schools need to do. If we’re saying no, we do not suspect that your child has a disability, we need to document that on a prior written notice. 

Or to agree in writing on a conference note on a conference form with a really high level of detail on an alternative, on an alternate course of action, usually a change to a current intervention plan.

​There are plenty of reasons why we might respond to a parent with this third option. You know a parent of a third grade student who really, truly is struggling. The parent says, I think my student might have a learning disability. Can we evaluate? But then we see, oh, in kindergarten they were absent 40% of the time, and in first grade they had eight different long term subs. 

Boy, there’s a lot of indication here that it might be an instructional issue and reasons that I might suspect that it might not be a disability, but other factors, I might say, “Well, let’s come in for a meeting, let’s lay it all out there, what we think, and we will document this all on a form.”

But the key thing is that even if we do agree in writing on this alternate course of action, we always should be in the business of saying to parents, well, you can always, even though we’re agreeing today to this course of action, you can change your mind tomorrow or next week and say, “I would prefer to do the evaluation,” even though we know that there’s probably not a strong basis for there being a learning disability, we would still be legally obligated to perform the evaluation. 

The eligibility determination is a whole other thing, and we won’t address eligibility here today, but parents do always have that right to request, even if they’ve signed an alternate course of action the day before.

​And if we were to do these three things and have it be well documented, and be in very close communication with parents, the incidence of parent complaints and due process and due process procedures would likely come down.

​But again acknowledging that, is it a challenge to maintain that sort of close communication with parents. You know everyone. Everyone is very, very busy all day every day, and we’re often talking with parents at 5:00/6:00 in the evening.

​This is superhuman work that folks in school districts are doing, but this information is merely presenting what is in the law in an attempt to help folks avoid sort of sticky communication issues with parents.

​So these requests for evaluation can come in a lot of forms. There are certain keywords that I look for that trigger the need to engage in some deeper conversation.

​“Something more is going on with my child. I think there’s a learning issue. Can we do some additional testing to figure out what’s going on? We’ve been doing Tier 3 for a long time. I’m not seeing improvement. I think there could be a serious problem. We need to look at something more. My child is struggling to read. I think they have dyslexia. Can we do some testing?”

You know all of these things, I would consider, and as a classroom teacher and later a school psychologist, as not an explicit request for evaluation. That would trigger our need to respond to it in one of those three ways, but if not an implicit sort of  communication that I need additional information here. 

We need to have a deeper conversation where I’m talking to parents about their options for general education intervention, when we might suspect that there’s a disability going on, where their child is in a multi-tiered system of support, what a comprehensive evaluation looks like, the information that it will or won’t give to us; you know an informed parent is a happy parent. I won’t say happy parent, because I know, but a happier parent. They need to have a strong understanding of what they’re asking for and we need to be in the business of informing them.

​So let’s talk about where dyslexia kind of falls here within this discussion.

​I have Florida’s definition of a specific learning disability.

​I won’t read everything out to you here, but I have bolded and underlined the term dyslexia. So dyslexia,  in Florida’s legal definition of a specific learning disability, appears there as one of the specific learning disabilities that we consider. So specific learning disabilities happen across reading, math and writing. And there are multiple areas within reading, math, and writing that students can have a specific learning disability. So in reading, they can have a specific learning disability in basic reading skills, phonics, decoding. You can have a specific learning disability in reading fluency and you can have a specific learning disability in reading comprehension.

​Dyslexia and specific learning disability in basic reading skills mean the same thing. So the terms should be thought of as interchangeable.

​Right? There’s a lot of misconceptions about dyslexia out there, the most common of which are that students see letters backwards, or the words jump around on the page. Those are all myths and misconceptions.

​Dyslexia is at its core a specific learning disability that affects your ability to read words and spell words accurately and fluently. It’s a core phonological processing difficulty that affects your phonics, decoding and spelling skills.

​And so when you kind of understand dyslexia to mean that kids have a specific learning disability in basic reading skills. That is, dyslexia. Kids have to be found eligible for SLD in order for us to say that they have dyslexia, but they do mean the same thing. And of course kids struggle with decoding issues and phonics, issues and spelling issues for a lot of different reasons, most of which are not dyslexia. 

And so you see the second paragraph here is that an SLD or dyslexia doesn’t include problems that are primarily the result of vision and hearing issues, intellectual disability, limited English proficiency, lack of instruction, cultural, economic or environmental factors.

​That’s not dyslexia, that’s not SLD. We want folks to understand that the term dyslexia can be substituted for SLD and basic reading skills if a student has been found eligible as having a disability.

​There are no legal reasons, no procedural reasons, no legal reasons that preclude schools and districts from using the term dyslexia.

​I have here a screenshot of a 2015 piece of policy guidance from the Federal Department of Education, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (the National ESE branch of the Department of Education) called Dear Colleague Letter that basically indicates there’s no legal reason to avoid using the term dyslexia.

​We think about dyslexia as the same as SLD and basic reading skills. Students have to be, of course, found eligible for an IEP, but once that process of disability identification has been satisfied and a student has been found eligible, nothing in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the main sort of national piece of legislation would preclude schools, districts and states from using that term as well as Dyscalculia, the math math SLD and Dysgraphia, the writing SLD in their evaluations, eligibility determinations and IEP documents.

​This is a major shift from the way that a lot of people were trained, or things that their administrators or other leaders have told them, when I was teaching and a school psychologist, I was told by many folks that we can’t say dyslexia. That’s a private, medical diagnosis. We don’t want to be on the hook for X and Y that we now know was not correct.

Saying, “We suspect a student has dyslexia” would mean the same thing as we suspect a student has a specific learning disability. We know what to do in those situations when we suspect a specific learning disability. It’s not scary. We have processes there for strong evaluation and intervention, and we can just substitute that term right in there.

​A parent request for dyslexia testing should be treated like any other parent request for ESE evaluation  or a specific learning disability.

​The same evaluation processes and procedures apply. There should be an extra step there, though, and that extra step is explaining to parents the relationship between the term dyslexia and specific learning disability. We do not have a disability category called dyslexia, or dyscalculia, or dysgraphia. 

They fall under this term ‘specific learning disability,’ and we can talk to parents about the different kinds of specific learning disabilities and basic reading skills, reading fluency and reading comprehension and say, well, okay, do we suspect are there issues with this student’s basic reading skills, with their ability to read words accurately and and fluently as that’s impeding their ability to benefit from grade level text and to meet grade level standards.

​Well, if that’s the case, that’s SLD in basic reading skills. You’ll see that on the paperwork and when we evaluate, for your child, we can substitute that term. Dyslexia is just not a term that appears in our IEP paperwork or our SLD evaluation sort of paperwork, but we can very much use that term with parents and feel comfortable kind of discussing the implications.

​We should not tell parents that dyslexia is a medical term or that we can’t test for dyslexia.

​There are a range of resources from the Florida Department of Education around this. There’s a nice infographic out there called dyslexia, fast facts from 2016 or 2017, I believe, written by a nationally prominent researcher in education that indicates well, no dyslexia is not a medical term. In the same way that SLD is not a medical term. It’s a term that is in the purview of public education and dyslexia itself is actually not even a medical diagnosis. The diagnostic term is specific learning disorder, and dyslexia is one of these specific learning disorders that a private clinician might diagnose.

​But again, we shouldn’t say we can’t test for dyslexia and close the door to ESE evaluation. If a parent says, Can we test my child for dyslexia?, we open up that conversation. If warranted and appropriate, we start the comprehensive ESE evaluation for a specific learning disability and basic reading skills.

​For some folks listening to this, that might be a major sea change from what you have previously been trained to do, or how to respond to a parent, or think about SLD and dyslexia. For others, it might be totally consistent with what you’ve been doing, and this was just maybe a nice review and an affirmation that you’ve been talking to parents and to your colleagues in the right way.

​It’s sort of a reflection of the sort of pervasive misconceptions that can be out there around terms like specific learning and dyslexia.

​These misconceptions tend to be one that really commonly causes later issues down the road in terms of parent complaints that are related to MTSS and RTI. We identify a big part of a comprehensive SLD evaluation is obviously providing Tier 3 intervention and gauging students’ responses to intervention over time.

​So hopefully, that sort of surface scratching cleared up a little bit.

​We’ll talk about it a little bit further in our next installment coming up in June.

​MTSS, again, to reiterate, whenever we’re talking about systems level work.

​We’re talking about complex interactions, between pieces of a system between instruction, assessment, meetings and professional learning. MTSS is implemented at the classroom level, at the school level, and at the district level.

​And so, it really just refers to the systems that are in place that find the correct level of support for students, provide that level of support with fidelity, with the proper level of support for both students, teachers, parents and administrators at both the school and the district level.

​So our last webinar in the series will be on June 24th, and the title is Bringing it all Together, Planning Cohesive Reading Interventions.

​We’ll focus on aligning your Tier 1 instruction with your Tier 2 and your Tier 3 intervention and different sorts of ways that we can do it. It’ll be very specific. And hopefully we can leave that session with good sorts of examples and things to bring back to your classrooms, your school and your district. 

So thank you so much. We appreciate everyone’s valuable time here on a Tuesday at the end of the year.  You’re doing a lot, and we so appreciate you joining us here this afternoon.

​Thank you so much.