TRANSKRIPT 🔗
WEBVTT
00:00:01.663 --> 00:00:15.131
So MTSS and RTI have been touted for years as the way to student improvement, but how quickly can we really expect progress?
00:00:15.131 --> 00:00:19.670
At what kind of rate of improvement should we even be looking for?
00:00:19.670 --> 00:00:22.748
That's what I'd like to talk about with you today.
00:00:22.748 --> 00:00:29.655
That's what I'd like to talk about with you today.
00:00:29.655 --> 00:00:34.225
Hi, I'm Jessica Curtis of Teaching Struggling Learners.
00:00:34.225 --> 00:00:35.529
I'm a boy mom and a veteran teacher.
00:00:35.529 --> 00:00:45.652
You're listening to the Reaching Struggling Learners podcast, where we talk all about helping students succeed academically, socially and behaviorally.
00:00:45.652 --> 00:00:47.847
Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:00:47.847 --> 00:01:05.865
The core question that we should be asking ourselves in every meeting is how do we know if what we're doing is effective?
00:01:05.865 --> 00:01:18.504
There has to be no doubt in everyone's mind that the intervention that we're using is effective or not, because if it is, there's going to be significant progress over time.
00:01:18.504 --> 00:01:33.359
The chart, the data, all the information that we collect from the progress monitoring if we're doing it right again, it all should be going up and it should be going up pretty quickly.
00:01:33.359 --> 00:01:49.483
For example, if our goal is that the student will be able to identify X number of letters or letter sounds, that student should be making pretty quick progress on that.
00:01:49.483 --> 00:01:52.831
They should be learning a few more letters or letter sounds a week.
00:01:52.831 --> 00:02:07.753
If our goal was that the student would be able to do X number of math facts weekly or X number of math facts in a minute, we should be seeing weekly or biweekly progress on that on the graphs.
00:02:07.753 --> 00:02:29.540
All of that is dependent on how good our goals are and whether our goals are targeted at the correct skill gap the most foundational skill and if the intervention that we have chosen is most effective for that skill.
00:02:29.540 --> 00:02:40.227
Now, if you have questions about how to progress monitor, I want to encourage you to pick up my five steps to beginning progress monitoring.
00:02:40.227 --> 00:03:02.950
There's also a whole bunch of podcast episodes and I will link them in the show notes today, but you need to go back if you have any questions whatsoever on how to choose your goals, how to write effective goals, how to figure out what skill you want you really, really need to be focusing on Today.
00:03:02.950 --> 00:03:11.329
When we're talking about the rate of improvement, I am assuming that we've made good goals.
00:03:11.329 --> 00:03:27.262
I'm assuming that you have that under your belt and that you know how, that you're following the procedures for collecting consistent data and the data you're collecting is on the skill gap
Load full transcript
that you're focusing on.
00:03:27.262 --> 00:03:56.615
All of that, if you take all of that into consideration, if you have a goal that is focused on what the student actually needs to work on the most significant foundational skill and you are progress monitoring that skill and your intervention is focused on filling the gaps for that foundational skill, you should see pretty fast improvement.
00:03:56.615 --> 00:04:08.515
The fact is, if we are honed in on the correct thing, the students are really primed to make really fast improvement.
00:04:08.515 --> 00:04:11.765
We should see pretty quick improvement.
00:04:11.765 --> 00:04:16.281
We should see significant gains over a six to nine week period.
00:04:17.062 --> 00:04:36.307
Now if the data is stagnant or goodness knows if it's going down Again, assuming that nothing crazy is going on, for example oh goodness, hopefully not a TBI or there's something going on at home, something you know, a divorce, or something just ridiculous is going on.
00:04:36.307 --> 00:04:42.185
Assuming that everything else is pretty normal, then a couple things could be happening.
00:04:42.185 --> 00:04:51.809
Either the skill focus for the goal or the intervention was wrong or we are using the wrong intervention.
00:04:51.809 --> 00:04:54.014
That's really all it is.
00:04:54.014 --> 00:04:58.382
Assuming that the student has, you know, average intelligence.
00:04:58.382 --> 00:05:00.425
Kids learn quickly.
00:05:00.425 --> 00:05:06.595
So over a nine-week period they really should see some significant improvement.
00:05:06.595 --> 00:05:14.985
Now I realize that that can be different for different things, for example, and it also depends on the age that you're working with.
00:05:14.985 --> 00:05:22.608
If you're working with elementary school students and you're working with letter sounds, you should see some pretty quick improvement.
00:05:22.608 --> 00:05:38.567
If you're working with high schoolers and you are working on them understanding the different definitions for prefixes and suffixes, that might take a little bit longer because that's a little bit more complicated skill that you're trying to teach the students.
00:05:38.567 --> 00:05:48.586
But again, over a six to nine week period you should see those graphs or the progress monitoring data going up pretty, pretty quickly.
00:05:48.586 --> 00:05:59.494
It should not be a real stagnant line If the goal and the intervention are focused on the skill that you are working on.
00:05:59.494 --> 00:06:04.846
So yeah, we've all heard that whole whole thing.
00:06:04.846 --> 00:06:06.932
Yeah, slow but steady wins the race.
00:06:06.932 --> 00:06:10.565
Not here, not here, it doesn't Not here.
00:06:10.565 --> 00:06:26.526
If the skill that we're working on is truly a foundational skill gap and it's broken down into the small section that it should be, then progress on that skill should be really significant.
00:06:27.507 --> 00:06:35.757
Now, a couple reasons that we might not see progress again is when the goal is muddy or unclear.
00:06:35.757 --> 00:06:47.170
So meaning we have lots of skills in it and if you go back to previous podcast episodes, we do that fairly regularly that we'll write a goal that has a bunch of different stuff in it.
00:06:47.170 --> 00:06:56.596
We'll say that we want the student to be able to identify all the letter sounds and be able to read CVC words.
00:06:56.596 --> 00:06:59.367
Well, no, which do you want?
00:06:59.367 --> 00:07:02.634
Which is your actual goal for the student?
00:07:02.634 --> 00:07:06.449
Do you want the child to be able to read CVC words?
00:07:06.449 --> 00:07:11.206
Well, you shouldn't be asking them to blend CVC words unless they know all their letter sounds.
00:07:11.206 --> 00:07:18.591
So your goal really should be that the student will be able to identify all the letter sounds.
00:07:18.591 --> 00:07:27.997
You should not be mixing multiple goals into one goal, because again, that just muddies the water for what you're trying to progress monitor.
00:07:29.401 --> 00:07:36.406
Another reason that you might see less progress is the intervention tries to work on too many skills at once.
00:07:36.406 --> 00:07:45.790
So there are a lot of especially reading intervention programs out there and they want you to do a little bit of everything.
00:07:45.790 --> 00:07:57.749
They want you to spend 10 minutes on phonics and then they want you to spend 10 minutes doing sight words, and then they want you to spend 10 minutes doing fluency, and then they want to divide up the time.
00:07:57.749 --> 00:08:11.088
Well, the reality is, if the child is working on, or you have identified that the child is struggling with, letter sounds, then that's what we should be spending our time on.
00:08:11.088 --> 00:08:19.548
We should be working in small time frame spurts of very intensive work on that skill gap.
00:08:19.548 --> 00:08:28.749
We shouldn't be trying to spend all this time on things that we haven't identified as the struggle for the student.
00:08:28.749 --> 00:08:33.134
We need to be focused in our interventions.
00:08:33.134 --> 00:08:43.017
The interventions are just kind of when you see an intervention that is trying to do all the things at once in a very short amount of time.
00:08:43.017 --> 00:08:46.447
That's not helping anybody move forward.
00:08:46.447 --> 00:08:47.969
It really isn't.
00:08:48.931 --> 00:09:05.407
If we really want our students to make fast progress and fill those skill gaps, we have to be laser focused in our intervention time only on working on that skill gap, which means they should be making progress pretty quickly.
00:09:05.407 --> 00:09:12.620
Because, again, we should be very intense in our work in that skill gap area.
00:09:12.620 --> 00:09:25.485
We should be spending the entire time that we have set aside to teach the student the new sight words, if that's the goal, or teach them to blend sounds together, if that's
our goal.
00:09:25.485 --> 00:09:28.649
But that's what our time should be.
00:09:28.649 --> 00:09:36.979
We shouldn't be doing this array of intervention time things just to fill the time.
00:09:37.860 --> 00:09:44.177
If we have identified that the child is struggling in phonics, well by golly gee, we should be spending our time on phonics.
00:09:44.177 --> 00:09:50.509
We shouldn't be working on sight words, fluency and comprehension at the same time, they can get that stuff in the classroom.
00:09:50.509 --> 00:09:59.385
We have to focus on the very specific skill that that we have identified as the root of the problem.
00:09:59.385 --> 00:10:33.768
So if the intervention doesn't focus on the skill or goal at all which I have sat in some meetings where there's been a lot of confusion, mostly for me where the school has said we are going to use this intervention program, but then the teachers have identified that the goal, the skill that the child is missing, is missing, not covered by that intervention program.
00:10:33.768 --> 00:10:38.403
Well then the teachers look at me and go well, what are we supposed to do?
00:10:38.403 --> 00:10:43.452
Well, you're supposed to work on the skill that we've identified.
00:10:43.493 --> 00:10:51.583
If we never address the skill that we have identified as the root of the problem, the child is not going to make progress.
00:10:51.583 --> 00:10:53.592
It's just not going to happen.
00:10:53.592 --> 00:11:15.330
It doesn't matter how many times you work on trying to blend CVC words or teach kids digraphs or anything blends, whatever it is, if they don't know their letter sounds, you're not going to make progress, you're not going to make the progress.
00:11:15.330 --> 00:11:19.125
You're not going to make the progress that the children need or deserve to make.
00:11:19.125 --> 00:11:29.144
So we have to make sure that the intervention that we choose focuses on the skill and doesn't just disregard it.
00:11:29.264 --> 00:11:52.024
Another example of this is sometimes we will see at the high school level, students unfortunately right now don't know their phonics because we didn't teach it to them for various reasons back in elementary and middle school and at the high school level I have had teachers look at me and say, well, we can't work on that, that's for elementary school.
00:11:52.024 --> 00:11:52.567
We have to work on that.
00:11:52.567 --> 00:11:53.514
That's for elementary school.
00:11:53.514 --> 00:11:55.061
We have to work on comprehension.
00:11:55.061 --> 00:12:02.620
Working on comprehension is not going to help your student who can't sound out words.
00:12:02.620 --> 00:12:04.144
It's not going to.
00:12:05.167 --> 00:12:13.726
So if you want the child to make progress, you have to focus on the skill area that is the root of the problem.
00:12:13.726 --> 00:12:24.123
Again, if you have any questions on how to identify these things, there are a lot of previous podcast episodes where I've talked about getting to the root of the problem.
00:12:24.123 --> 00:12:33.340
You can use screener data to figure out where you want to start and also again pick up my freebie the five steps to getting started with progress monitoring.
00:12:33.340 --> 00:12:45.009
That is an excellent place to start with all this, but the reality is we got to make sure that we are identifying the correct skill and then working on that skill.
00:12:45.009 --> 00:12:56.408
And then, finally, another reason, the final reason that we might be seeing less progress than we really should or it's not as quick as it should be, is the goal.
00:12:56.408 --> 00:13:00.253
Or skill wasn't the most foundational skill gap?
00:13:00.253 --> 00:13:12.548
So, if you're finding that, if you're looking at it and going, yeah, we had a goal, the goal that we set is addressed by the intervention program that we have in place.
00:13:12.548 --> 00:13:17.523
The intervention program is absolutely working on that skill.
00:13:17.523 --> 00:13:23.400
We've been collecting our data so we don't understand why the child isn't making progress.
00:13:23.400 --> 00:13:27.725
And they're an intelligent child.
00:13:27.725 --> 00:13:35.653
We need to make sure that the goal that we chose originally is the actual foundational skill.
00:13:36.615 --> 00:13:49.946
Sometimes we kind of assume, a lot of times we assume that the children are struggling because we'll I hear it a lot, especially at the secondary level they need to increase their fluency.
00:13:49.946 --> 00:13:52.889
We need to get their fluency rate up.
00:13:52.889 --> 00:13:57.841
Okay, what is causing the fluency rate to be low?
00:13:57.841 --> 00:14:00.827
Oh, is it because they can't sound out words?
00:14:00.827 --> 00:14:03.133
Is it because they don't know their sight words?
00:14:03.133 --> 00:14:05.783
We got to look at it, you have to.
00:14:05.783 --> 00:14:13.691
And then when you realize that, oh, we've been working on fluency, or, let's be honest, a lot of times it's we've been working on fluency or, let's be honest, a lot of times it's.
00:14:13.691 --> 00:14:17.748
We've been working on comprehension and you start to dig into it.
00:14:17.748 --> 00:14:22.892
Well, the comprehension is bad because the fluency rates are so low.
00:14:22.892 --> 00:14:28.652
The fluency is slow because the students don't have decoding skills.
00:14:28.652 --> 00:14:36.832
The students can't decode words because they don't know their basic phonics, the letter sounds.
00:14:36.832 --> 00:14:40.710
They don't know the sounds that the digraphs make.
00:14:40.710 --> 00:14:43.708
They don't know how to blend the sounds together.
00:14:43.708 --> 00:14:45.626
They never learn these things.
00:14:45.626 --> 00:14:53.793
Oh well, they're struggling with the letter sounds because they have a hard time hearing the different sounds in the words.
00:14:53.793 --> 00:14:57.710
We're getting down into phonemic awareness at that point.
00:14:58.480 --> 00:15:13.955
So you have to make sure even though it doesn't matter what grade you're talking about or what age you're talking about, you have to make sure that the goal that you are working on is the most foundational skill gap, because it all builds.
00:15:13.955 --> 00:15:18.965
Working on is the most foundational skill gap because it all builds.
00:15:18.965 --> 00:15:25.403
I've said it, I don't even know how many times I've given the analogy of you would never buy a house that only had 80% of the foundation.
00:15:25.403 --> 00:15:33.628
You want your house to have 100% of the foundation so that you can have 100% of the walls, so that you can have 100% of your roof.
00:15:33.628 --> 00:15:38.885
You have to have all those things that don't seem significant.
00:15:38.885 --> 00:15:48.309
We don't, on a daily basis, think about the foundations of our house until our foundation starts settling and cracks start forming.
00:15:48.309 --> 00:15:59.052
We have to make sure that we have a good, solid foundation for our students and if they don't have that, then we have to dig in and we have to shore it up.
00:15:59.052 --> 00:16:04.153
We have to fix those skill gaps so that our students can be successful.
00:16:06.260 --> 00:16:21.153
So I will link a whole bunch of previous episodes that I have done talking about you know how to get started in progress, monitoring how to choose your goals, how to choose your skills.
00:16:21.153 --> 00:16:42.373
And again, if you're really getting started with this or think that this might be an area of weakness for your MTSS team especially, check out the episode where we talk about how to use screeners, how to use those screeners to choose your goals, to choose your foundational skills.
00:16:42.373 --> 00:16:47.753
They can definitely be very helpful in identifying those weak areas for your students.
00:16:47.753 --> 00:17:12.909
So next week we're going to start talking about MTSS as a system and how it should look in the school as a whole, and I can't wait to start talking about that because we're going to start breaking down MTSS and what it should look like in the different subject areas and how it can really be helpful for all of our students.
00:17:13.550 --> 00:17:20.249
And even next month I want to I've actually started writing it down I want to start talking about absenteeism and MTSS.
00:17:20.249 --> 00:17:39.185
So we've got some really interesting things coming up in the next few weeks that can be really helpful as we end this school year and you can start, we can start thinking about how we will make MTSS what we want it to be as we go into the next school year.
00:17:39.185 --> 00:17:47.790
Until next time, may your coffee be strong, your students calm and the end of your year successful.
00:17:47.790 --> 00:17:48.653
Bye.