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So last week I promised you a podcast episode about MTSS for math, outlining the system of MTSS specifically for math.
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Well, when I was looking through and doing my research for the podcast episode and for the podcast episode that I had planned for next week, which is for writing, I realized the fact is math and writing are very similar, not subject areas, but in the way that they are treated in MTSS, in that they're basically not there.
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Honestly, when we look at the data and the information that's available, the vast majority of the students that enter MTSS the focus is on reading.
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When I was planning the podcast episode for math and then for writing, I realized I wanted to honor your time and my time a little bit more with this.
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Understand the reality that my teachers and my administrators out there are facing.
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While I disagree that with the way that we're doing MTSS, I think that we should be focusing a whole lot more on math and certainly way more on writing.
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That's not the reality right now.
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Teachers and administrators are beat down.
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They're tired, you're exhausted.
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You're just trying to do the best you can with what you've got, while I want to go over the information for how MTSS works for math and then for writing when you're probably not going to see it within your school system.
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Maybe you see it in your school, maybe once or twice.
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Well, I want you to have the information so that if you have that student that comes up, writing or math is a really big focus for the child and you have that opportunity to show how it should be done.
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I want you to have that opportunity.
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I want you to have the resources available.
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So I'm going to combine the two podcast episodes.
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So we're going to talk today about MTSS for math and we're going to talk about MTSS for writing Hopefully that will be very helpful to you and we're going to talk about MTSS for writing.
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Hopefully that will be very helpful to you.
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And then next week we're going to take off so that you have some break and I have some break and we're going to enjoy a little bit of summer.
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Hi, I'm Jessica Curtis of Teaching Struggling Learners.
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I'm a boy mom and a veteran teacher.
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You're listening to the Reaching Struggling Learners.
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I'm a boy mom and a veteran teacher.
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You're listening to the Reaching Struggling Learners podcast, where we talk all about helping students succeed academically, socially and behaviorally.
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Thank you so much for tuning in If you've listened to the last couple podcast episodes.
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You know the basic system of MTSS, which, for writing and for math, we know that tier one is whatever the main curriculum is for both of those.
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For math, there's a lot of different curriculums out there from different publishing companies.
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Some are better than others.
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It depends on what the needs of the students are and, quite frankly, what the contracts were that were paid for by the school districts or the state that you're in.
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But that's the main, the main curriculum.
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For writing, there are very few main curriculum For writing.
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There are very few overall curriculums that are out there that are just focused on writing.
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There's a couple out there, there's very few.
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The vast majority of the writing curriculum is embedded within the overall ELA curriculum.
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Unfortunately, from what we are seeing from the data the state scores, the pre-med post scores and all that writing has very much taken a back seat, and with good reason.
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Let's be honest only 35-40% of our students are able to read on grade level.
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That's going to be the focus.
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You have to be able to read to be able to write.
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That's just how it is.
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Reading levels are always higher than writing levels.
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That's just how it works.
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You have to be able to read, to be able to write.
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You have to know how words go together, how they form, to be able to write them and to share your thoughts on paper.
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It does make sense for teachers who are looking at a classroom of 20 kids and a teen of those kids are struggling with reading the grade level text.
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Yeah, I understand that just being able to read and comprehend that text is going to take priority.
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Writing has unfortunately taken a big backseat to reading.
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We know that there is a very big issue at the high school where students are unable to perform very basic writing skills like writing a complete sentence.
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We know that the tier one writing program is not serving our students For math.
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We'll look again at the algebra teachers, since before COVID, our algebra teachers are getting students who don't.
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They cannot perform the basic operations for algebra because they don't understand the basic algebra, because they don't understand the basic skills, they don't have fact fluency.
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So again, I would argue that the Tier 1 programs that we have been using have not been adequate for the majority of our students.
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Tier 1 is whatever all of the students are getting or Not getting, unless 80% or more of our students are able to perform the skills, I would argue that the tier one curriculum is not appropriate.
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It's not doing what the students need it to do.
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Mtss is the perfect means of collecting the data and arguing for better curriculum, or curriculum at all, for that tier one level, and I'd like to give you the opportunity to have your voice heard.
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If the tier one curriculum isn't doing what it should meaning the students aren't gaining the skills that they should for math or for writing then we should move them to tier two.
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Again, just like with reading, use some screeners for that At different levels.
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You can screen for well, we all have the pre-mid post for math, the star scores and all that stuff, the map scores, all that.
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Most states and counties require some sort of pre-mid post.
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You can use those to determine that, hey, below this cutoff point, these students really do, they're struggling.
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If we identify a student that's struggling, we need to look at and see what is the skill area that they're struggling in.
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This is much easier in math because we have those MAP scores, the STAR scores, the whatever it is that you're using in your county or your state for those assessments.
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For writing, until you really get into the testing quote-unquote testing grades, there usually isn't a writing test and that's not till the very end of the year For writing.
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Every grade level should be doing a beginning of the year writing assessment.
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Now, I'm not a big advocate for adding assessments, but if we have third graders who are asked to write about something that happened in their life, your favorite thing in the world, whatever it is and we find that those that are third graders are not able to write complete sentences, they cannot spell certain words that are grade level appropriate, that they can't use capitalization or punctuation, then that's your screener right there, and we know these are some things that we need to work on for those students and that would be a tier two intervention working on capitalization and punctuation, sentence structure, making sure that we can spell grade appropriate words in the sentences.
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We can spell grade appropriate words appropriate in the sentences, those kinds of things.
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That would be your tier two Using the screeners, just like we would for math or for reading, use the screeners to identify what are the skill area deficits and focus on those, giving them the you know, the smaller group instruction for writing.
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It might be the whole classroom, but hey, at least we know what we need to work on.
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Then, if the students are not making the progress that we would expect to get them onto grade level, filling in those skill gaps.
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We would then want to move them on to tier three, which is that would be for students who are working well below grade level, probably working two years below grade level.
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Those students would need individualized, or more individualized support.
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They need more reteaching.
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They need more practice to solidify those skills.
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I know that there has been a lot of pushback in the teaching community that students don't need as much practice to show that they know something.
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Unfortunately, what we are finding is that, okay, if students show five times that they did this one problem correctly on the test or whatever, that doesn't necessarily mean that they understood it and they really absorbed it.
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If you give them those same problems two months later, they may or may not get it right.
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We have to start ensuring that students are getting enough practice and that they are remembering how to do the previous skills, because there's a lot to learn and we have to ensure that the students are getting enough practice, especially when it comes down to it.
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They have to be getting that fluency that it's easy that it is second nature for them to know the addition problems, the subtraction problems, the multiplication and division when it's appropriate.
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Tier three, a lot of times is going to be a lot of extra practice and making sure that the students, not that they just understand the process, but they have really, truly absorbed it and they're able to do it in a bunch of different situations.
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For tier three, for writing, that would be again reteaching very basic skills, probably going to focus a lot on spelling with that, because that seems to be a big area of struggle for a lot of students, preventing them from getting their thoughts on paper.
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Most students absorb very quickly the capitals at the beginnings and punctuation, those kinds of things, but they will change and simplify their writing drastically, shorten their writing drastically, not because they don't have the wonderful ideas
in their head but because they lack the spelling skills to be able to really convey their thought.
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They can have students with a fantastic vocabulary are writing very, very simplistic sentences, if they're writing sentences at all, simply because they don't have the spelling skills.
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So a lot of the times, some when you're working with tier three, with writing, be prepared.
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You may have to work on spelling quite a bit and that's.
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I realized that's a that's more of a phonics thing, but it's.
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It's an important phonics thing.
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It's a gateway for our students to be able to convey their thoughts appropriately.
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Now for interventions.
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We've talked about this a lot.
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There aren't a whole lot of interventions out there.
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There aren't a whole lot of intervention programs out there for reading or for math and for writing, which, for reading, I honestly see the number of interventions as a stumbling block because districts, schools, get so stuck on.
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We're using this program at this grade level and whether it's appropriate or not.
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The benefits to not having a whole lot of extra programs out there for writing and for math is that we as teachers get to use our own good logic and understanding of our students to be able to focus and say my student doesn't need to spend 30 minutes doing this, five minutes doing this, five minutes doing that, five minutes doing this.
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Instead, we can spend our 20-30 minutes just working on what we feel is the correct skill.
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So, for example, if you have a student who is struggling with addition or subtraction fluency, you can do your very quick timed test to see how are you doing today?
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Okay, here's some really quick practice.
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Here's a quick game to do that is focused just on this skill.
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All right, let's do another drill and see how you improve.
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Even over a course of 20-30 minutes, you may see quite a bit of improvement.
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Same thing with writing.
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Because we don't have a whole lot of writing intervention programs that are so scripted and the higher ups are just in love with this one program.
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We can go and say, hey, you know what, guys?
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I've noticed that we are doing a really good job with getting our capitals and our end punctuation.
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But you know what we need to do?
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We need to.
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Today we're going to focus on common versus proper nouns and making sure that those proper nouns have a capital at the beginning.
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So we can spend 20-30 minutes just working on those very minute skills so that when the students move on, they've actually really acquired a new skill or they've had some really good practice and made some really good gains towards meeting that goal that we had for them.
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While I know that it could be daunting, for example, if you were going to be the writing intervention teacher, oh my goodness, I would love that.
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That would honestly be like a dream job for me.
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But let's say you're going in to be a writing intervention teacher and, no, we don't have a program for you to use.
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There is nothing scripted.
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That's daunting, but at the same time, it is so freeing because you're not scripted.
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You can do for your students what you see as their next step, which is beautiful, and I honestly feel that teachers should have the respect that we can look at them and say, hey, here's a bunch of resources.
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We want you to pick what you feel is right for your student to make to meet the goal that we've set for them.
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I think that that's the respect that teachers deserve.
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Obviously, we want to provide all the interventions that we say that we're going to do, just like we would for reading, and then we have to progress monitor.
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For math and writing, progress monitoring is even more important because these areas, these subject areas, just aren't used in MTSS.
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They're not addressed nearly as often.
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It's important to show, when we are addressing math and writing in our data chats and all that, that we're actually making progress and that what we're doing is working.
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That's how we, as teachers or as an administrator, we can advocate and say we need to dedicate more time to math interventions or writing interventions.
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We need to dedicate more money, more resources to providing better resources for both of these areas that we need to have a tier one curriculum for writing or we need to spend less time on something else so that we can focus some more on this.
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It's all about advocating for our students.
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Using that progress monitoring data to advocate for our students helps us actually get with it.
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Of course we're gonna.
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We should have meetings.
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We should have meetings for math and writing just as often as we do for reading.
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It's really important
probably more important if you're adding in math or writing for MTSS that you have an agenda.
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We know that the focus for MTSS by and large is reading.
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So if you're talking about math or writing for a student, it is really important to have that agenda up there with your subject in it, because otherwise it's really very likely that the other subject areas will get kind of pushed to the side so that we can talk about reading.
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So again, an agenda is even more important and following the system, the steps of MTSS for math and writing, is very, very important so that the students get what they need in these other, less focused upon subject areas, just like we do with our reading.
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I strongly suggest that we have a list of red flags for tier two, moving into tier three, tier three, into asking for testing or going back down, you know, from tier three to tier two and so on.
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There should be some red flags that indicate, hey, we need to have a very serious, frank conversation about this student and what they need.
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For example, if a student has been struggling with math for a long time, then we need to talk about bumping them up to the next level or maybe talk about testing.
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The vast majority of students who qualify for specific learning disabilities nationwide qualify under reading.
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That's because MTSS the focus is on MTSS.
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In my opinion, if we had as much of a focus on math as we do on reading, we would have an equally large number for students who would qualify under our current system for math.
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There are a lot of students who are out there who we say we give them the excuse oh, they're just bad in math because they never had the opportunity to get the help that they needed.
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If we were to treat both subjects the same, we would realize that, hey, there's a lot of kids out there that they actually could do better in math if they received the supports.
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Unfortunately, the data doesn't exist right now for writing, and I wish it did, but we have no idea right now how many students would need extra help or maybe even need specialized instruction for writing, because it's just not covered in MTSS.
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There's a lot of kids out there who have fantastic ideas and thoughts, stories that could be shared with the world, knowledge that could be shared with the world, but they have not taught the skills that they need to be able to share their ideas, and that's very, very sad, but it's something that we need to address.
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Obviously, it's probably not going to be in the coming school year, but over time, I would love to see a much bigger focus in supporting all of our students, not just supporting the ones that are struggling with reading, but the ones that are struggling with math and with writing, with communicating through the written word.
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I would love to see us care about all of our students, not that we don't care about them, but really focus on all of the needs of our students, not just the ones that struggle with reading.
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That, in a nutshell, is MTSS for math and writing, just like with reading.
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It mirrors the overall MTSS process and it's a process that we could be using to support a whole lot more students than we are right now.
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We are going to get more in depth in how we can support more of our students and be a little bit more focused in what we're doing, but not next week.
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Next week we're going to take off, and the week after we are going to talk about something that, no matter what your subject area, it's something that all of us need to deal with or unfortunately have to deal with, and that is behavior.
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We know that behaviors have been increasing, not in a good way, over the past few years, and so we will talk about MTSS for behavior in our next episode, but until then, may your coffee be strong, your students calm and your summer absolutely amazing.
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Bye.