Multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS, also known as ‘Response to Intervention'/RTI) are in instructional structure that aims to stop students falling through the gaps. Here's how it works.
Tier 1: Tier 1 instruction is research-informed high quality whole class instruction. The aim here is that all students are given a fantastic chance to succeed in the context of their standard classroom, and high quality instructional practices such as explicit instruction, progress monitoring and formative assessment are used to achieve this end.
Tier 2: In almost all classrooms, there are some students who will struggle to keep up with even high quality Tier 1 instruction. For these students, it's valuable to offer supplemental instruction that gives them additional exposure to the core content, often in small groups, and with higher frequency and often closer monitoring. For many students, upping the instructional dosage in this way can be enough to keep them on track.
Tier 3: Tier 3 is for students who, even after the additional supports of Tier 2, are still struggling. What these students need is usually individualised, intensive intervention and very close progress monitoring.
MTSS is a structured and systematic approach to ensuring that all students have the support that they need to reach their learning targets.
Here's a fantastic pictorial summary of MTSS from Emina McLean's LDA presentation
MTSS is a fantastic framework for answering the question, ‘How can we support students who need additional help?' Building on this, the other day I was wondering to myself, ‘Could the MTSS framework be expanded to also include opportunities to stretch and challenge higher achieving students?'
To answer this question, I had a bit of a think about the factors that are altered as we move through the tiers. Here are some of them:
- Student/teacher ratio: Reduces as we move up the tiers
- Frequency of monitoring: Increases as we move up the tiers
- Instructional guidance: Increases as we move up the tiers (e.g., scripted programs are more often found in Tier 2 than Tier 1, and in Tier 3 than Tier 2)
- Instructional dosage: Increases as we move up the tiers
Considering these factors helped me to extrapolate in the other direction, to a potential Tier 0 that could be a way to provide additional challenge for students. Logicially following the pattern, I realised that Tier 0 would essentially look like more independent and self-directed student work.
It would include much less frequent monitoring from the teacher, participating students would have touch points with the teacher perhaps once or twice a lesson, or once every few lessons. Guidance would be much more open-ended, and instructional dosage would be kept short and sharp, with only sporadic guidance provided over time, such as during the set up and project framing.
Why bother thinking about Tier 0?: Graduating to project work
One of the reason why I think it might be useful to conceptualise project work, and more self-regulated work as Tier 0 instruction, is because we can apply the same requirements of ‘tier graduation' to movement from Tier 1 to Tier 0 as we do to move up the tiers. Let me explain.
Within MTSS, students are moved from Tier 1 to Tier 2, and then on to Tier 3, based upon rigorous evidence of learning collected through a number of assessments and touch points. Nothing is left to chance, and students are moved only when it would be the best fit to manage their learning progress.
Similarly, we could decide to develop an assessment system that earmarks students for movement from the standard Tier 1, to Tier 0, iff they require additional challenge. For example, students only move to more project-based and self-regulated work if it's demonstrated that they:
- Independently organise their resources
- Have high levels of self-regulated attentional control
- Are already achieving well on benchmarking assessments
- Have the pre-requisite time management skills
- (and so on)
When these factors are in place, students could be considered as having ‘graduated' to Tier 0, they're ready for more independent work! (Not always, of course, but perhaps a higher level of exposure to such independent work than many of their classmates)
…
At researchED Ballarat, Daisy Christodoulou suggested that learning time spent on knowlege vs. skills instruction is not a pendulum that we should be arguing about, but instead it's a pathway that we should be carefully curating for our students.
The idea of a ‘pathway' captures the idea of continuity. Where do students start and where should they go to from that starting point based upon their progress?
By seeing minimally guided instruction as a part of a Tier 0 to Tier 3 continuum, and by starting all students off on Tier 1 and then supporting them to move to Tiers 2, 3, or 0 based upon their achievement, perhaps we can move closer to clarity around what exactly this pathway might look like between skills and knowledge. Further, it prompts us to put in place some checks or assessments to even better support students to get the level of guidance, and the level of learning freedom, that best suits.
…
You are reading an instalment 137 of Teacher Ollie's Takeaways, an (aspirationally) weekly email in which I share some personal thoughts on teaching and learning, as well as great resources from others.
Subscribe here, view all back issues here.
…
Announcements and Opportunities
- Catholic Ed Tasmania is running the Teaching Matters: Science of Learning National Summit in Tasmania from April 2nd to 4th. I plan to be there, along with a heap of other speakers like Pamela Snow, Brooke Wardana, Noel Pearson, Dr. Lorraine Hammond, Toni Hatten-Roberts and Michale Roberts, Peps Mccrea, and many more! Should be a fun and learning-filled few days!
This week in Ollie's Learning (Takeaways)
- ‘Replacing a teacher whose VA [value add] is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by approximately $250,000 per classroom.' – Chetty et al., (2014)
- Hanushek and Woessman (2010) estimate that achieving a 25 point rise in a country’s national PISA scores corresponds to a £4 trillion boost in GDP.
- Time management skills matter! ‘Britton and Tesser (1991) found that time- management skills measured in the freshman year were more predictive of GPAs in the senior year than were Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) scores.' – Helina Seli
- ‘a single worked example per instructional area is not likely to result in the worked example effect' – Sweller (2006, pg. 167)
- Quote:
- ‘Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of harming another; you end up getting burned.' – Buddha (misattributed, but still a great quote!)
…
You're reading an instalment of Ollie's weekly email. Subscribe or see all back issues.