 Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us to learn more about MTSS today. We will be talking about research-based interventions. I'm Steph Lundgren, a PD coordinator at ESU 8. And I'm Tony Earhart, the MTSS and peak coordinator. Welcome. Here's our contact information. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions about the things we talk about today, or just generally the MTSS process at your school, or if you need support at a meeting or, you know, anything like that. Yep, definitely let us know. This is our agenda for today. We'll really talk you through selecting interventions, some resources to make good choices, some guidelines for implementing and selecting good interventions, questions to ask as you plan out and some tools to review research-based practices within that intervention. And then we'll share with you some of the supports that we can offer. This graphic is that MTSS pyramid that we oftentimes show to kind of give that visual of the process. And whether you're working with academics or behavior, we start with tier one in that those core supports that we offer to all of our students. Some students might need tier two supports, which are extra interventions layered onto that core. And even fewer students might need some intensive supports. And so that would be, you know, more intensive intervention with those students. And as you work through this process, you're also addressing the A-Quest tenants. Nebraska MTSS has a wonderful website that offers lots of resources for you to use. I'm going to go ahead and move our pictures so that we can see that better. Clear to the right, if you get to the MTSS website is a resources tab. And there, you know, as we think about our interventions today, you can do a program comparison. And within that, you can select either math, reading, writing, oral language, behavior, and even some COVID-19 resources to compare programs on. And if you don't see the programs that you're using or that you're interested in using, you can request that a program be reviewed by UNL. So they've been a really great partner in MTSS to make sure that, you know, we're picking the right things. We're using the programs that are research-based and proven to work. And the website is linked on here also. Yes. And there's also a link at that tab to Ed Reports. Now Ed Reports is kind of like the consumer reports of instructional materials. And they've also gone through and reviewed their alignment to standards. So why is it so important that we use research-based interventions? Well, you know, it's just really important that we focus on things that are proven to work, right? So if we have a limited amount of time with our kids, we want to make sure that in that time we're using it as wisely as possible. We're using it with programs that are shown to have success for students in any of these different areas. So this goes along right with the why. So why is it essential? Evidence-based practices increase the likelihood that students will have on positive outcomes. So if your school isn't really looking into programs and not using research-based practices, you may not have the gains that other schools may have that are using research-based practices because this research is done for you. So that's why we're having this presentation now, is so that these schools take the time to really look into these intervention programs because we want you guys to see the best results with students that you can. So we want to give you the resources to use to look into those. So we really want you to use these EBPs, which are evidence-based practices. And according to the Nebraska MTSS, this comes right off their website. This is one of the essential elements of the any MTSS process. So it's the third one down. We would like you to use evidence-based practices in curriculum, in your intervention and your assessment. So it's an important piece of the elements of MTSS. And there's more information on this also and some documents if you want the survey. There's some questions on there so that you guys can evaluate how you're doing with getting research-based interventions or even your curriculum also. Intensive interventions are necessary for students with difficulties in academics and behaviors or behaviors. Here are some guidelines to follow. So a few guidelines I want to know are usually interventions meet for a minimum of four days a week. So if you think about if you've ever have days off of school, that's important that in order for it to be an intervention, it should be a minimum of four days a week in order for that student to receive that intensive intervention time. It's usually 30 minutes each time. But in order to figure out how much time is needed in an intervention, we recommend that you look at the guide or the handbook on that intervention on how much time is needed per day in order to catch that student up to grade level. Based on your tiers of where those students fall, that's how you'll base your minutes off of. And this may be found in your decision rules also. So we often see in tier two, 20 to 30 minutes per day with each student. And in tier three, it needs to be a layered support so that intervention should be more intensive and you may need additional time plus that 30 minutes. Interventions generally have a placement test so that it can show you where the students at. And we always want your strongest instructor with the highest need of students, your lowest student should be with your strongest instructor. Interventions also need to be trained in that intervention. So please let us know at the ESUA how we can help you get that training. If we don't have it, we'll look for it or maybe we're offering it. You can go to our website and see right now which ones we have available. And I think this is really important now is to ensure you have fidelity checks on your interventions. Fidelity checks ensure that your interventions are doing it accurately. You want your students to get the best results from those interventions and the intervention needs to be doing it accurately in order to get the best results. And intervention should be compatible with their core programs. Some interventions don't mesh well with other core programs and we really want them to be compatible compatible in order for those students to see success. So these are just a few intervention guidelines that we suggest at the ESUA. If you have any questions on these or you're not meeting them or need help meeting them, please reach out to us. Here are some questions to guide your selection in getting research based interventions from any MTSS. There's just a few questions that you should look at and I kind of went over a few of what the ESUA expect on the previous slide. So just give you a few minutes to look over this yourself. And you can always come back to this also. But these are going to help you reflect on your current practice and determine future steps. Okay, here are some tools for reviewing evidence based interventions. We've shared these before but these are the websites that we recommend if you're looking at new interventions or even curriculum. If you want to find out more on these websites, this will help you base your information when choosing interventions off of research and not just opinions or if you like it. So we really want you to base it off the research and also use the website from what Steph said earlier on the program comparison chart in addition to these. And the link to this presentation if you want to access all these links will be in the description of this webinar on YouTube. And here's some more tools for reviewing the evidence based interventions also. And these are linked these subject links so you can definitely hit those links when Steph has that in the description there for you. And we're always here available to support you and your needs. We want to base your support on what your school needs in MTSS. So there's different ways that I can support you as the MTSS coordinator. I can offer professional learning and come out to your district and help you in your professional needs with the PD team also. There's classroom coaching that I can provide along with other coaches at the ESU 8. I can provide fidelity checks and come out to your district and make sure that there's fidelity to your core program or interventions or help train others on fidelity checks. And lastly, I'll always be here to collaborate and support you and your team, however, through email phone. And then steps here also is the PD coordinator and she supports many things in MTSS especially in the reading core area and interventions. And we offer MTSS days now at the ESU 8. We had our first one last year and we saw many success stories from that and schools really appreciated our information. So we have developed a five year process with two days in each year. We first start at the core and then you build your interventions from that you of course keep doing the things that you're doing now, but you pick the area of need, whether it be reading math or behavior, and then you work through these years. We also offer onsite coaching with these days so we'll come out and help ensure that these things are being done. But we feel like this is a way to help you in your MTSS process and guide you in the things that need to be done in order in order to have a successful process. If you have any questions though please reach out to myself or step on this. Absolutely contact us anytime and thanks for your time today. Yes, thank you.