 Hi everybody, thanks for joining us for our MTSS Monday. Today we're going to be talking about MTSS universal support. I'm Steph Lungren from the PD department at ESU 8. And I'm Tony Erhart, MTSS coordinator and peak coordinator from the ESU 8. Welcome. Today we're going to talk first about MTSS, then universal support, universal screening, and ESU 8 support. So first just a little recap on what MTSS is. It's an educational framework for continuous improvement, problem solving, and decision making. It promotes an integrated system connecting general and special education along with all teaching and learning components into high quality standard based instruction and intervention framework that can be adapted to meet students academic, social, emotional, and behavior needs from preschool through graduation. And it really is that structure that we fit a lot of the other things that we're doing into. So lots of times we see a pyramid when we think of MTSS and it's just showing that level of support as we go from tier one through tier three. Tier one focuses on the core and that's what we're talking about today. Tier two is for a smaller group of your students about 10 to 15 percent. And it's layering on some targeted support for those students. And tier three is layering on an additional layer of intensive support for about one to five percent of your students. When we think about this pyramid, we're addressing academics and behaviors. And it also really fits in well with A-Quest. We can see the A-Quest symbols over here. Okay, next is universal support. Okay, when we think about universal support, it's your tier one. So it's your support for all students. What are you giving to all students? The goal of MTSS is to have 80 to 90 percent of students to fall into tier one. So they would be receiving the core without any extra intervention supports. So that is the goal to have 80 to 90 percent of your students there. Then if students need extra assistance, then they fit into those other tiers. Again, like Steph said, it's a layered continuum of supports. You would layer on that extra support for those other tier two and two tier three. Tier one is instructional practices that help all students. Teachers are going to use those. And overall, all students achieve better academic and behavior outcomes. Schools rearrange their schedule so that all students can learn from the core program. So it's important that your schedule goes over all of your students and all of your students can benefit from that core curriculum and high quality instruction. There are some teaching strategies for universal support, such as differentiated instruction, co-teaching, collaboration, peer learning, whole group, and small group. So those are just some strategies to incorporate for all students. And then effective core support comes from when you select your core program materials that are consistently being used by all teachers. So here are some components listed for your core program to implement. And it's important that all staff members are trained and using effective teaching strategies consistently. And in order to see, excuse me, in order to see if teaching practices are being used consistently, you can implement fidelity checks. And myself can help administer those and come out to your school. And if you're interested in me helping train a staff member or an administrator or even just complete those for you, please let me know. You can email me or call me at the ESU 8. And then from those fidelity checks, you'll be able to look at those comments and strengthen your core. So again, we would like to see 80 to 90 percent of your students reaching the grade level target. So that's a goal for tier one. Universal support is designed for all students. So it's those who struggle, those who excel, those learning a new language, those on an IEP. It's all others. It's everyone. Schools need to plan, implement, continually evaluate their schedules, personnel and resources for the core. Here are some tools for reviewing the reading programs. Evidence for S as a good website, along with ed reports. And those are linked in there if you want to look at those. Universal support begins with behavioral support also. Just like Steph mentioned in the pyramid, students successfully can manage their behavior while learning. And if you integrate systems for both of these, you're going to see successes in both of these. So less behavior and better academics. We want to have a proactive behavior system and integrate the academic along with the behavior. Okay. So when we talk about universal screening of our students, it's the act of assessing all of our students consistently to fidelity of the assessment. All right. So we really want to use the rules and procedures set out by that assessment because that's the way it's been researched to work. It's typically conducted three times a year. So usually a beginning of the year, middle of the year, end of the year assessment. And it measures those critical early skills that are predictive for later reading success. For instance, if we're looking at a reading screener or later just success at whatever skill math or behavior that we might be talking about. So we have some types of universal screeners, especially used in our area are Acadian's and math fluency. So we do have Acadian's trainings annually in the summer. And I can come out to your district if you have several people that need to be trained, like your whole staff. And math fluency is being used here and there. We can let you talk to some schools that maybe have used it if you're considering that. So what do you do with your universal screener? Well, first of all, it identifies students for the tiers, right? You kind of color codes them even out into those tiers for you. It identifies what supports needed for those students. So how can we meet the needs of those different groups? And then measure students' needs with an evidence-based practice for teaching and learning. So we're really showing that data from a really researched out program. So when we talk about procedures for collection of universal screening data, you have to decide who you're going to screen. So our suggestion is all kids K through 6 should be screened. We're seeing more and more junior high settings and middle school settings that are using screeners as well. So really the State Reading Act, though, is mandating that you screen all kids K through 3 because we know those early reading years are so critical to later success. But you know, the suggestion really is that you screen all kids K through 6. And then you decide who will administer or practice the assessments. And this has done many different ways. So, you know, some schools use a team like we have listed out here and a teacher walks her class down and the team just goes ahead and screens each of the kids in the class. Other schools, you know, that are very small, might just have the title teacher screens all the kids. Other schools, the teachers might screen their own kids or they might switch classrooms. If you're a two track, you can switch classrooms with your co teacher and screen each other so that there's not a little bit less bias involved. So that can be done many different ways. It's a district decision. Testing frequency in windows. Again, that three times a year. You want to make sure that your whole staff is using about the same two week window to test. Some schools even limit it down to a one week window. And then collecting assessments, assessment data for new students. So you might have a policy that within five days of entering the district, we're going to get that kids screened. That way you can just start off providing instruction at their level right away. And we also have to ensure that reliability. So there's a strategy called shadow scoring that can be used. And that's where somebody comes in and scores right along with the teacher scoring. And then they check their data together. They compare it. Like, did you get the mistakes that I got? Or did you get the same report that I got? And it's really nice. The kids might not even notice what's going on. You know, one teacher just sits off to the side. But it really kind of helps check yourself. And that's really useful even at the beginning of the year, you know, when you're getting back into things. And guidelines for proctoring if, you know, if it's if it's group administered or on the computer assessment, you just really need to follow those guidelines. There are picky little scoring rules, and they need to be followed so that they are consistent scores throughout your building. But also the scores that you enter online are used to determine benchmarks. So we want to make sure that we're as accurate as possible. All right. And then lastly, the ESU 8 support. At the ESU, we have some different options available for MTSS support. We have myself, which is the MTSS coordinator, and I'm able to do professional learning, classroom coaching or collaboration and support. And you can email me or call me. And then Steph Lundgren here. She's in the PD department. She has many experiences with MTSS and can also support you in many ways. And then your school sites, they're available also. And they'd like you to invite them to their to your MTSS meetings, because they're very familiar with interventions, extra supports, how students learn so they can offer that input also. So please just let us know what kind of support that you'd like, because it's going to look different at different schools. Your support that you want may be different than what another school may want. So there's different variabilities available for you. So just reach out to one of us and we'll help you. And then we've also developed the ESU 8 MTSS days. And these days are two days a year for a five year process. And these days are built on first strengthening the core and then adding in interventions of the area that you feel needs to be stronger in your district. So these days are built on what's best for your school. And then we give you guys work time and then on site coaching with these days also. And if you have any questions about those days, please reach out to us. So those are some of the supports available. If you have any questions, please reach out to staff or I here's our email addresses. Thank you for listening. Thanks, guys. Bye