 Hi everyone, thanks for joining us to hear more about MTSS Intensive Support. I'm Steph Lundgren from ESU 8's PD department. And I'm Tony Ehrhardt, the MTSS and peak coordinator at the ESU 8. Welcome. Today we're going to talk about the basics of MTSS. Then we'll go into intensive supports and what it looks like at tier three. We'll talk about diagnostic screeners and how they can inform your intensive supports and also about the support you can receive from us at ESU 8. So MTSS, Nebraska defines it as 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 a high quality standards-based instruction and intervention framework that can be adapted to meet students' academic, social, emotional and behavior needs from preschool through graduation. And we just really want to emphasize that it truly is that framework or a structure that you're using for decision making regarding your students' needs. And when we talk about MTSS, lots of times we use this pyramid model. So tier one is at the bottom. It's core supports. It's the things you do for all students and that should meet the needs of 80 to 90 percent of your kids at least. So you have really strong instruction within your classrooms that meet those needs. At tier two, you might have some 10 to 15 percent of your students who need a layering of additional supports on and you might have interventions for those students. In tier three are intensive supports for about one to five percent of your students and that's what we're going to talk about today. When we talk about all these supports in the core, we're talking about academic and behavioral needs for your students and when we address both of those together, we tend to get the best results. And as we work through this process, we're also addressing all of the tenants of A-Quest. And also just a note that a lot of MTSS is really focusing on what we do as teachers. Not just the outcome of the kids with the instruction given, but how can we strengthen our strategies and our implementation of programs within our school? All right. Intensive support. Intensive support is in tier three. So this is for a few students and usually about one to five percent of students fall into this category. If your district is seeing a bigger number than this, this is where you'd want to look at your core and see if you can strengthen it. This is also targeted instruction based on what the students need and if your student is receiving this intensive support, they're also receiving that tier two additional support and then they need this support layered on because it's in addition to that support. So this is extra intensive support and in a few slides we'll give you some ideas of what that intensive support may look like. So how do you determine intensive support? This intensive support is based on the school's universal screener in that subject area and that'll predict the area or the skill that that student needs. There are diagnostic screeners which can be administered also and we'll go over those two. Your data and decision rules, you should use those to make your decisions on what those students need. So what interventions should those students need and when should they be put into those? In all areas, reading, math, behavior, social, emotional, they can receive help from those areas. They can go in and out of the tiers also. Make sure you really look at that data and if a student doesn't need to be put in intervention, they're put into the core and they should always be receiving that support also. This is in addition to the core. If students aren't making gains from tier two, this is when you do add in that intensive support. So you're giving them another layer of support. We always want to use research-based interventions for intensive support. They are targeted and specific, often provided in smaller groups. We want to produce student responses and the explicit instruction is very important. Here are some links for reviewing your interventions materials and delivery practices. So here are the ones that we would refer you to to look at these first. And then on this next slide here are some additional ones that you can look at. And we'll have the link to this presentation in the description of the of this webinar. So you can access the all these links that are there or you could just google them too but they're easy and linked for you. So you know when we talk about intensifying the support some strategies that you might use are really looking at your group size. So especially for tier three students you want to keep that group small maybe two to four. You know there's been some research to show one-on-one isn't always the best situation. So you know groups of two to four can work really well. Time per week might be increased. So in tier two your kids may have been meeting for 15 minutes a day for their intervention and maybe for tier three you're going to decide it's going to be 30 minutes per day five days a week and it just does not get interrupted because it's that important. You might increase progress monitoring make sure these kids would be definitely progress monitored each week and we're going to talk about that in a moment. The teacher conducting the intervention is definitely going to be trained in that intervention. You need to make sure and that's a good practice for any intervention that the teachers are trained in it. And when we think about you know our tier three kids and even tier two kids our neediest students are with the most qualified teachers and so think about on your staff do you have somebody with a reading specialist degree if we're talking about a reading goal or something like that then you need those neediest kids with them for intervention. And maybe classroom teachers are working with some of your middle students and then maybe pairs are working with your higher students on some extension activities so make sure your most qualified teachers are with those neediest kids. And then also we have quick paced lessons not so fast that kids don't get it but you need to have that mastery component in there but we need to have that perky pace that Anita Archer talks about and keep moving and keep them thinking on their toes. Also on specialized programming that specializes in only a few key skills at a time so really we're using that diagnostic to inform what we're doing with our intervention and focusing in on which dynamic indicator of that early literacy that they may be working on or which exact area of math that they need to work on or behavior and on and on. We have a variety of practice opportunities so we know that it's not just the direct instruction but we need to practice practice practice. We might also use things like modeling and scaffolding. Anita Archer talks about I do it we do it you do it and not just that quickly but I do it we do it we do it we do it we do it then you do it so scaffolding for your kids that way. Systematic and explicit instruction for students on these skills is very important. We have positive corrective feedback encouragement and self-monitoring activities and you know that error correction is super important in in these four kids in tier three and then active instruction with them. Okay so when we want to monitor that intensive support we think about progress monitoring and in our area most students or most schools use a cadence to do that and this could be weekly or bi-weekly again once we get to tier three it's usually pretty much a weekly practice that we're going to progress monitor our students and think are these interventions that we're using working. So again they provide that ongoing feedback and you really hear the kids read you hear that the mistakes that they're making and can analyze those you determine students progress toward those important meaningful goals so you're always looking at that aim line are we following the aim line are we staying too far behind are we going above the aim line and we can make timely decisions about changes to instruction so if they aren't following their aim line we might decide hey we need to intensify this intervention a little bit more we need more time we need to tighten the fidelity to the program so our progress monitoring really does tell us a lot as we go through but also we don't make changes too fast right so even you know we have to give a program a little bit of time to start working and to start seeing those effects go up. All right and then how do you evaluate the intensive support so this would be at your team meetings you're going to look at that data you're going to look at that progress monitoring data check the attendance engagement engagement and accuracy first so I think it's important to check those things oftentimes we skip to changing the time person or even intervention but just like Steph said we need to really look and see if that intervention is working and look at the attendance engagement and accuracy of that student first before we change it and then you would look and see if you need to change the time person or intervention lastly and three diagnostic screeners so for diagnostic screeners these provide your in-depth information about the student skills and instructional need this is not used with all students so it's only when more information or data is needed. Diagnostic screeners would be great to use with the tier three students because oftentimes we need more information with those tier three students and oftentimes they do struggle in more than one area so we want to pinpoint out what it is they're struggling with so we can really get the correct intervention to work on the skills that he or she needs to be improved and your ESU 8 psychologists can help administer these diagnostic screeners or they can help steer you in the right direction on which one to give here are some types of diagnostic screeners for reading we have the Acadian's Reading Dibbles D, the past test by Dr. David Copacic, the corophonic survey and then there's a really great reading diagnostic also these are just examples of reading ones we have if you guys need any more help on any other area you can ask your ESU 8 school psychologists and what do we do with these I kind of touched upon this before but you use this assessment to inform instruction and intervention and make your instruction more focused and powerful so you're going to use this screener to drive your instruction what do those students need help in and for ESU 8 support um uh Tony has a nice um chart about her support to schools here on the left um and Tony is our MTSS coordinator so she's always here to answer MTSS questions but I'm here too out of the PD department please contact me as well as your school psychologists who are in your buildings probably pretty regularly, weekly and then also we have some days coming up so I'm going to move our picture so you can see that just a little bit better and in the next few school years we will have people in to work through a five-year process and starting with year one and year two next year and so those dates are on there those exact dates are on there and just know that we're here for you to work through this whole process and we're we're willing to come out to your schools we're willing to zoom with your teams so we'd like to be a part of your meetings as well as your sites would like to be a part of that so yep and with those days um they give you information and help guide you on the MTSS process and you can choose what what's your area of need and they also offer on-site coaching with fidelity checks also to help you go through that MTSS process so please reach out to us and we just want to thank you for joining us today um uh and um if you have any questions at all please do not hesitate to contact us here's our information thank you thanks so much