Making Your MTSS Framework Work for Teachers

As an educational leader who oversees the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework in my district, I am always thinking about teacher capacity. In many schools, MTSS can feel like something added to teachers’ plates, creating new work every time there’s an issue.

But it doesn’t have to feel like this. By thoughtfully integrating the framework into teachers’ work, MTSS can function to better support students, as it is meant to.

3 STEPS TO BUILD TEACHER BUY-IN FOR MTSS

In my role, I have outlined three critical steps that help build teacher buy-in for MTSS, ensuring that teachers have the capacity to do what is planned, understand the framework, and believe in it too.

Step 1: Create a mission and vision that teachers connect with. It sounds cliché, but this is the foundational step that will help alleviate pressure in other areas.

Creating a mission and vision for MTSS is critical, but it cannot be created by the leaders alone. Supervisors, coaches, administrators, and practitioners should come together to develop a common goal—they will all be involved in the system, so it is important to ensure that everyone is aligned with the mission and vision.

To create this shared mission and vision, our district created an MTSS leadership team that meets monthly. When this team was created, we elicited feedback from throughout the district to create a mission and vision. We came together and discussed what the MTSS framework would do, why that work was important, and how we would know when we achieved our goals.

Once we established the mission and vision, this team was refined and shifted their focus to working toward MTSS goals, refining documents and processes, and problem-solving at the systems level.

However, throughout the year, we always include people on the team who can provide input from a teacher’s lens—a small group of teachers, instructional coaches, or administrators. This prevents us from pulling teachers from the classroom regularly, but it gives us a way to make sure teachers’ voices are heard as we refine the framework.

Step 2: Structure MTSS meetings to respect teachers’ time. MTSS often falls apart because there are so many meetings, and the same people are generally in multiple ones, if not all of them.

It is important to have meetings where we discuss behavior, academics, and other areas, but the way we structure these meetings can have a major impact on how effective they feel.

At our district, we’ve aimed to ensure that all of our MTSS meetings are purposeful, integrated, and structured to help respect everyone’s time. In practice, this means sharing the purpose of the meeting before it is held—explaining why the meeting is happening and who needs to be there via email in advance of the scheduled time. This ensures that anyone who is not directly needed during a particular meeting can have the time back.

Having separate meetings for each area—behavior, academics, attendance, etc.—is not the best approach, as it takes up more time than needed and doesn’t allow us to focus on the whole child.

Instead, each school has an MTSS team that meets weekly to discuss academic interventions, social and emotional and behavioral interventions, and individual student needs all within the same hour.

The meeting agenda starts more broadly and then shifts to focusing on individual students. As these more individualized conversations occur, team members who do not directly teach those students can leave the meeting.

Lastly, we aim to help keep meetings focused on the data we are there to review. If something else comes up, teams schedule a separate problem-solving meeting for only those involved so that we can stick to our set agenda during the MTSS team meeting.

All of these steps help show teachers that we respect their time.

Step 3. Create an MTSS handbook. An MTSS framework can feel complicated, but a handbook that is easily accessible and clearly outlines all of the relevant processes and procedures can help.

For our district, we refined and developed elementary and secondary MTSS handbooks that house everything teachers need to know about MTSS, including an overview of the intervention process, delivery and tracking of interventions and universal screeners, and entry and exit criteria from each tier of the system.

I worked with instructional coaches, teachers, and administrators to create usable documents, ensuring that the processes we outlined were doable for teachers and aligned with how they were already working.

In addition to intervention information and materials, our handbook houses standardized letters to communicate about MTSS with families, guidance on supporting English language learners based on level of language acquisition, and a catalog of past professional development offered.

I recommend creating the handbook as a digital tool to ensure that teachers have access to all the information they need to effectively engage with the MTSS framework.

When MTSS feels like something that was built for teachers to be part of, and not simply something for administrators to monitor, the entire system can function better. And, in the end, when teachers are better able to carry out their part of the MTSS program, students benefit.