Academic Success for All Students: A Multi-Tiered Approach (Transcript)

Teacher: And so, how are you going to get from there to there?

Student: I think it’s south and west.

Teacher: Okay, try it, like take your finger and now follow my finger with me, west. Do we get to our destination?

Student: Yeah.

Teacher: All right, high five.

Lynda: It’s a real challenge to educators today to figure out how do you use your available resources so that every child succeeds.

Lynda: Before we started our work, we had what other schools had. There would be a teacher in a classroom. They would teach a curriculum. And if a student needed extra help, out the door they went, down the hallway they went and somebody else pulled out all the tricks that they knew and tried to teach that child. So for us, it was really flipping that whole model upside down and saying, “These are the resources we have available to us. How do we get everybody working together to design a system that is more seamless for students?”

Holly: The system would not work without teacher collaboration.

Mindi: Every decision we make, we have to make as a team.

Ashley: And we problem solve together and look at data together and make decisions about what kids need.

Lynda: If we’re going to work collectively to ensure the success of every child, then we had to get on the same page about what we were teaching. So for us, it was an early lesson in identifying a core curriculum in math and reading that was the same no matter who the teacher was.

Ashley: So every single student will receive, you know, universal instruction, core instruction, also known as Tier 1. Some kids will need supplemental instruction. They’ll need a little bit more than core. So you’ll hear that referred to as Tier 2. And then, some kids may need more intensive intervention and so, you’ll hear that referred to as Tier 3.

Teacher: So what did it tell you to do? How are you going to figure it out?

Ashley: Teachers at the very beginning of the block are teaching core instruction to their core 22 students. And then they would move into a time that we call autonomous time where the students will be more self-directed in their learning.

Students: Columbians are–

Ashley: So some teachers may pull Tier 2 at that time. You also may see Tier 3 being pulled at that time in a very small room where kids can really focus.

Teacher: So this book is about the Constitution and the reason…

Dejuan: It’s pretty awesome here. My three favorite things are math, writing and reading.

Sophia: It’s kind of cool so if you don’t just– aren’t just with one teacher and you get to kind of move rooms and move teachers.

Jhett: When you go down into the– with Mr. Kirby in your small group, then it really stretches your brain in a really good way.

Ashley: The teachers organize themselves in a variety of different ways and it depends on teacher strengths and students needs.

Student: Brushing away the old vine.

Ashley: We may need a specific group just on predicting. And you don’t have five kids who need predicting in your 22. You have a whole bunch of them across the learning community. So it’s really important that the tiers are connected. Your core instruction could be inferring. If they’re receiving Tier 1 with me and Tier 2 with you and Tier 3 with someone else, we all are really teaching inferring. We just may be teaching it with different materials. That requires a lot of trust amongst teachers and that also requires teachers to communicate. They meet every Wednesday in a learning community and they definitely check in with each other about instruction.

Teacher: Like had almost all of their packet already filled out and then there’s some groups of kids that don’t have anything filled out.

Teacher: We have the same problems with when they come to us, they have to finish up the packet. So if we try to stick to what that core part is…

Ashley: And then we meet as a Student Success Team. That team is made up of myself, the learning community leader, all of the core teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, speech and language pathologists.

Lynda: All of those stakeholders will sit around the table together, take a look at all of the data, have deep conversations about the effectiveness of the core instruction and also monitor the progress of the Tier 2 groups and the Tier 3 and then problem solve together to figure out the ways in which they might make adjustments. And then once they make those major adjustments, then they’ll come back together once a month to make sure progress is being made.

Teacher: And then reading, which was mini lessons 45 percent of the time and then 83 percent of the time. And then you also had some really other good details.

Teacher: Maybe her goal sheet is almost like twice as long so she has more space like on Monday. And right before you go into Tier 2, okay, what are the specific things you’re going to do.

Mindi: I think that we’re meeting the student’s needs better.

Holly: The growth that we see in our students is phenomenal. We’ve had kids go from eighth percentile to thirty, fortieth percentile and sometimes higher.

Ashley: My work is to make sure that all kids get what they need. We have lots of different types of learners and everybody deserves to have instruction that meets their needs.

Holly: That was beautiful, high five.

Schools That Work

P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School