Are You Ending this Year OR Beginning Next Year?

April is here and May will be here before we know, so are you counting the days or making the days count?  The end of the year reminds us that things are coming to an end.  Kids are excited about summer and transitioning to a new grade.  Teachers feel a sense of accomplishment in how far they've taken their students, and administrators gauge the health of their school based on how many kids were academically successful.  But the real question is this.

Are You Focused on the End of the Year or the Beginning of Next Year?

Sure, we have to close up the year.  We have to get ready for graduation and prepare the school for dormant activities such as summer cleaning, maintenance, and inventory, but in order to ensure a successful school year next year, a bridge has to be built, and that bridge must connect this year's kids to next year's learning.  As we near the end of another school year, it is critical to ensure that every student masters the essential skills for every course, but the real reason for this focus on learning is not so kids pass standardized tests.   Students have to be prepared for next year and ultimately what we do in the months of April and May has a huge impact on that preparation.

Just because kids pass this year doesn't mean 

they're ready for next year.

Next year is all about being prepared for next year's skills, and the key to next year is getting kids to  master this year's essential skills. The essential skills are those few but critical skills taught this year which serve as foundational skills for next year's standards.   If left unmastered, these prerequisite skills could prevent students from reaching success next year.

To identify those skills, teachers must collaborate with next year's teachers and identify which skills need additional reinforcement now.  Furthermore, teachers should discuss instructional vocabulary taught as well as strategies that are used to teach those skills.  If teachers can align how they teach these critical skills to students, April and May can actually be a head start on next year's learning, and wouldn't that be a huge advantage to all kids especially those that need additional time and support?

For more on Vertical Alignment Meetings, click here.

But aside from prerequisite skills, students must also master 4 more skills.  These skills are referred to as the 4 C's:  Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Creativity and Collaboration.  These are not separate skills from prerequisite skills.  In fact, the 4 C's should be leveraged through meaningful and challenging activities to help students master this year's essential skills to a deeper degree of understanding.  Teachers should be aware of how next year's teachers integrate the 4 C's into their instruction and incorporate those strategies also into their instruction now.

Mastery can't happen without Intervention and Extension

To ensure that every student masters this year's essential skills, we have to remember that kids are different; therefore, how they learn and process is different.  To help every student learn, intervention and extension should happen simultaneously on a regular basis.  Without intervention and extension happening during regular instruction, learning becomes the variable.  Here is how it can work:

• Intervention 
• Intervention is all about remediating the essential skills that students need additional time and support with. 
• Small groups can be pulled for students who share a common instructional deficit, or 
• Individuals can be pulled for remediation on an academic deficit unique to the student.
• During intervention, the teacher works with students directly and scaffolds concepts to help take kids from what they know to what they must know.

• Extension  
• Group work can be assigned to students and the work is tied to skills that need additional reinforcement.  In effective extension activities, every student must do their own work, but students should be encouraged to collaborate and communicate to help one another master the skills.  
• The goal is simple.  All kids will demonstrate their learning.
• Group work is not busy work.  It's challenging work that piques student curiosity and interest through critical thinking.
• Individual tasks can be given to students that are based on specific skills that need additional practice.  These tasks should also be familiar to the students so that it will require little to no support from the teacher.   
• Projects can be assigned to advanced groups or individuals as these tasks allow kids opportunities to apply their mastery of learning in creative ways.
• Extension activities should increase communication between students as this is where students make sustainable meaning of their learning.
• The teacher's role in supporting learning through extension activities is to monitor student engagement, provide feedback, and ensure that students complete the work.

The Future is Now
Instead of thinking about ending the year, I'd like you to think about April and May as the first 2 months of next school year.  As educators, our goal should be to guarantee the success of every child and the first step of that guarantee is to begin the transition process now by ensuring that all kids have a firm grasp of the essential skills. By personalizing our support for kids who struggle as well as challenging all kids to master this year's essential skills independently, we are giving every student the tools to begin that transition process on the right foot.

Are you finishing this year or preparing them for next year?  If we truly believe in learning for all, we will commit to student learning beyond the confines of a school year.

Tier 1 or Tier 2? That's NOT the Question

RtI is an difficult concept to wrap your mind around.  Presenters and authors share their ideas about how best to implement RtI on your campus.  Difficulties arise when campus teams process new information and discuss which steps to implement first. Arguments and misconceptions generally ensue around what's a Tier 1 or 2 intervention and how much failure it takes to get a kid into the system.

Everyone has their own idea of where to start first because they develop their own understanding of RtI based on how they think RtI should apply to their role within the organization.  With all of the uncertainty, teams ultimately fail when they move to action without understanding. Furthermore, if educators don't collectively commit to fully understanding how a successful RtI must work to support all students in learning, they might as well abandon the concept of a systemic RtI program all together.

Tier 1 or Tier 2 is not the Question.

If you want to implement a strong RtI system, here are some ideas all educators in the organization should consider about RtI before building a system of interventions.

• RtI isn't about Intervention - Actually RtI is about learning and guaranteeing that students get access the very best instruction possible to help them learn.
• Understand before You Implement - If you start implementing without gaining a full understanding of RtI, you can create structures that will be ineffective and more than likely lose kids.
• Train your Staff - If you want your staff to understand RtI, they must receive training themselves.  Regional education service centers provide free training and can bring in consultants to train campus teams.
• Build an RtI Team - An RtI team is critical to lead any campus to successful implementation of an intervention system.
• Develop a Campus RtI Philosophy - If everyone has their own philosophy of what RtI should be, RtI will become a dirty word to all.
• Identify What Works - Many campuses set out to implement new things without looking to see if anything that they currently do works.  Identify what interventions are currently working and weave them into your RtI system.
• Clarify your Tiers & Triggers - This gets confusing, so it is very important that everyone align their understanding around which interventions are Tier 1, 2, 3, and more importantly what triggers are in place to prescribe interventions for kids.
• Build Norms within your Team - These norms must include how frequently the campus will monitor student progress and how you will work together to respond when kids are not learning.
• Identify What Data to Monitor - Data can get overwhelming, so decide as a team what data is most important to monitor at each tier.
• Realize that RtI is a 3-5 Year Process - Be prepared to take lots of time to build your RtI process.  Rome wasn't build in a day.  Your RtI system will take lots of blood, sweat and tears to develop. 
• Learn from Others - Here is a short list of leading experts in the field of RtI.  Begin to study their work, as it will make your work a lot easier.
• Mike Mattos, Solution Tree Consultant and Author of Pyramid Response to Intervention and Simplifying Response to Intervention @mikemattos65
• Austin Buffum, Solution Tree Consultant and Author of Pyramid Response to Intervention and Simplifying Response to Intervention @agbuffum
• Chris Webber, Solution Tree Consultant and Author of Pyramid Response to Intervention, Pyramid of Behavior Interventions and Simplifying Response to Intervention  @Chi_educate
• Jim Wright, Creator of InterventionCentral.org, an outstanding website with tons of intervention ideas.

Supporting All Kids is the Answer

RtI is the answer to how we will respond when kids do not learn, but the answer won't come unless teams stop building stagnant systems and thoughtfully consider how to build a living system that continuously strives to guarantee learning for all kids.  In other words, if you fail to make a detailed system that responds when kids fail to learn, you are essentially planning to allow kids to fail.  That's why it is critical to stop worrying about Tier 1 or 2 and start focusing on what systems will support kids in the class first and outside of class second. 

"It's about Time" You Read this Book

November has been a great month. My first published work came out, and I was glad to be a part of such a cool project. Mike Mattos and Austin Buffum led an RtI anthology project called, "It's about Time" Planning Interventions and Extensions in an Elementary School", and it was an honor to be included in this book.                                                                                                                                                          Now before you think this is a shameless plug, I'd like you to read a little further. This book features several leaders who are practitioners from all over the nation.  They serve in all kinds of schools in a variety of roles, but these schools have one thing in common. Each school overcame amazing obstacles to make all kids successful. 

In each chapter, readers will learn a variety of strategies for collaboration that are truly focused on school improvement. Contributors share how they overcame the barrier of "not having time for intervention". Leaders illustrate how they included strong academic and behavioral interventions in their RtI program. The great thing about this book is that there's something for everybody. There are chapters that you can use right now to guide your school's thinking in constructive ways. In short, you will be able to connect your school and its limitations to almost every chapter in the book. That is because this book is about real schools with real problems who found powerful solutions to guarantee learning for all kids. 

#NoExcuseSchools

The cool thing about the book is that it focuses on the right thinking that schools need to help kids. Sure, some of these schools may have more things than your school, but there are also schools that have far less resources and more problems as well. RtI is not about programs or paperwork. It's about collective responsibility and tapping into the unique strengths of your school and utilizing every asset in the building to help every child learn. 

"It's about Time" is about the right thinking schools need to support kids. I learned a lot about myself by writing my chapter, but this book taught me far more about what I need to do now for the kids in my school district. I'm very proud of this book, and I truly believe you should check out this book.  'It's about Time' provides educators with a smorgasbord of solutions that will help you focus more deeply on the learning in your school. 

Closing the Transition Gap

At the end of every year, students learn the material well enough to go to the next grade or the next course of study.  They demonstrate mastery or at least proficiency for their current teacher and the teacher is confident that the student is prepared to learn the following year.

At the beginning of every year, students walk into a new classroom with a new teacher and are asked to show their knowledge acquired from the previous year. All too often, an equal number of students succeed and fail demonstrating their retention of prior learning.  If this is all that is known about the student, the new teacher is left to wonder what the student actually learned last year.

So a gap exists.  Between the time that a student completes school and begins a new year, many factors exist that cause students to be unable to walk into the classroom in August prepared to learn.  Of course, summer regression plays a big part in why students stumble in the initial days of school.  On top of the loss of retention, the learning that the new teacher expects from students is slightly different from the learning that took place in the student's prior year.  Instructional language varies from teacher to teacher and from grade to grade. If students fails to traverse the gap, they will be behind before the first assignment comes their way.

Schools can create transition sheets to help the new teacher learn about students from their previous teacher.  Grades, reading levels, generic behavior infomation are great indicators about the students' performance from the previous year.  A piece of paper can close the gap, but not completely.  Without a deep understanding from both sides of the gap, misunderstandings still exist.  What one teacher deems proficient, another may rate below average.  Something is still missing.

CONVERSATION & COLLECTIVE UNDERSTANDING

Transition sheets created by administration and handed to all teachers to complete is helpful but may not identify the best information for all teachers.  Teachers from adjacent grades must work together to create transition sheets that have common language and concrete quantifiers of proficiency that both parties can understand.  When teachers decide the proficiency of a given skill, teachers must have a precise definition of what the skill looks like and sounds like at the end of the current year and the beginning of the next year.  Teachers must understand how the skill was taught and learned in the previous year, so the next year teacher can build on prior learning for the beginning of the year.

Transition sheets must not be limited to just grades, skills and numbers to gauge proficiency.  The receiving teacher must know what strategies work best for the student.  Strengths and weaknesses in learning the content should be shared.  Interventions and their frequency can give teachers strong indicators of how much support the new student will need to be successful.  Behaviors that prevent learning are a critical piece of data and positive behavior supports that have worked with the student should be communicated.

Transition is a difficult thing for students.  Each year they have to adjust to us.  Each year we have to adjust to them.  Instead of spending the first 6 weeks of school figuring out what they can and cannot do, we should be more proactive and know as much about the kids before they enter our classroom.  If we can do that, we will definitely move in the right direction toward closing the transition gap.

Using your Roll-Over Minutes

5 years ago, cell phone companies touted that if you went with them, you could roll over unused minutes to the next month.  The idea sounded great.  Save unused minutes so you can bank them when you really need them.  If you think about it, wouldn't it be cool if we could roll over unused minutes from this year and use them for next year.  After all, we always complain about not having enough minutes in the day to truly meet the needs of every kid in the course of a year.

Well check this out.  Schools have about one more month left on the clock until the end of this year. Everyone is tired and ready for the break. While it is easy to watch the clock wind down, this is the time to roll over your minutes into next year.  Kids are struggling now and will regress over the summer.  Instead of spending the first 6 weeks next year reacting to them, spend these 4 weeks preparing for them.  Teams will spend the first 6 weeks of next year learning how to work together.  Instead spend these 4 weeks preparing to be the most effective and efficient team you can possibly be.

This is your opportunity to roll over 4 weeks into next year's instruction and make next year's 1st 6 weeks as powerful as possible.  In essence, you could roll over 4 weeks into next year by getting a head start today.

From Planning to Transition

Teams must plan now for the kids that they will receive.  Here are some questions that teams should be asking now:

• How will the team assess the new students' knowledge at the beginning of the year? 
• What are the successes and failures of the kids that will receive in the fall? 
• What current year skills will need extra emphasis as soon as school begins?

From Intervention to Prevention

Kids will come in the door behind due to summer regression, struggles from this year or both.  Here are some questions that current year teachers must ask to set next year's teachers up for success with students who struggle academically?

• Which students struggled all year long?
• What current year skills did each kid struggle with?
• What interventions were used to help the student learn the skill and what were the results?
• How often did the student receive prescriptive and targeted support and who provided the support?

Helping Students with Next Year's Behavior

Kids had difficulties all year long with behavior.  It is easy to have the mindset that it is now someone else's turn to deal with the student, but that mindset is selfish and counterproductive for the kid and next year's teacher.  Set both up for success by:

• Listing the student's typical behaviors
• List the student's motivations for his behavior (attention, task avoidance, etc.)
• List consequences that were tried and their results (including parental involvement)
• List positive behavior supports, their frequency and the results.
• List a member of the campus that the student has a positive relationship with. (Possible mentor for next year)

Improve Collaborative Efforts

Collaborative teams have structures that help or hinder the team.  By reflecting on the collaborative efforts of teaming, teams can become more efficient next year and maximize their planning time next year.

• What tasks did we do this year that really helped our team meet the needs of kids?
• What tasks inhibited our team from making real progress?
• What behaviors did our team exhibit that we need to improve on for next year?
• What norms need to either be created or revised to make our team stronger next year?

Tick Tock, Tick Tock...

The clocking is ticking.  The game will be over soon.  We will all be going our separate ways for a few months and then come back ready to start a new game.  The game always begins with us being behind on the scoreboard from the start.  Use your time wisely to catch up on next year's score by putting some points on the board now.

Simplifying The Complexity of Question 3

In my earlier post, Vertically Align Your Interventions Simulataneously, I outlined how principals can carve out time to replace faculty meetings with collaborative discussions on interventions.  In these meetings, grade level teams come to the meetings with intervention strategies for the high leverage skills that they plan to teach in the upcoming grading period.  Teachers meet with teachers from the grade level above and below  about the interventions and offer suggestions to make interventions even more targeted and specific.  At the end of the meeting, every grade level walks away with a deeper understanding of why kids fail to learn and more importantly a more detailed plan of action to address kids when they fail to learn.  Attached are an agenda and graphic organizer to guide teams through the process of designing interventions that align with the grade level below's instruction and lead to the grade level above's standard.

Below are dropbox links to an agenda and worksheet to help teams prescribe Tier 1 interventions collaborative and vertically.
Vertical Alignment Meeting Agenda
Vertical Alignment Intervention Worksheet

So now that we've met and created our specific intervention, what do we do with all this information?

Question 1 & 2 Must be Answered

Once teams have agreed what the standard looks and sounds like at the expected level of proficiency, they must agree on what instructional activities and strategies they will use to guide learners to the standard. Teams must also design common formative assessments that are aligned to the standard and the rigor of instruction that was provided.  Without a common formative assessment developed collaboratively by the team, teachers will have no baseline to identify who really learned the content and who is still not proficient.  Thus, there is no reason to begin answering our next question, #3. 

Special Note - This topic is extremely complex and my basic explanation hardly does any justice to the importance of developing common instructional and assessment practices.

Before Question 3 - Use your Student Work

Assuming that your PLTs have developed a common understanding and agreements for instruction and assessment, teachers are ready to evaluate formative assessment data.  Teachers must come to the table with student work in 3 forms.

1. Struggling Student Work - Bring student work of a student or students that you cannot find an intervention that help them learn the concept.
2. Average Student Work - Bring student work of an average student to gauge if your instruction is pushing all students at the same level of rigor as your teammates' instruction.  This is a great way to evaluate if Question 1 is challenging all students at the appropriate level.  This conversation should also allow teachers to gather new instructional ideas.
3. Exceptional Student Work - Bring work of a high student that you need ideas to push them to deeper level of complexity.  This is a great way to collectively answer question 4.

Question 3 - Struggling Student Work

Why bring the lowest student to the table?  If you can design interventions that will help the student that struggles the most, you are designing interventions for most of the students that fail to learn.  It is easy to discuss a student that is mildly behind, but your collaborative time is precious.  You must spend it with your team discussing the hardest to accelerate and hardest to reach.  Use student work to show what specifically is the problem with the child's learning. Analyzing the student's work will help team members see problems and habits that the teacher may not be able to see yet. It is also very important to have intervention personnel in the meeting to share their strategies and to make them aware of the child's struggles. This conversation must turn into a plan of action that is specific to the largest skill that is preventing the child from learning. The plan must also specify the detailed actions that will be taken and identify the personnel, time and frequency of the intervention.

If your team is able to spend 10 minutes per child designing targeted, specific and prescriptive interventions for the lowest child, they will have just designed intervention strategies that every teacher can employ with other students who are failing but not at the severity of the lowest student in the class.

So What about the Vertical Alignment Document?

Teams must be purposeful in using the document from the vertical alignment meeting.  If they put a lot of effort into making the document and then getting input from the grade level above and the grade level below, they have just answered question 3 for all of their upcoming planning meetings.  Teams will be able reference the input and suggestions from the grade levels above and below each week.  From there, they ensure that the child receives interventions that begin from their prior year's learning and lead to a solid foundation for the next year's instruction.

Now there is a caveat to the perceived simplicity in the above paragraph.  Just because your team wrote interventions and got vertical input does not necessarily make the intervention good.  Teams must review the interventions and be thoughtful and committed to determining if the interventions are prescriptive enough to meet the  unique and specific issues that are preventing students from learning.  In essence, the preplanned interventions need to be reviewed and discussed to ensure that they will meet the needs of kids where they are currently failing to learn. 

Hope this helps.  I would enjoy your thoughts, feedback and questions to this post.  Good luck.

Vertically Align your Interventions & Instruction Simultaneously

On our campus, we don't have faculty meetings.  I don't like them because what I need to announce, I can do through an email or a flipped video.  Instead we have Vertical Alignment Team (VAT)  meetings on the 2nd Monday of every month.  This is our time to come together and vertically align instruction, curriculum, assessments and anything else that needs alignment. 

Our focus this year is aligning interventions and collectively answering Question 3, "How Will We Respond If They Don't Learn It?".  This month we had a VAT where our teachers worked in teams to improve their interventions. Our teachers brought with them the high leverage skills that they were focused on for the first six weeks of school. Teachers from the same grade level worked in pairs to identify one high leverage skill taught during the six weeks, find the most common mistakes that students made in learning the skill, and prescribed possible interventions to eliminate the mistakes.  The purpose of this activity was to proactively address 80% of the reasons that kids fail to learn the given skill, so that they could have time in planning meetings to respond to the unexpected reasons that kids fail to learn the skill (the other 20%) after the instruction was delivered.

Meet with the Grade Level Below

Before the teacher pair could finish designing the intervention, the pair had to meet with the grade level below to ensure that the intervention prescribed was aligned with the way that the skill was taught in the previous grade. The two grade levels had discussions about methodologies of instruction as well as the learning styles of the students from the previous year to ensure that the intervention would be aligned with the method that the students learned the concept the year before. Prerequisite skills were also discussed to ensure that the foundation for learning and intervening was aligned.

The most important point for meeting with the grade level below is that intervention for the current grade level must be aligned with the instruction from the previous year.  Otherwise, your intervention will come out of left field and not from the instructional experiences that the student was exposed to in the prior year.

Meet with the Grade Level Above

After the teacher pair finished meeting with the grade level below, the pair then met with the grade level above to ensure that the interventions that they were prescribing would help the student be prepared for the next grade level. The interesting thing about this discussion with the grade level above is that the discussion was more about instruction than intervention. This great conversation helped make sure that what is taught in the current grade level will set the stage for the teachers in the next grade level. The importance of the conversation is that grade levels understand that what they are teaching must build schema in the way that students learned the prerequisite skills in the previous year.  Conversely, the current grade must be cognizant of the way that skills will be taught next year.  Failure for both grades to recognize instruction from both perspectives will result in more students failing to learn.

The most important point to consider from meeting with the grade level above is that dialogue must eliminate bad habits that students learn in the current year, so that the next grade doesn't have to lose value instruction and intervention time breaking those bad habits.  For you math teachers, I give you the best example possible, to cross multiply or not to cross multiply...

Considerations & Reminders

There are two important things to consider when having a VAT intervention meeting. First, we need to be clear in our understanding that Tier 1 interventions are for all students and that intervention begins where the student begins to have difficulty in learning a given concept. In addition, Tier 1 interventions should be tried frequently over a period of time to gauge whether or not the intervention is effective.

The second point to consider in a VAT intervention meeting is that we must ensure that our instruction is as effective as possible. We ensure that by having discussions about the methodologies and what quality instruction and student work look like and sound like from grade to grade. This discussion ensures that what we're doing in one grade directly leads the students to a solid foundation of how they will learn it in the next grade.

The most important reminder is that these meetings are not about the grade level below and what they didn't do to prepare kids.  The grade level below does the very best that they can to educate every child, and our discussions should always make both grade levels better.  Mutual respect, trust, and commitment to helping one another must always be the goal of a VAT meeting.

Put What We Learn to Work

The result of a VAT meeting should be answering question three for our weekly planning meetings, how to respond when students are not learning. This activity makes planning each week easier as teachers are able to draw upon the intervention plans that they created in VAT meetings. These plans must be in front of teams to guide the discussion weekly and make lesson planning more focused and efficient.

In addition, the result of a VAT intervention meeting should also create strong lines of communication from grade to grade so that when teachers or teams are having difficulty teaching a particular concept, they can have a conversation with the grade below to see how they taught the prerequisite skills.  Then, they can have a conversation with a grade above to ensure that the instruction that they plan to deliver will prepare all kids for the next grade.

Vertical alignment is usually put to the back burner for most schools.  Schools that excel make vertical alignment a priority and more important schedule it on the calendar regularly, so it does not get move to the back burner.