I will never forget one of the toughest phone calls with a parent in my first year of teaching. As soon as the phone call ended, tears streamed down my face. It had taken everything I had to hold it together while a parent listed out all the things I had been doing wrong with her child. As a first-year teacher, I understood how to create engaging lessons, and I prioritized building relationships with students, but working with parents and families was much more challenging.

Long story short, MTSS exists to get the right intervention to the right student. Without a great intervention at the heart of it all, the work involved in MTSS—the data collection, the meetings, the documentation—is wasted. This toolkit will help guide you and your team in selecting high-quality, research-based interventions for your students, with tips for implementing, tracking, and troubleshooting those interventions.

Another new school year is back in swing, and along with that come new students, new school supplies, and new challenges. Along with grading, lesson plans, and lunch count comes that period of the day in which teachers are tasked with choosing appropriate, evidence-based interventions to support struggling students. This responsibility can be overwhelming for teachers who are already juggling so many tasks during the school day.

This blog was updated by Trudy Bender on September 6, 2022. 

Educators are becoming increasingly concerned about their students’ mental health and well-being. Research has shown that isolation and loneliness were often associated with psychological symptoms across childhood and adolescence even before the pandemic.

In order to create an efficient and effective system of MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports), educators need the assistance of technology to help track student progress and identify at-risk students. Gone are the days of tracking students on various Google Sheets and post-it notes. 

I am the first to admit that I didn’t even know how to get my students more intense help for many years. As a new 7th Grade ELA teacher, I just thought I was failing as a teacher. As I gained experience and training, specifically in English as a Second language, I learned how to make my instruction more accessible and to identify those students that needed help beyond core instruction. In many ways, I remained at a loss for how to provide the intervention they needed.

Years of data and research reveal gaps within education that continue to persist. With the best intentions, there are always ways in which the best system fails at meeting all needs. 

We all enjoy the collegial swapping of stories from our early days of teaching and chatting about the teaching memories we have collected over the years. This dialogue of shared experiences is extremely valuable as it can provide some laughs, illustrate how far we have come, and remind us that we are not alone, especially as we continue to learn new skills or take on new initiatives.

When I think of the word "culture," I equate it with traditions and success that live on forever through generations, celebrated, embodied, embraced, and most definitely something to be proud of. A standard definition of "cultured" is to be characterized by refined taste, manners, and good education.