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.

This past spring, Branching Minds held a nationwide competition with educators, asking them “How has MTSS impacted their school?” 

We had amazing entries from educators around the country. Each entry showcased how a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) has the power to transform the educational journey of students in every school. One of our entries came from Keke Powell, M.Ed., an elementary teacher in Texas.

Throughout my work as a teacher and then for years in educational technology, eventually, as the Vice President of Customer Success in the education division for a Fortune 500 education company, I lived and breathed education pilots and implementations for many years. I would find myself debriefing with my colleagues daily, discussing how we could improve pilots and implementations around the country. During these years, I trained my team, primarily comprised of former classroom teachers, to look deeply at each district’s and school’s protocols utilized during implementation.