This past spring, Branching Minds held a nationwide competition for educators to share their MTSS journeys. We received some truly great submissions from dedicated teachers across the country. The prompt for this competition was to answer the following question: “How has MTSS helped you in your job as an educator? Where and how has it made a difference in your journey as an educator?”

School is just around the corner and planning for next year has already started. This year, your school may be introducing a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) to better support all students. If you’re unfamiliar with MTSS, this new framework can at first appear daunting. 

What Does Tutoring Have To Do With MTSS?

There are many important components to a successful implementation of an MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) framework. All of the components rely on and inform one another (to see a visual of how MTSS is a framework, check out this MTSS flowchart).

It’s no surprise to see more states and school districts adopting a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) as their framework for supporting students across academics, social-emotional learning, and behavior for all students. MTSS is a collaborative, evidence-based approach to differentiating and personalizing instruction and intervention for all students. 

In my first year of teaching, I had a 2nd-grade student named Colton¹ who under-performed on both the beginning and middle of the year universal screener assessments. He was deemed at risk of falling behind his grade-level peers. 

The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights estimates that six percent of public school students are enrolled in gifted and talented programs (source). 

Branching Minds (BRM) is honored to have a guest post from Marie Stapleton, Lead Title Teacher at Painesville City Local Schools (PCLS) in Ohio. We began our partnership with PCLS in April 2019, and in this experience spotlight, Ms. Stapleton shares her experience using the BRM platform and reflects on how utilizing an MTSS technology has supported both students and teachers in her school. Special thanks to Marie Stapleton for sharing her valued perspective with us. 💙

About two years ago, I was a district administrator for school climate improvement. In this role, I was asked to support a group of administrators that were handling intense behaviors on their campus. The campus had maxed out its intensive support resources, and determined that they had no other option than to create a new tier of support—what they referred to as “Tier 4.” 

I have noticed this trend quite often. I hear different variations of this new level of need: “Tier 4,” “deep red,” or even “too many red students.” 

What does this mean? 

A Multi-Tiered System of Supports is based on the three-tiered public health model. This means that we must identify the root cause(s) within our current system and identify why it’s not serving our student population. By creating an additional tier, we ignore a problem that is perforating our entire system. 

There is no Tier 4. However, there is a Tier 2. And this tier is often overlooked in how powerful of an intervention tool it can be.

About six years into my career as a special educator, I attended a child’s study meeting. In this meeting, my 9th-grade student's mother encouraged the team to focus on the student's executive functioning.

Executive functioning? I remember thinking. What is that? I didn’t even know if we taught executive functioning, let alone how to begin supporting it. 

As schools and districts make the shift to include social-emotional learning (SEL) within their overarching MTSS practice, we often get questions about where student behavior fits into this framework. Many educators still view SEL and Behavioral Health as separate areas, but what’s more problematic is when these two areas are not aligned.