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To drive instruction using data-driven strategies through the depth of evaluation, analysis and implementation of instructional strategies.

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Chris Jakicic, EdD, an author and a consultant, was principal of Woodlawn Middle School in Illinois from 1999 to 2007. She began her career teaching middle school science.

Over the last several years, I have had the privilege of working with schools and districts as they develop and use common formative assessments to help assure that all kids learn at high levels. I'm often invited to work with teams at their meetings when they use the data from these assessments. As I sit and talk with teams who are actually doing the work, I've noticed several specific mistakes these teams are making. The first is that teachers, while trying to save precious planning time, often each score their own assessments and respond to the data in their own classrooms. This eliminates the opportunity for teams to learn together from the assessment. Without the collaborative conversation, teachers fail to compare how effective different instructional strategies were when other teachers taught the same concepts. They also can't learn together about how to respond to students who need help.

Another common mistake is that teachers use the scores students earn on an assessment to plan their response. For example, if a student earns an 80% overall the teacher is comfortable moving on. The reality, though, is that if their assessment is about essential learning that is guaranteed, failure to learn any one of the learning targets means the student needs corrective instruction.

Finally, teams often forget that using the student work helps lead to a better response. When teachers bring the student answers to the table, they are able to group together students who had similar difficulties. For example, I worked with a second-grade team assessing two learning targets on an assessment: 1) students can identify the main idea of a multiparagraph text, and 2) students can provide details that support that main idea. I asked the team members to begin their analysis by making two piles for the first learning target: students who correctly identified the main idea in one pile, and students who chose an incorrect idea in the second pile. As they were sorting papers, one thing became clear-students who answered that question incorrectly almost always chose the first sentence of the first paragraph as the main idea. Teachers realized that this was a common misconception, as they often taught students that the topic sentence of a paragraph tells the reader the main idea and that the topic sentence usually was the first sentence in their paragraph. Two things happened as a result. The first was that the teachers were able to easily plan how to respond to the students who hadn't learned this target. They would start by explicitly teaching why their misconception was incorrect. But they also learned something equally as important about how they should be teaching topic sentences. They needed to make it clear that topic sentences are not always the first sentence in the paragraph.

Using student work to plan corrective instruction has become one of the most powerful practices the teams I'm working with are using. Teams realize how important it is to have students expose their thinking on a formative assessment, generally in response to a constructed-response question. They also realize how important it is to move from getting the answer correct to knowing specifically what students have learned and what they have yet to learn.

Yes, the collaborative data meeting takes more time than having each teacher score and respond to an assessment. However, teams quickly see the value of that time-both in planning more precise responses to students, but also in how they can improve their initial instruction on essential learning targets.

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Chris Jakicic, EdD, an author and a consultant, was principal of Woodlawn Middle School in Illinois from 1999 to 2007. She began her career teaching middle school science. Over the last several years, I have had the privilege of working with schools and districts as they develop and use common formative assessments to help assure that all kids learn at high levels.

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To model and facilitate embedded PD persistently through observations, feedback, and coaching for design.

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To support blended learning and technology based instruction by obtaining Google I Certification for all teachers.

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To embed PD for Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction and support campus-wide interventions.

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Is there a school that isn't trying to purchase and integrate technology into its classrooms? If so, such schools are few and far between. And yet, despite the ubiquity of this work, most schools are doing it poorly.

We know this is true; all we have to do is ask teachers and principals. Many will freely admit that their school is struggling in this area. Other than a few isolated "rock star" educators who are pushing the edges of possibility, most teachers are utilizing technology-either minimally or frequently-in ways that generally replicate what instruction looked like before their school invested in digital learning tools. For example:

Using interactive whiteboards instead of chalkboards to push information out to students

Showing YouTube videos instead of showing DVD videos

Creating electronic Google documents that mirror paper worksheets but are submitted online instead of on paper

Implementing digital multiple-choice software (with points and a timer!)

Using flashcard apps instead of actual cards

The list could go on and on and on. This is what we face in almost every school we visit: everyone is trying to do the same work, and almost everyone is struggling.

Challenges to Ed Tech Integration

Inadequate Professional Development

Part of the problem is that our systems of professional development generally are horrible. Quick, name a school that is doing an awesome job of implementing effective, personalized professional learning in robust ways for its teachers. We'll wait.

Similarly, most school principals know little about digital learning tools and effective technology integration. Their university programs didn't prepare them in this area, their professional associations aren't doing much either, and they're not connected-locally or globally-to technology-savvy leadership peers who could boost their knowledge and skill sets.

Scaling

Another challenge is that we don't have good mechanisms for scaling innovation beyond those early-adopter teachers into the rest of our classrooms. We point to those teachers' technology integration efforts proudly, but they rarely "infect" fellow educators in their school or district. They remain isolated examples of both school pride and organizational frustration.

The Current Systems of Instruction

The biggest problem with technology integration has nothing to do with the technology. Instead, it's the fact that we're unwilling to rethink our learning and teaching. As long as we remain wed to systems of instruction that overwhelmingly emphasize factual recall and procedural regurgitation-because of institutional inertia, state accountability mandates, parent expectations, or whatever-we'll never allow digital tools to truly transform learning opportunities for students.

The 4 Shifts Protocol

It's not all gloom and doom. There are some schools and districts that are making progress. These are the ones that are beginning to reenvision their "profile of a graduate" and are serious about doing the complex and difficult work of shifting organizational paradigms. Most of them are focusing on what we call the four shifts:

1. Deeper learning

2. Greater student agency

3. More authentic work

4. Rich technology infusion

The first three shifts are what's most important in terms of organizational and instructional impact. The technology infusion shift helps students build new digital literacies and tool fluencies and also supports more robust work in the other three areas.

For these school organizations-the ones that are starting to reexamine the core of what they're all about and what they're trying to do for students, families, and communities-our 4 Shifts Protocol should offer help. As its name indicates, the discussion protocol focuses on (re)designing instruction around the four shifts. The protocol is structured to help educators talk in nonjudgmental ways about instructional purposes and provides concrete "look-fors" and "think-abouts" that help them diagnose and (re)design lessons, units, and other instructional activities toward new educational outcomes.

We're having incredible success with the protocol. People grasp its intent and structure fairly quickly, and we can get educators up and running with it in a few hours. As we use the protocol to (re)design lessons and units together, our conversations with teachers, instructional coaches, technology integrationists, and principals have been nothing short of amazing. In the hundreds of schools that have piloted the protocol, learning opportunities for students have started to shift, and teachers feel like they can start attacking the larger task of preparing students for their globally interconnected, technology-suffused, innovation-oriented futures in ways that are manageable rather than overwhelming.

The protocol seems to be occupying a wonderful space between traditional practice and full-blown, "gold standard," multiple-week, project- and inquiry-based learning. In that space, the protocol helps educators approach "future-ready" education in smaller slices and build their capacity for that more complex (and wonderful) PBL work. The small changes add up over time and build our readiness for more robust learning. That's a win for schools and communities and the students that they serve.

Hope you enjoy the new book, Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning, which introduces the protocol, provides eight concrete examples that walk educators through the lesson/unit (re)design process, and includes tips and strategies for implementation in schools. Let us (Scott McLeod and Julie Graber) know what questions you have and how we can be of support to your redesign work.

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Is there a school that isn't trying to purchase and integrate technology into its classrooms? If so, such schools are few and far between. And yet, despite the ubiquity of this work, most schools are doing it poorly. We know this is true; all we have to do is ask teachers and principals.

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Based on Adapting Unstoppable Learning and Simplifying Response to Intervention
Common sense needs to be a common thread in education, and this applies to response to intervention (RTI) or multitiered systems of support (MTSS) as well.

One of the most frequent questions I receive related to RTI is, "What is an interventionist or intervention specialist?"

Perhaps a more helpful question is, " Who is an interventionist?" The answer is that all educators are interventionists. Why? Let's provide some background.

Response to Intervention (RTI)

The RTI tiers of supports are schools' systematic approaches to addressing a common-sense reality: if it's predictable, it's preventable.

That some students will need additional supports is predictable.

That some students will be become frustrated and will fall behind in the absence of proactively planned supports is predictable.

Allowing frustrated students to fall further and further behind is preventable.

If it's predictable, it's preventable

Designing and implementing systems of support for students is common sense.

1. We can predict that students will bring different learning preferences, interests, and readiness levels to core learning environments.

Let's prevent frustration and time-wasting by being ready with differentiated supports, particularly scaffolded supports, so that highly vulnerable students can successfully access priorities.

2. We can predict that some students will need more time to master core priorities and that other students will benefit from enrichment, and we can predict that not all students will learn on our timetables or in response to our first, best instruction.

Let's prevent students from falling behind and other students from missing opportunities to reach greater depths of learning by embedding supports into our unit plans.

3. We can predict that some students coming to us for the beginning of each school year will have significant deficits in foundational skills.

Let's prevent continued failure and frustration by providing students with immediate and targeted Tier 3 supports that explicitly address these needs.

The three scenarios represented above are realities for which we can be prepared. RTI does not have three tiers simply because some wise sage dictated from on high that three tiers was best. There are three tiers because there are three predictable types of supports that we can anticipate students will need. The situations above describe what we do, and the reason for doing it, at each tier.

Proactive, Targeted, and Organized

As we often do, I fear we've overly complicated RTI. One straightforward way of describing the three tiers of supports, whether applied to academic or behavioral skills, is using the terms proactive, targeted, and organized.

In Adapting Unstoppable Learning, Yazmin Zapata and Rebecca Brooks describe how schools can use systems thinking to inform teaching and learning. That makes sense. We systematically gather evidence, we collaboratively analyze evidence, and we collectively design supports in response to this evidence to meet student needs. In other words, we check for understanding, whether formally or informally, so that we can intervene-no matter the type of need, no matter the tier of support.

Tier 1 Interventions

At Tier 1, all teachers are interventionists, providing differentiated supports that match students' current readiness levels, interests, styles, and needs. Teachers meet student needs in differentiated ways as they strive to ensure all students master the essentials of the grade level, content area, or course.

We can and should know the characteristics and needs of students who are coming into our classrooms at the beginning of the year. Screening data would give us this information, as would structured conversations between last year's teachers and this year's teachers. In most cases, students were at our school or a feeder school last year. (In the case of incoming kindergarten students or students new to the school, we could and should have a process for screening prior to the beginning of the school year.) We can intervene to meet student needs at Tier 1 by proactively preparing differentiated supports, and, in the case of students who have not yet mastered prerequisites from prior grade levels, preparing scaffolds so that they can access the core.

Our efforts to ensure that all students master the priorities of the core at depth so that they can apply their learning and retain their understandings for the next year and beyond will forever be compromised if we favor coverage over mastery. Instead, we must target our supports for students, prioritizing the key outcomes for each grade level or course and focus on depth not breadth. We will teach all standards, but we cannot teach all standards as if they're equally important. That defies common sense.

No teacher can intervene to meet all students' needs on their own, We must organize ourselves in collaborative teams, learning from and with one another. The logical way to ensure this collaborative preparation for differentiated core instruction is successful is to organize our learning outcomes into common units of study within which are common prioritized learning targets. We cannot collaboratively prepare otherwise. It's also logical that we have a consistent way of measuring mastery so that the team (and the students) know what the target looks like. We're organized, designing common assessments in advance to collectively measure mastery of the essentials.

Tier 2 Interventions

At Tier 2, teacher teams collaboratively analyze ongoing evidence of learning to provide timely, collective supports and serve as interventionists.

Recognizing that some students won't learn within our timetables, we embed buffer times and days as we are planning our school year. Finding space for these buffer times after the year has been scoped and sequenced is impossible. Instead, we proactively carve out times for Tier 2 intervention and enrichment. All students benefit. The consequence of dedicating time for these "no-new" content periods is that we won't be able to cover as much content. The consequences of not proactively preparing time for these supports are much more significant.

We certainly cannot reteach and provide enrichment on all of the learning outcomes within Tier 1. Let's not try. Instead, we target these supports on the most critical and prioritized learning outcomes for which there is evidence of need. And while research does not support ability grouping at Tier 1, we can target Tier 2 supports based on what evidence gathering reveals are the intervention and enrichment needs of students. We can target these supports if we're organized.

Tier 2 supports can be provided by an individual teacher, but logically, we will be more successful in meeting this anticipatable set of needs if we can organize our daily schedules (at the elementary level) or our bell schedules (at the secondary levels) so that teacher teams for grade levels or courses can share students and provide supports based on the learning gaps that evidence-gathering (e.g., through common assessments) has revealed. Organization and coordination within a system of supports is a key characteristic of successful professions.

Tier 2 isn't complicated. It's really just more time and alternative supports so that students master the priorities of Tier 1 at more depth. For some students, that means intervention; for others, it means enrichment.

Tier 3 Interventions

Tier 3 need not be complicated either. An intensive support that meets a student's need at Tier 3 was a core support that didn't meet a student's needs several grade levels or courses before. It's just another way that, if school communities collaborated both vertically horizontally, we're all interventionists.

Universal screening directly informs two of the tiers; this information informs proactively prepared, differentiated Tier 1 supports as well as proactively provided, intensive Tier 3 supports at the very beginning of the year. We must not and need not delay. Students rarely teach themselves to learn the foundational skills that represent their significant area of need over the summer. And it's simply not logical that a teacher and teacher team can, alone, meet the Tier 1, 2, and 3 needs of a student. Instead, schools must proactively prepare for Tier 3 supports to be provided immediately.

The best intervention is a targeted intervention. A broad support in the area of reading, for example, is a very inefficient-and perhaps unnecessary-way of intervening at Tier 3. Instead, let's listen to a student read and determine if the most immediate area of need and the primary cause of the difficulty is phonological awareness, simple phonics, advanced phonics, fluency, or comprehension-and target our intervention accordingly.

Few if any schools have enough staff to schedule a separate grade 4, 5, 6 advanced phonics Tier 3 intervention session. So, we must be organized, scheduling strategically across grades and grade spans. It will likely result in an intervention schedule that works in concert with our core class schedule. This is possible, of course, because we do not provide Tier 3 supports based on a student's grade level but at the level that corresponds with his or her current readiness level.

RTI is common sense in action, and we should embrace the notion that we are all intervention specialists.

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Who Is an Intervention Specialist? With RTI, We All Are

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Based on Adapting Unstoppable Learning and Simplifying Response to Intervention Common sense needs to be a common thread in education, and this applies to response to intervention (RTI) or multitiered systems of support (MTSS) as well. One of the most frequent questions I receive related to RTI is, "What is an interventionist or intervention specialist?"

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One goal that we have is to make our team meetings more efficient especially with time. We have a set agenda and time for each talking point to ensure we are covering and developing solutions to each point.

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Each member of the team will present instructional strategies by giving at least one EGO presentation during the.

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One goal we have is make efficient use of our team meeting time by following agenda items with fidelity and following up with on-going issues/needs as necessary.

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Each week's team agenda is sent out prior to weekly Wednesday meeting so that team members can access it, add to it, and put in student concerns that will be addressed. This helps the meeting stay more focused, efficient and on track.

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We will work to ensure that all academic electives teachers receive connection, community, and

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TeamSMARTgoal-settingplan DATA TEAM FPMS 2019