Prioritize Content

tires. Successful school change requires similar check-ins and capacity to adjust to unforeseen difficulties and opportunities.

Just as students sometimes experience difficulties with executive functioning skills such as planning, organization, and time management, school teams can become stalled or sidetracked in their efforts. By following a systematic plan—one that prompts staff members to check on progress and anticipates pressure points— school leaders can ensure success. This ten-step plan is one that schools should follow to initiate, monitor, revise, and sustain MTSS-based school improvement. The plan makes a school’s progress on the journey clear and provides the information needed for course corrections.

Chapter 5: What Does Student Evidence Reveal?

Evidence, provided through formal and informal assessments, is the engine that drives education. Evidence, when gathered accurately, analyzed collaboratively, and used to guide decisions, can motivate students and staff to expect more from themselves and to persevere through the difficulties that will arise. Schools have lots of data; however, data do not become evidence until educators make sense of the data in preparation for continuous improvement. Schools that maximize student outcomes through MTSS-based principles and practices thrive on evidence. Educators in such schools enthusiastically resolve the assessment paradox—that students are assessed too often and yet schools need more information about student needs.

Schools must gather the right evidence with the right tools.

• What evidence formats are necessary? • Which students have significant gaps in the foundational prerequisite skills of literacy, numeracy, or behavior? • To what extent are students learning the core content taught during initial, scaffolded, differentiated instruction? • What antecedents, or reasons, explain the difficulties of students who are at risk of not mastering the desired learning outcomes? • To what extent are students responding to supplemental supports?

When sites gather this information and take timely action, they are using evidence to drive their system of supports.