S5 E17 - MTSS for Reading with Stephanie Stollar

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Jocelyn:

Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn, and boy do I have a treat for you. Today I am joined by the wonderful Stephanie Stollar and I have to tell you everyone, when I received Stephanie's email talking about her new book, I was very excited. So hello, Stephanie, welcome.

Stephanie: 

Thank you so much, Jocelyn. It's so nice to join you today.

Jocelyn: 

Stephanie, for those of us here in Australia who may not be familiar with your work, can you tell us a little bit about what you do and what's led you to this new book that you have coming out?

Stephanie: 

Yes, so I live in Cincinnati, Ohio in the US, and I am an educational consultant. I support schools and districts to improve reading outcomes by addressing the instructional structures that support students, and I have done that in a variety of capacities over the years. I have worked at universities, I've been a consultant at a regional resource centre. I worked as a school psychologist, that's how I started my career, and it was in that job, as a school psychologist, that I got interested in and passionate about reading, because all of the referrals that came to me, whether it was an eighth grader struggling with math or it was a fifth grader having some behavioural issues, reading was always at the heart of it.

And in my system you had to be a certain amount behind before you got any help. And yet I could see at the beginning of kindergarten, when students entered, that there were students who needed intensive support in language and literacy from the beginning, and it was so frustrating to watch those students languish and get frustrated and suffer because we weren't ready as a system to support them right away. And that's what drew me to focusing on reading, on prevention, on reading intervention and what we now call MTSS or multi-tiered systems of support. So the book MTSS for Reading Improvement, my co-author, Sarah Brown, and I have written it to capture the work that we've done for more than 30 years to support districts to get those structures in place to improve results for absolutely every student. So thank you for the opportunity to talk about topics that I'm so passionate about.

Jocelyn: 

It's a delight to have you here. Now, Stephanie, one of the things that people can be a little muddled on, and I'd love it if you could provide some clarification for the audience, is what's the difference between MTSS, or multi-tiered systems of support, and RTI, or response to intervention?

Stephanie:

I think the biggest point of clarification is in the way that RTI is commonly implemented, which is a way of providing interventions to students. The common framework of tiers, shaped like a triangle, moving students through tiers is what RTI has become in many school implementations. So, many people think about RTI as just a set of paperwork, a set of meetings where you are moving students from Tier 1 to Tier 2 to Tier 3. And in some cases that is only seen as an alternate route to special education, perhaps for students with learning disabilities, an alternative to a discrepancy formula, a difference between IQ test score and achievement test score, and all of those are aspects of what we now call multi-tiered systems of support, but MTSS is a lot more than that. It is about engineering a system of evidence-based instructional supports for all students and making those available from the very beginning of kindergarten, as I mentioned my frustration around. It's about the adults in the system taking ownership for student learning, recognising that the most important interaction in schools is between that classroom teacher and his or her students and everybody else in the system, all they're there for is to support that interaction between the classroom teacher and their students.

But every system is different, every school building or district or system has a different set of resources and a different set of challenges. So to me, MTSS is the process of using assessment data about your students and about the adults and structures in the system to surface what the barriers are so that you can create actions, action plans, that will allow you to use your existing resources to eliminate those barriers to reading outcomes. So I think about MTSS as systems change, it is a school change framework. Obviously it's not specific only to reading, all academic subjects as well as the social, emotional and behavioural support that we provide in schools, but I just happen to focus on reading, so I don't know if that provides enough clarification between the two.

Jocelyn: 

I think it does, and I think there's- when we think about intervention, RTI, MTSS, it's a little bit like the word differentiation. Our understandings can be so different from person to person and school to school. So having the principles and structures and frameworks that sit within it and an understanding of that is really important.

What I'm hearing in what you described, Stephanie, is the need for consistency, and I love what you were saying about that interaction between the teacher and the student, because so often what used to happen, and unfortunately still does happen, is a siloing of intervention from the classroom. So the student would have been identified, often just through teacher judgement, without a consistent basis for making that judgement, as needing extra support, and a couple of times a week they go off with somebody and they do something and the teacher's not really sure what they're doing or what the focus is, and that can look like the people working in intervention have brought in a whole 'nother program that's completely different from what's happening in the classroom, without anybody even knowing, and so there's this disconnect between what happens in that support space and what happens in the classroom.

So what are some of the challenges that you see schools facing in bringing MTSS to life in their school, and how can we provide people with simple suggestions and solutions for taking those first important steps into beginning to develop these structures?

Stephanie: 

Yeah, you really put your finger on one of the biggest misconceptions that what MTSS is about is screening, finding students who are low and putting them in intervention, and everything you said about the intervention being separate from, disconnected from, the classroom instruction, I experienced that quite commonly. So what we've been missing if that's been the approach or our understanding of what this model is about is the fact that there are so many students who are scoring low. I mean, in the US we have a national assessment and, depending on which group of students you're looking at, it could be 25% to 40% of the students are successful on that national reading assessment in fourth grade. So by and large, across the board, we are doing not a great job teaching reading.

So the concept that this is a problem for a small number of students that we can solve through intervention that is something outside of the classroom, different from, delivered by someone different than the classroom teacher, is just a fantasy. It's just not connected with the reality in schools that I work in. So I think that misunderstanding that it's about intervention, it's about some small number of students, it's about something outside of the classroom, is a really important misunderstanding to confront head on. So the alternative is through this innovation, this fantastic innovation of universal screening, we no longer have to wait for that teacher, as you said, to recognise, or miss, perhaps, that there is an issue with an individual student. We can screen all students very briefly, in maybe 10 to 15 minutes for each student, maybe an hour for the whole classroom to be screened. We can screen every student on key indicators of predicting reading performance or indicating current reading comprehension, and not only use that information to identify the students who are at risk or already struggling readers, but more importantly, to look at the effectiveness and health of the classroom reading instruction.

So MTSS is a regular education curriculum and instruction enterprise. It is about evaluating how good is the first way we teach reading? And by good I mean, how well matched is it to the students who are in front of us? So yes, we want to lean into the research space and we can glean a lot from how to teach. But we have to bring that together with the little people who are actually in front of the teachers in the classroom and make sure that the instruction that we're providing the first time around is lined up with what they need.

So sometimes people think MTSS is this rigid process that, like thou shalt do X, Y and Z, and people get very hung up on is this a Tier 2 or a Tier 3? Is this student in Tier 2 or Tier 3? Is this program Tier 2 or Tier 3? All these very rigid thoughts, and it's not helpful at all. What we should be doing is, first and foremost, using that screening data to understand what does this grade level of students need, and then constructing the systems classroom instruction in Tier 1, intervention supports in Tier 2 and 3. Constructing those systems that match what the students need, instead of what happens often is constructing a system and trying to shove the students into it and sort of making them fit into it, and that's not serving students very well.

Jocelyn: 

You can't see me everybody, but I'm nodding emphatically at what Stephanie's saying there. And actually one of the chapters in the book is all about aligning to local context, and one of the challenges that here in Australia we are experiencing, and attention that we're experiencing, is wanting to ensure that we are working with fidelity with the programs that we have, but then also recognising that there are contextual needs. And for me, fidelity, I had a whole podcast episode, everybody, called My Most and Least Favourite F-words, and fidelity was one of my least at the moment, only because of the rigidness in which we are trying to apply these programs. So don't change anything that's on the page, don't change the pacing, don't change the scope, don't change anything because you have to do it the way it's said. But that creates this mismatch, as you said, Stephanie, about trying to squish the children into meet the needs of their pre-conceived ideas. So how do we reconcile that tension between keeping the support for students in the classroom but then the reality of a teacher you know could have in Australia anywhere between 25 and 30 students in a classroom and recognising the quite widespread of need across the class, how do we- how do we manage the tension between providing targeted instruction but then not having silos?

Stephanie: 

Yeah, great topics there, I want to listen to your podcast. I'm going to pile on to that fidelity issue a little bit first. Many of the published programs that are available right now have absolutely zero research on their effectiveness. So to say that you should implement one of those with fidelity is not good advice, because where that idea of implementation or treatment integrity, as it was originally called, where that comes from is from intervention programs that actually have evidence of working. So once there's been research on an instructional package, and again this is mostly from the intervention context, once there's research on that working, then you should replicate those conditions when your school uses it. You should use it as designed, because that design, that package, that sequence, that teacher language, all of the bits of that actually have proven to work better than other things. We don't have that with core reading programs right now. So this idea that you're going to adopt this big box program and use it off the shelf with fidelity is just, it's misguided. It's much more nuanced than that.

So, again, relying on the universal screening data as the first indication of what is the range of needs. If we're talking about incoming kindergarteners or a group of first grade students, we can see from screening data, and then second grade and above, following up with some diagnostic, instructionally relevant diagnostic data to really pinpoint and target, especially if we're talking about the word recognition skills, where are students on, let's say, a phonics scope and sequence. And then across the whole grade level, grouping students in skill-alike groups so that instruction can be targeted at the next thing they need to learn. So this is not what I see happening in most places and I think it's what you're experiencing as well. Instruction works best when it's targeted right at that sweet spot of not something that's too easy, that the kids already know, not something that's too hard, that's going to overwhelm their working memory, but that sweet spot right there in what they need to learn next. And the range of students in your grade level or in your classroom will tell you, should I be teaching phonics and spelling whole group or should I be differentiating that in skill-based small groups where every student is with an adult? So screening data, diagnostic data, tell us what our students need and I really recommend that people invest the time in collecting that assessment data first before purchasing programs.

I've worked with systems that have a very narrow range of skills. All the students maybe 75%, 80% sort of are in the same place on the phonics scope and sequence and it's a small number who aren't. Whole group instruction can work well if that 20% is getting some pre-teaching before the whole group lesson so that they can access and participate in that. But once you get beyond about 20% it just becomes not a productive use of time to do the whole group phonics lesson. In place of that we should be doing that skill-based targeted grouping, some small, some larger groups for the more on-track students from the get-go. Many people think about what I just said as that targeted skill-based grouping, as what we do only for intervention and that might get you a little bump in student outcomes if you only have a few students who are struggling. But again, the places I work with they have lots of students who are struggling and we know very clearly from the research that even students who start a couple of grade levels behind can catch up to grade level expectations, but not with the same number of minutes of instruction on those phonics and spelling skills. They're going to need more time every day. So that's what that tiered model, that triangle shape, is all about. It's layering instructional doses on top of each other, not across time but in a single school day, and those doses of instruction are most effective when they are lined up. So students are not experiencing different programs across the day. Because if you stop and think about that, you know the students are already confused, they're struggling, they're having a hard time, you know, breaking the code. And now you are teaching vowel teams in one time of the day and you're teaching basic letter sound for reading CVC patterns in another time of their day. You're calling it a magic E in one time of their day and a silent E in another time of their day and you're using different routines where one place they're supposed to raise their hand and another place they're supposed to, you know, snap or something. It's so confusing for the most confused students and when you stop and think about that it's like, well, duh, why are we doing that?

What I've seen to be extremely helpful is when the same instruction, perhaps with the same program, is used in different times of the student's day. This is what I mean by layering on aligned instructional programs. And coming back to what I said originally, if you screen your students and you have a large proportion in the grade level who are struggling or at risk, your Tier 1 may look a lot more like how intervention looks in some other school. Your Tier 1 may need to have all of the components of reading intervention. So the program that you choose for word recognition in Tier 1 regular classroom reading instruction might be an intervention program, just because an intervention program is designed differently than typical Tier 1 instructional programs. So this process of collecting the data, knowing what your students actually need, literally laying out the continuum of skill needs across the grade level and then selecting the programs that match what the students need, that's what I've seen to work best.

Jocelyn: 

And it's a difficult space for school leaders to sit in to make the selection of the programs, because often the programs chosen are the ones chosen because other people are using them and say they are good. So I feel for our principals and our deputy principals who have been in leadership during the last five years and not in the classroom, because they have not had the benefit of learning on the job, as it were, with children in real time. They are often feeling a little on the back foot in terms of not really knowing who to listen to, what's what, and as professionals we learn through experience as well as through academic study. So to have not had that, and the schools where I see this working the best are actually where the principals and the deputies and the other senior executive leadership maintain at least a very small working load. And I know principals who go in and they take a phonics group once a week or twice a week or when they can, and they keep that connection there with the classroom because then they're able to reflect in and on practice in a way that you just can't when you're in the office trying to get the best advice from a range of people who often share conflicting advice and then we're not sure what to do.

So the program selection is challenging and I think that, even if so, you mentioned about Tier 1 your core reading programs not being as rigorously studied, or studied at all. That's, as we know, a very long, expensive process and all of the things. So that means that we have to know what elements of instruction we're looking for and be able to think critically. The other thing that I often argue as well, and I'm interested in your perspective on this, is that even if the program at the core level had been rigorously studied and shown to be effective, the program developer doesn't know the students in any single classroom. They are indicating the number of repetitions and the pacing of introducing new learning based on an average, which is usually somewhat imagined in a way, and then the teacher and the person using that tool has to make the determination in the moment around ok, are the students ready to move on yet? So that means that teacher capacity building has to be a huge part of this picture, that we can't just rely on programs. What are you seeing in your space in the US and in the reading space that aligns or not with what I'm sharing about the Australian context?

Stephanie: 

Yeah, well, I completely agree with you. The leaders who keep their foot in instruction or develop that skill set, maybe they were secondary teachers and now they're leading a primary school, they have my greatest respect. And I understand that we look to our peers. I understand asking the district down the road what they're using, but the bottom line is student outcomes. So if that's going to be your approach, I think you have to ask the districts around you, show me your data, and the important data point is the percentage of students who are on track on screening. So a direct screening measure, something like Acadience Reading or DIBELS eighth edition, that you can aggregate across the grade level and see the percentage of students who have met the minimum expectations. And so I'd be asking around and I'd be specifically looking for the district that tells me that 30% of their students were on track at the beginning of first grade and 90% were on track at the end of first grade. That's what I'd be looking for.

And then I'd want to know not just what program are you using, that would be a starting place but, as you suggested, I'd be asking them well, how did you group students? What kind of professional development and coaching did you provide to teachers to deliver that program? What kinds of support staff did you have in place to support that? What was the schedule like? How did you select students for intervention? What kinds of observation did you do to support teachers to deliver that program? So all of those additional supports around the program also have to be in place.

So you know, school leaders are in a tough place. That's who Sarah and I wrote the book for, trying to help them understand the science of reading. Really cutting to the chase, in the first part of that book we're really trying to get to the meat of what we think school leaders need to know about reading and reading instruction is sort of a crash course, but they really do have to have trusted advisors. They need to, you know, vet the people that they're listening to. They need to listen to their staff. They need to not disregard their staff because, as you said, their staff may be four or five years ahead of them on their structured literacy journey and they actually might know better than the school leader does. So they should definitely listen to them.

And then the bottom line is always the student data. So if you come into a school system and you know you think you have the way forward, that's terrific, that can be very helpful, but it might not work with this group of students, it might not work with this staff, it might not work in this school community. So you've got to let the data guide you in making those decisions. And that's what MTSS is all about, getting those collaborative teams in place with the right kinds of data and having the thinking structure, what are the questions we should be asking with our data? What kinds of decisions should we be making? What should be guiding us in those decisions? That's what MTSS is all about.

Jocelyn: 

Wonderful and it's the contextualisation, I think that is the key. The other thing that's incredibly important you mentioned coaching. So we know that often when a program or an approach is studied, there are expert coaches on hand to support teachers, and then people try and take that approach or the program and implement it without that expert level of coaching in the mix and then they don't necessarily see the same results, and that just comes back to, the best dollar we invest is the dollar we invest in people. At the end of the day, the tools are necessary and they must be robust and they must be at least evidence-informed, if not evidence-based, and we have to have a clear line of sight. But it's the investment in people and helping them not just understand the reading space, but also about the learning sciences and the lessons we have, about cognitive load and information processing and working memory and all of those sorts of things as well. So, leaders, if you have the opportunity to have a great coach in your school, please have them.

And different states have different systems here in Australia, so there's different approaches to that, but one of the things that we do have consistently across all of our states and territories in Australia is schools that range significantly in their size. So the smallest school I ever taught in had eight children, and three of them were my own, I was pretty good for the school numbers there. But we have a lot of schools who are sometimes I've got 20, 30, 40 students in the entire primary school. We know that when you work in a school of that size, which I have, you wear many hats. So if I was a leader or a teacher in a small school, even up to 150 students, it's still not big enough to have this big group of adults around who can do all of this work. What are the absolute must-dos that are needed to build those multi-tiered system of support structures that you're talking about so that you can meet the needs of the students? What's the absolute meat and potatoes that they have to have for it to work?

Stephanie: 

Well, you might not believe this, but I think MTSS can sometimes work better in small schools like that, because in large systems they sometimes have more money and they use the money to hire people and then they get very entrenched in roles and titles and job descriptions and they're completely unflexible. So having the assumption that you're going to wear many hats as an adult in the system is actually good. That's one of the tenets of MTSS, flexible service delivery. So that can work in your favour. I think the really big idea in MTSS is what I've already mentioned and that is targeting instruction to the students' needs. The first instruction and then intensifying that support as the data suggests that you need it. And you cannot get off step one with MTSS without data. So screening, diagnostic and progress monitoring data and somebody to talk about those data with. It might be two of you in the system right, it might be you and a community member, it might be you and a parent, but two people at least talking about what you see in the data and what the implications of that are for your system. So, nuts and bolts wise, you may, in a small system, do a lot of cross-grade grouping. Again, the important piece is skill-based targeted instruction and, as much as possible, having that instruction delivered by an adult.

So sometimes when people hear me say skill-based instruction in as small a group as you can get it, they think that means the teacher is with a small group and everybody else is doing their own thing, and that's not at all what I mean. So in a small system you may have to beg, borrow and steal for other adults to deploy this approach, or you may have to be very intentional and careful about what the other students are doing while the teacher is with a group of students and you might have to be planful about which group of students you're with most frequently. So again, the concept is the students who are behind or at risk need more and better instruction. So that means teacher-led small group instruction every day for that group of students and if you're going to target where their current skill level is, and that's below grade level, they need extra doses of that, more time each day. So maybe two small group lessons with an adult. You may have to get very creative about who are those adults and making sure that you are training those other adults. They could be community volunteers, parent volunteers I would use very sparingly. There are confidentiality issues there, but in certain circumstances it can work. But I have literally seen every available pair of hands in school systems used as reading instructors, from cafeteria workers to librarians, to bus drivers, to custodians, secretaries, every single adult in school systems trained, just like the teachers have been trained, to deliver that intervention program and that can work very well. But it takes thinking out of the box. It takes, you know, thinking differently and flexibly, and I think that's really at the heart of MTSS. Again designing the system that your students need, whatever your local context might be.

Jocelyn: 

I've never worked with a school who's gone to flexible grouping across classrooms rather than streaming, because streaming implies that we've identified the students who we think are smarter or, you know, dumber than the others, and then they're stuck in a track, and that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about adjusting those groups every time we do a data collection so that they're getting exactly what they need. And I've never had a school go down that road who's ever elected to go back, because the results speak for themselves.

Stephanie: 

That's right, but it is not tracking. It's not- you're in this lowest quote unquote group across all subjects all day or you're going to be there forever. I think this is a really important point to clarify that the grade level standards. Do you have standards at each grade level in Australia, like we do in the US? Yeah, so those are the outcomes that we're working towards at the end of the grade level. They are always the outcomes as we get into second grade and above focus mostly on reading comprehension. That's where we're going for every student.

But every student doesn't start there and just teaching those grade level standards does not make it miraculously happen for students. We have to start them where they are with the objective of getting them to those outcomes as fast as we can, and we move them faster towards those outcomes by double dosing that tiered model. It is meant to be temporary. It is not streaming, as you said, or tracking as we call it in the US. It is a temporary solution and the sooner we do it, if we start that in kindergarten, if we start it in first grade, we can actually have every first grader reading for meaning at the end of the first grade school year and not have to worry about all this difficult grouping across the grade level, flexible grouping in second grade and above. So it's really worth taking the lead of what's in the research and focusing on prevention and focusing on targeting those skill deficits. That's not a dirty word, it's not deficit thinking. It's actually the way that we move students forward by doing that double dosing that's depicted in the MTSS tiered model.

Jocelyn: 

Wonderful. I think, Stephanie, we've given our listeners a lot to think about and potentially they may have more questions than they began the episode with. That's sometimes how it works. So, everybody, you can reach out on the Structured Literacy Bus Facebook group with any follow-up questions that you may have from this episode. But what are the final thoughts you'd like to leave listeners with as they're grappling with this quite difficult but highly achievable task of meeting the needs of all of the students in front of us?

Stephanie: 

Well, I imagine, if they are listening to your podcast, in your Facebook group and reading your blogs and following you, Jocelyn, they are well informed, and so I would applaud them first and foremost. I've just been so impressed by teachers that I've encountered, especially in the last five years, taking it upon themselves to educate themselves. They understand how important literacy is, and they are not just sitting back and taking it easy. They are figuring out how to be more effective with their students. So, first and foremost, I applaud all of those hardworking teachers.

Don't be quiet, you know, you don't have to be rude, you don't have to shout, but don't be quiet about what you need to serve your students and what's working for your students. Engage your school leaders. Make sure that they know what you're curious about, what's working, what's not working. Band together with another teacher in your system to have those conversations with your school leader. If the leadership is moving in a direction that you don't think has any evidence or isn't matched to what your students need, I just want you to feel empowered. Don't just sit back and take it. You may actually know better than they do. And again, you don't have to be bossy or loud about it, but speak up on behalf of your students. This may be, well, it is your students' only chance in this grade level, and the way that they are taught reading and writing is life-altering potentially. So now I'm scaring people because I'm really laying it on thick, but there are resources out there for you and there are groups that you can join to get support. So that's what I encourage you to do is reach out if you need that, support, band together with other people in your system and don't be afraid to speak up to your leadership.

Jocelyn: 

And I think when it's- sometimes these discussions can become a little emotive and a little heated in some circumstances. At the end of the day, if your data is showing that there are students not being served by the current approach, something has to change. It doesn't mean you have to tip everything upside down and start again, but we need to be asking that question, who is not being served by what just happened? And using our data to figure that out.

And, Stephanie, you mentioned Acadiance and DIBELS and we have those here in Australia and they are being adopted and embraced for their purpose, which is as a universal screener, to help point us in the direction of what to do. But it's also an evaluation of the effectiveness of instruction and it's not about taking it personally, it's not about saying "but I like", it's what do the students in front of us today need? Recognising that as your team grows capacity, as the structures grow and strengthen, what it looks like this year may be very different from what it looks like in three years, because we got better at it as we went along, so we were able to be more effective. Have every moment have bang for the buck and really do the things that we knew were going to make the biggest difference. Stephanie, it has been an absolute pleasure. Can you let people know where they can find the book and how they can hear more from you?

Stephanie: 

Thank you. Yes, so people can find me on Facebook, Stephanie Stollar Consulting and my website, where I have all my other social media connections. My blog, access to my Reading Science Academy and my MTSS course is www.readingscienceacademy.com. The book MTSS for Reading Improvement is available from Solution Tree and they will ship to Australia. The first shipping date, I think, is May 9th, so pre-orders are available now. Sarah and I are happy to respond to any questions that people have. You know, making these changes in systems is challenging, as you said, Jocelyn, but it absolutely can and must be done. So it's been a real pleasure talking with you. We've known each other virtually for quite some time and it's great to be connected to you in this way, so thanks for the opportunity.

Jocelyn: 

My pleasure. Thank you so much for braving the time zone difference.

Everybody, have a fantastic Term 2 if you're listening at the time that this is being released. If not, well, just enjoy whatever term you're in. You know that you can make a difference. Every change you make in the direction of providing targeted instruction is a gift to your students. You're not going to do it all overnight or by next week, but have a timeline, have sensible steps, look after yourselves and you really can make this happen. Until I see you next, everyone, happy teaching, bye.

Show Notes:

S5 E2 - My Most and Least Favourite F-Words

On the Structured Literacy Bus

Stephanie Stollar Consulting

Stephanie's Website, Reading Science Academy

MTSS for Reading Improvement on Solution Tree

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