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The Alaska Staff Development Network, Alaska Council of School Administrators and the Alaska Department of Education are teaming up to offer districts an opportunity to assess their current multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) model in order to look for ways to enhance their practices for student success for all.  

Knowledgeable Support – Realistic Timelines
Design MTSS Systems Meaningful to Your District.

• This is a two-year project with the time and support that is necessary to make the needed enhancements to your MTSS structure
• Work with nationally recognized experts and discover– or rediscover– how to build a powerful multi tiered system of supports to meet individual student needs.
• Each participating district will work alongside an experienced MTSS Coach to evaluate current MTSS practices and develop the next steps.  
• Receive a $1,500 stipend for additional work done outside the school day.
• Attend up to three conferences per year – travel and conference registration fees are covered by the project
• Receive three university credits per year in connection with your work on this project. The cost of the credit is covered by the project.

Why

Supporting ALL Kids: The multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) framework is designed to help schools identify struggling students early and intervene quickly. MTSS supports all students with excellent core instruction, targeted, research-based interventions, and ongoing data collection. The goal is for students to receive timely intervention to help them meet learning targets, instead of waiting for them to receive failing grades. 

It’s All Connected: MTSS provides strong academic core instruction to help students meet grade-level expectations, but a student’s growth is not limited to just academics. MTSS also supports social-emotional learning, positive behavior, and mental health.

Time for a Refresh: Many of the components of MTSS are not new practices. They’re the high-impact actions that educators have been doing for years. Coming back from COVID, it is time to focus on aligning those efforts again to help our students. MTSS isn’t reinventing the wheel—it’s bringing cohesion to the student-centered practices and data-driven decisions that already happen in many schools. MTSS helps increase the effectiveness of existing efforts, and uncover areas where adjustments or enhancements are needed.

How

Deliverables and Anticipated Outcomes

Each cohort will be expected to either produce or develop working documents that include:

Deliverables

• Develop a district wide MTSS Support Team
• Develop Action Plans for Years 1 and 2
• Develop MTSS guidelines/guardrails that can be distributed to schools (and submitted to DEED)

Possible Projects

• Design a resource for teachers to utilize when examining Tier I strategies & Tier II interventions
• Develop intervention blocks that are focused on reading
• Create a system of tracking student progress to allow for adjustments to specific interventions
• Create systems that examine the effectiveness of interventions

Timeline

Presenters: Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey
Dates: October 11, November 1, 15, 29 (Tuesdays)
All webinars start at 3:45 p.m.
One credit available (Graded)

Every brain needs to be taught to read.  And over the past 100+ years, there have been hundreds of thousands of studies that comprise a science of reading.  During this workshop series, Dr’s Fisher and Frey will unwrap the research around the science of reading, and provide clear and concise plays around strategies that have the highest influence on reading development for young children.

Target Audience: Teachers, Leaders and Coaches- grades K-3 – but anyone  involved in early childhood literacy would  find these sessions beneficial.

Session 1 – What’s New and What’s Enduring in Reading Instruction? (October 11, 2022 with Doug Fisher)

Research in reading dates to 1865 and is the oldest form of educational research. Knowledge of best practices continues to evolve over the last 157 years. In this opening session, we use Hollis Scarborough’s reading rope as the organizer for the playbook as well as the series. We provide an overview and grounding in word recognition and language comprehension and their reciprocal nature. In addition, we focus on newer elements of reading research to build the constrained and unconstrained skills of reading. Doug Fisher, a past president of the International Reading Association, hosts this session.

Session 2 – Word Recognition: The Foundational Skills of Reading (November 1, 2022 with Nancy Frey)

Readers must develop the skills necessary to quickly and accurately recognize words. In this session, we turn our attention to phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. In addition, we expand on the reading rope by adding specific strands on fluency and alphabetics as essential components of word recognition. Nancy Frey, a member of the Literacy Research Panel of ILA, leads this session.

Session 3 – Language Comprehension: Understanding What is Read (November 15 with Nancy Frey)

At the same time that foundational skills are being built, language comprehension instruction must also occur. This session focuses on vocabulary development as well as morphological awareness. This session includes a focus on language structures, in particular the syntactic and semantic dimensions of sentence- and text-level comprehension

Session 4 – Metacognitive Awareness: Becoming Increasingly Strategic and Fluent Readers (November 29 with Doug Fisher)

Effective readers are active and self-aware readers. In this final session, we examine the metacognitive dimensions of the reading rope, with special attention to verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge. As well, we examine the role and development of background knowledge necessary for comprehension of texts. We end with exciting newer research on the role of a theory of mind in reading, and the ways word recognition and language comprehension are braided together to build strategic and fluent readers. 

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