Kent McIntosh - Making schools and classrooms more positive, effective and equitable
Kent McIntosh:OK, so here's some things that I want to do in this last hour of the day. I want to talk a little bit about this thing called MTSS or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support. I want to talk about the idea of integrating with other systems that George was talking about a little bit this morning. I want to talk about how different systems might work together or might not and I also want to give you five big ideas for what to do. You can see right down on the bottom, if you look, it's just a little bit clipped off, the website where these slides will be. I will send them tonight, which will mean they'll get posted yesterday in the US. I really like that, that works really nicely. You might have to wait just a little bit longer.
So, starting off, what is MTSS? I already described Multi-Tiered Systems of Support and gave you the language, and I want to talk through each one of these. For some of you it will be a little bit of review, it will catch on from what George talked about this morning, but I spent a little bit of time going through some slides, and a couple of them are funny, so I think you might just want to bear with me for a moment. So, you've seen this triangle, it all makes sense to you, you know what it's all about. If your triangle in your school looks like this you're in big trouble. You probably feel like this donkey, overwhelmed, overworked, over-tired, yeah? So, what I really liked particularly about what Bevan described this morning, when he talked about establishing a high water mark for the support that we provide to students, I really liked that. I thought that made a lot of sense.
What George talked about earlier was the importance of providing something really good for everyone. The thing that is really interesting about this is when we provide something really good for everyone, guess what? Those students who we thought were yellow zone students, and those students who we thought were red zone students are actually doing better and are doing just fine based on what we have. Now, is what we do for everybody going to work for each individual student? No, no, there's no way that our universal systems can actually do that, so we're always going to have some students who need a little bit more or some students who need a lot more to be successful. The reason to focus on the whole school is so that this group of students for our needs is small enough that we can actually deal with it with the resources that we have. A little bit more for some and a lot more for a few. Those are layered on top of each other as opposed to taken out and put in separately.
I know some of you are thinking, well, you know George presented some information about these students up here creating most of the problem behaviour in our school, what's going on here? I've got a little question for you, a little pop quiz. Who do you think has the most influence over students in secondary school? Here are your options: teachers, parents, parliament, or peers? Peers, right. So, here's the question that I'm going to ask you, the follow-up one. Who do you want to have influence over your students? Here's the thing, whenever we walk into a situation and we're really unclear about what we're supposed to do, the first cue we usually do is to look around and see what other students are doing. If I've got sort of an inkling of what I want to do that's a little bit different, and I look around and I see my mates around me doing something a little bit different, then I might do that, too. But, if I look around and basically everybody is doing what's expected of them, then I'm probably going to fall in line and do the things that they're doing because of that peer influence. That's the real key important part about focusing on Tier 1 that actually provides more and more support that's laid out.
MTSS works not only in schools, it works all over the place. How many people are familiar with Geoff Colvin? Anybody know Geoff Colvin? He's an Aussie. Some of you have maybe been trained by him. Geoff Colvin wrote a really interesting, but he's written a lot of good books. He wrote a really interesting book that was PBL for Bartenders. He has a triangle, too, but it's a pint glass. He actually walks you through and says, "Here are some examples of the type of Tier 1 pub behaviour, Tier 2, and then Tier 3, watch out. This works all over the place. That's multi-tiered. The next one is systems that I'm going to talk about.
What I'm going to do, I usually hate it when people do this, but I'm going to read you a quotation that I think is really important that was written in one of our Teachers’ Association Journals in the US. "Many schools, particularly those in high poverty districts operate in a crisis management mode. Often our students display anger, frustration, and hurt in ways that feel and often are defiant or disrespectful to educators. There is no magic bullet. The effectiveness of responses hinges not solely on individuals, but also on whether school cultures facilitate relationships between students and educators, have open communication, provide opportunities for school-family collaboration, promote cultural awareness, and offer professional development to help teachers manage stress."
In other words, we cannot place systemic responses on the shoulders of individual educators. I'm sharing with you big idea number one, we've got to work together. Here's the little bird showing off, how we've got to work together. How can we work together to make things better? The good thing is George already showed us his tattoo this morning, you've already got that, we're all set, we all know what those are. What I want you to do, I did say you were done with your audience participation, but if you wouldn't mind doing just a little bit more. If you are not only implementing PBL in your schools, but you are also implementing academic RTI or Response to Intervention, say, "That's me."
Okay, a few of you out there, right. So, if you don't know, there's a whole parallel system for academic support and it mirrors, but there are some differences between it and PBL. You can see that green area of overlap. There's a lot of overlap, a lot of very common core features that cut across both, and the differences are actually really minor. They're real small differences. They're sort of which teams handle what, looking at when data are collected, what kind of data that looks like, but overall, there's lots and lots of similarities. That's important because these are complex systems, and it's really hard to layer complex systems on complex systems, right.
My big idea number two is that we need systems to make our jobs as educators easier. Here's a picture of what I think, this is probably the average American stereotype of what an Australian is, but it also describes what teaching is like, right. At least on a particularly rough day. We're doing a lot and it's really dangerous, OK. We can't just be told what to do and assume that that's going to work for us. That's just blaming the teacher again, that doesn't work, we've tried that, we keep trying that, it still doesn't work, but still we have this common perception that if we provide training, then people are going to do it, right? You sit here in front of me talking to you, and you're going to be able to pull off whatever it is that I'm telling you about. Right? So, we know that is not true.
In terms of our definition of Multi-Tiered Systems, we also have support here. This is when we start thinking about all of the things that we've got to do and all of those little domains of support. I’d like you to think about every single initiative that you have in schools, how many people, this might be a little intimate, but I'm going to ask you anyways. How many people organise their desks by stacking things? Just say, "That's me." Right, so how many people have that stack of all of the conference handouts of all of the really, really good ideas, maybe that you got a little bit earlier today, right, and then go on a stack on your desk? Yeah, OK. Then, you know that when you've filled your entire desk, there's nowhere to work and you just have all of these stacks, then, what do you do? You stack on top of your stacks, right? That's the same thing we've got with initiatives, right? So, here's our initiative for academic achievement, social-emotional learning, every single thing, think about all of these stacks on your desk. They keep coming, don't worry. This is just the US, you might not have as many of these things, I'm sure.
But, here's the job of education, right. Remember that chainsaw juggler, it's throw all of these things in the air, keep them all in the air, keep them happening, and in reality, if we try to do that much, boom, they're all gone. This is one of the really sad realities of teaching, this is the thing that's really hard. There are plenty of really good ideas. But, we don't have enough time to do all of them. We only have enough time to do the great ideas. That means doing a little bit less as opposed to doing a little bit more.
I'm going to show you a little picture here. I know a keynote is supposed to be inspiring, but if you look at the top this is called the Birth and Death Cycles of Educational Innovations. All right, this might be foreign to some of you, but that's all right. What you see here is across the bottom, you've got years, and each one of those dotted lines is a year in school, OK. This one starts on January, so, it should really work with you. Each one of these thick lines is a new initiative, and our implementation of that initiative. We all get very excited, we all get trained, we do pretty well, we get really good implementation in about year two, and then it starts to drop off a little bit, and then what happens? The next initiative comes along, and then, boom, that one is gone and we've got our new one. If you have experienced this before, say "That's me."
Here's the thing that's really scary about this picture. This picture is over 25 years old. This has been the status quo for education and it's a really, really tough thing. Here we are, educators are inherently optimistic people, and we go to a conference to see that next silver bullet, that next magic thing that is magically going to get all of our students reading at grade level, that's going to get all of our students in their seats and loving me and all of those things, right. But, there is a massive cost to this, all right, and a lot of people are actually getting really rich off of our optimism. That's kind of a tough pill to swallow. One of the things that we think about is well, maybe we can align or integrate our initiatives together to make them really, really work nicely, and then we're still doing all the same things, but we're doing it with fewer working parts, so that's going to make it easier, right.
I showed you this before, to say, "Hey, look, there's so much overlap, there's so much in this green area that we can do, what about if we just push all of those together, into one coherent initiative," and sometimes we end up with something like this, where it really sounds conceptually good, but doesn't make a lot of sense. What I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about two things. I'm going to talk about alignment and I'm going to talk about integration as slightly different things, OK. Alignment, is anybody familiar with the term parallel play? We probably have some early educators out there, all right. Right, parallel play, you're doing the same thing as the person next to you but you're not actually interacting. So, it's the first step, actually, to interacting together for babies in terms of development, babies and toddlers. When we think about parallel play, it's pretty easy to think about what structure do you think of? We think about silos, right. We've got the exact same structure right next to each other, and each one of them is separate, it all comes with separate teams, it comes with separate coaches, it comes with all that, right.
So, that's a little bit different. I'm going to show you a picture of my children. They are doing parallel play. They are not working together at all. The little guy is just copying his big sister, but it sort of looks like they're working together, it kind of seems like it looks good, OK. But, when we think about integration, we actually think about full integration, which means tearing down the silos, ripping those apart, and saying, "Let's work together, instead of doing the same thing side by side, let's actually just put everything together into one system." Here's my kids here swinging on a swing together. Now, they're doing something, they're doing it together, and then it turns into a headlock, and then daddy's got to put down the camera and go restore breathing, right. That's not so good.
A colleague of mine, George Batsche, from the University of South Florida has this really interesting analogy. If you come from a blended family, say, "That's me." All right, so, do people know what I'm talking about? OK, just checking, got to know these things. You don't have Wi-Fi, so you can't google it right now. George has this really interesting analogy, George Batsche from the University of South Florida, and what he says is, "Integrating initiatives is like a blended family. No matter how good things go, somebody's couch is ending up on the curb." Maybe it's a terrible couch that is just awful and you are actually getting a much better one, right. We can all agree if we look at this thing it's missing a leg, it's missing cushions, it's terrible, it's disgusting, right, we would be happy to be rid of it, but here's this really interesting picture that I think kind of sums up some of the challenges of change, even really good, positive change. Look at this.
Even that couch, which looks terrible, and does look worse than the last one anyways, still has some value, and we might be giving up a little bit. I might be saying, "You know what, I'm a PBL coach and now you're asking me to be a MTSS coach? I don't know, that feels really hard, I've got to learn some new things, I've got to do some different stuff. It might be a little different." Maybe you're also trying to integrate cross initiatives in the same domain, so you're working on social-emotional behaviour, and you've got these two different initiatives that are basically doing the same thing, targeting the same outcomes, but not playing well together, so not parallel play.
You might think there are philosophical differences that stop us from working together on this. Here's something that I want to ask you to do. I want you to think for a moment, and instead of thinking about philosophical differences, where we can honestly say "From my theoretical orientation your way is very different from ours, and they are not compatible. We have different mechanisms, we've got different things. George is a damned behaviourist, other people have feelings, whatever all of that is." Here's the challenge, it's really, really easy when we talk about philosophy, to start with something pretty straight forward, the research of my philosophy supports instructional practice X, right. Your philosophy is different from mine. That leads us to some illogical conclusions. The philosophy of yours does not support that practice. Your philosophy opposes that practice, or your philosophy is evil and you all need to go to hell right now, OK.
Here's the thing, when we start our conversation about philosophy there can only be people who are right and people who are wrong. One of us must lose if we talk about philosophy and more often than not it's actually the students who end up losing, right. This birth and death cycle comes a whole lot from our philosophical differences. That initiative is gone, here comes this initiative. But, if we say, "let's stop talking about philosophy, and let's actually talk about common practices, things that we do with students that are similar," we don't have to disagree with things. We can actually often find more things in common than our differences and these walls can start to come down.
What I'm going to do in the middle of my five big ideas is I also want to give you a three step process for integrating initiatives, OK, or aligning if you feel like there might be headlocks involved. It's got these three steps, and I stole this from George and then I deleted a few of them, so, this one is simpler, but it's not going to work. George's is more complex and probably will. It's got three big ideas here. Number one, we start looking at shared outcomes. Number two, we pick the practices that are most likely to get us to those outcomes. Number three, we implement those practices within systems of support instead of just simply picking and training and saying "Go for it, you're all done."