School Infrastructure and Support Mechanisms include the knowledge, resources, and organizational structures necessary to operationalize and implement all of the components of MTSS in a unified system to meet the identified implementation and outcome. This collection of resources summarizes the infrastructure and support mechanisms outlined in Section 5 of the MTSS Fidelity of Implementation Rubric as necessary for successful MTSS implementation.

Innovation configurations (ICs) are designed to evaluate current teacher preparation and professional development (PD) by determining the extent to which EBPs are taught, observed, and applied within teacher preparation and PD programs. This IC can serve as a foundation for strengthening existing preparation programs so that educators exit with the ability to use various forms of assessment to make data-based educational and instructional decisions within an MTSS.

Response to intervention (RTI) is a multi-level prevention system to maximize student achievement and reduce behavioral problems. With RTI, schools use data to identify students at risk of poor learning outcomes, monitor student progress, provide and adjust evidence-based interventions when needed, and identify students with learning disabilities or other disabilities. In this video, Dia Jackson describes the importance of implementing RTI with fidelity and how she provides RTI coaching and professional development to schools so that they see gains in student achievement.

This series of guides describes the setup and use of the EWIMS process based on data-driven decision-making research. The aim of this guide is to support school and district efforts to systematically identify students who are showing signs of being offtrack in school (an early indicator of risk for achieving key educational milestones like on-time graduation), match these students with appropriate interventions, and monitor students’ progress within those interventions. A guide is available to support district level implementation as well as Middle and High School Implementation.

An early warning system allows educators to assign and provide appropriate interventions to at-risk students early on, during the 9th grade year, to prevent dropout before it happens.This video from the Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest (REL Midwest) summarizes research on early warning systems and dropout prevention. The video includes highlights from the research conducted by REL Midwest on behalf of the research alliances in the Midwestern states.

Building a Multi-System Trauma-Informed Collaborative is designed to help child-serving agencies and their partners build a coordinated and more effective response to child trauma, and to support jurisdictions as they look to further coordinate services and response across diverse stakeholders.

The guide is intended for an audience of state or local policymakers, public agency administrators, trauma experts, provider partners, and other stakeholders. The guide:

The purpose of this document is to provide content-specific examples of how to structure educator-level and/or systems-level coaching as a mechanism to ensure ongoing professional learning to support tiered intervention. This document provides examples of coaching supports, models, and functions within the context of tiered intervention (e.g., RtI, PBIS, MTSS) and data-based decision making (e.g., data-based individualization [DBI]) for educators who already have foundational knowledge and/or experience with coaching.

This website includes information from three Office of Special Education Programs model demonstration projects focusing on tiered approaches to improving reading and language outcomes for English Learners (ELs). These projects are developing and implementing culturally and linguistically responsive models for multitiered systems of support for ELs, including those with or at risk of having a disability. This website includes briefs and tools developed through these projects.

The MTSS for ELs: Literacy Implementation Rubric is intended to be used by individuals or teams who are responsible for monitoring school-level fidelity of a multitiered system of supports (MTSS) for English learners, including MTSS, bilingual, literacy, and English language development specialists or coaches; school principals; and teacher leaders. The rubric is aligned with the essential components of MTSS for literacy and the infrastructure that is necessary for successful implementation. It is accompanied by a worksheet and action planning document with guiding questions.