Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System Implementation Guide

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.

Coaching for Ongoing Professional Learning within Tiered Support Models

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.

Building capacity and improving student outcomes with DBI: Wyoming’s implementation story

This fourteen minute video, developed by NCII in partnership with the Wyoming Department of Education and staff and students from Laramie County School District # 1, shares Wyoming’s journey in building the capacity of educators to implement data-based individualization (DBI) to improve academic and behavior outcomes for students with disabilities as part of their state systemic improvement plan (SSIP).

Considerations for Effective Implementation: 5 Elements of Fidelity

If we don’t implement critical components of an intervention with consistency, we cannot link student outcomes to the instruction provided. Fidelity can help us to determine the effectiveness of an intervention, and identify if a student requires more intensive supports. This resource outlines five elements of fidelity and provides guiding questions for each.

MTSS for ELs: Literacy Implementation Rubric and Worksheets

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.

Effective Coaching of Teachers: Fidelity Worksheet and Rubric

Like any other educational innovation, the coaching of teachers must be used with fidelity in order to achieve its intended outcomes. Although fidelity is often thought of as adherence to the “key ingredients” of the innovation, it also includes aspects such as quality, responsiveness of the participants (e.g., coach responsiveness to teacher needs), and dose. This means that fidelity in coaching should continuously adhere to the effective practices of observation, modeling, delivery of performance feedback, and use of alliance-building strategies.

Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) Fidelity of Implementation Rubric

The MTSS Fidelity of Implementation Rubric and Summary Sheet are for use by individuals responsible for monitoring the school-level fidelity of MTSS implementation. They may also be used by schools for self-appraisal evaluation; however, they were not designed for compliance monitoring and therefore should not be used for this purpose. The rubric and the summary sheet are designed to be used together and are aligned with the essential components of MTSS.

10 Steps to Make RTI Work in Schools

After scores on the 2014 New York State English language arts assessment at P.S. 52 Sheepshead Bay School in Brooklyn were unsatisfactory, first-year principal Rafael Alvarez searched for a way to improve academic outcomes for his students, who come from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and about a quarter of whom are English language learners. Alvarez and his leadership team discussed the large body of research on student improvement and decided to focus on improving student reading using Response to Intervention (RTI).