In every school, students are offered many different types of support in order to create a more equitable learning environment. Multi-tiered systems of support services may target the emotional side of a student, or it may focus on the learning aspect. Without disregarding the extreme importance of emotional support, this entry will be focusing specifically on those who need extra help academically.
Students in your classroom may be eligible for additional academic support for a myriad of reasons. Depending on the circumstances, they may be eligible due to a specific disability, or maybe they were identified through a screening process that just simply states they are behind their peers academically. Regardless of the student’s reason for needing help, the teacher should take an active role in helping those who are providing the support. Here’s how that needs to happen.
First of all, it shouldn’t matter if support is being provided by a certified special education teacher, a special education aide, or a non-certified adult or peer tutor. It should only matter that the help is coming from someone who is capable of helping. This will allow the student in need to have positive engagement and an increased opportunity to learn. In theory, this is a great idea, but in practice it often falls short. From our personal observations, it is very common for classroom teachers to relegate interventionists and resource teachers to becoming “homework buddies”. Basically, some teachers are expecting the students’ support help to simply facilitate homework completion. This is doing the students a HUGE disservice and is yet another obstacle for learning.
Unfortunately, most of us have been led to believe that better grades equates to more learning. Therefore, if a student gets help completing homework and his grades go up, he must be learning! Right? WRONG! First of all, grades and learning can only have a positive correlation if the grade accurately measures a student’s skill based on specific learning standards. If a grade is representative of some convoluted mixture of learning standards, attendance, bonus, behavior and compliance, then it has a weak correlation to learning. The second reason we shouldn’t be using interventionists as “homework buddies” is because the homework itself is not being properly utilized as an instructional tool. Think about how incredibly absurd it is to give “credit” for a formative assessment after the summative assessment for that chapter has already been given. But teachers and administrators often look to MTSS as a life jacket for those who didn’t do their work. That’s not supporting learning…That’s just simply charity for students who need to pass a class. Consequently, it has nothing to do with learning. Let’s also consider the negative implications of modeling compliance based activities as accomplishments. If a student goes to intervention one day and completes three assignments under adult supervision and then his grade goes up five percentage points, has he actually learned to be more responsible? Just remember, many teachers say homework is paramount for teaching responsibility, but requiring a babysitter to help you complete assignments is not representative of a responsible person.
Let’s consider the Skills Based Classroom and how a skills based teacher maximizes the impact of tier 2 and tier 3 support. In a skills based classroom, a student’s grade is clear and specific about what it’s supposed to measure. When learning occurs, the grade increases. So students who are receiving support services now have to focus on learning a skill in order to harvest positive results. This shifts the mindset of the support teacher. Instead of being a “homework buddy”, the interventionist now has a responsibility to make sure learning occurs. This will only occur if a positive line of communication exists between tier on and tier two or three.
At the beginning of my first year as a Skills Based Classroom teacher, I had no thoughts on the role the interventionists would have on my students. Since I wasn’t assigning homework, I felt their role would be minimal. After all, traditionally they had been utilized simply to help the student complete assignments. But it didn’t take me long to realize just how potent their presence could be in this new system. Within just a few weeks, I saw certain students making huge improvements on their skills assessments. Each one attributed their success to an increased focus on learning the specific skill during their support time. Instead of simply supervising students who were behind on their homework, the interventions got right to work teaching and reinforcing concepts from class. By removing the compliance element from the grade (and the anchor that comes with it for so many students), the focus was finally placed squarely on the concepts I was teaching in class. What a great, yet unintended, consequence. We’ve finally created a system where students can maximize the academic resources afforded to them.