One of the foundations of successful MTSS implementation is clear, consistent, data-based communications. Communications between who? Communication pathways should be established between the MTSS leadership team and all staff, the MTSS leadership team and the district school board, and within a school between teams that coordinate the various tiers of support. Family and community communication is important to but we’ll talk about that in another post.

Successful Start with Clear communication

Pathways of communication can get easily overlooked when first getting MTSS set up. Consider how these different teams interact with each other and share information in your setting. Don’t forget to consider how the district MTSS leadership shares information with school implementers and learns how school-based personnel experience district policies. This process is referred to as the Practice Informed Policy (PIP) - Policy Enabled Practice (PEP) Cycle (The National Implementation Research Network, 2015).

So how does the PIP-PEP cycle work in practice? At the school-level a strong MTSS framework includes teams who use data to make decisions for groups of students. Often the curricula and assessments are selected by the district leadership team. In a PIP-PEP cycle, teachers would have a communication pathway to let district leadership know how the curricula and assessments function for their students and classrooms. For example, if a new intervention was purchased and the teacher’s manuals were given to teachers but then there was no support for using the intervention and no one from the district is assigned to follow up with teachers to ask how the new intervention is working then we have a broken PIP-PEP cycle.

MTSS Teams Share Data & Information regularly

In a positive example, a representative from the district leadership team would visit teachers at their schools and ask them about the new intervention. Perhaps a survey would be sent out to teachers asking what supports they need to use the intervention curriculum effectively. Teachers would provide feedback and the district leaders could share the lessons learned across the district to everyone using the same intervention or make adjustments in the intervention roll-out.

The PIP-PEP cycle can also be used to secure funding from the school board for MTSS implementation. I was working with a school and they felt that MTSS implementation was not being prioritized by the district budget. When I asked how much the school board knew about MTSS and how it was being implemented the principal revealed that there were some new board members who probably knew nothing to very little about their long-term implementation of MTSS. Together we worked on a presentation that 2 members of the school’s MTSS leadership delivered to the school board. They received lots of questions and positive feedback from the board and more importantly MTSS coaching was sustained by the district so that each school had a person with a percentage of their time allocated to MTSS coordination and training. In a future blog post we’ll talk about the importance of communication between teams within the same building. If you’re not on the MTSS Solutions free resources list yet - click the yellow button to sign up and get a free MTSS teams infographic that you can use in your trainings.

NIRN (2015). Improvement cycles: Policy-practice communications loop [website]. http://nirn.fpg.unc.edu/learnimplementation/improvement-cycles)