Supportive Schools

Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS)

What makes a school supportive? What helps all children within a school flourish? Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) is one way of understanding the kinds of support that can be put into place to ensure that every student has what they need to succeed. MTSS and several other frameworks that came before it apply a public health model to school settings. In a public health model, we seek to identify needs and provide support before children fail to thrive and then require more intensive services that are both more expensive and have less positive outcomes.

Tier one efforts are focused on whole school efforts to assure that things like teacher and student interactions, and school climate optimally support every child in the building. In public health, this is akin to providing vaccinations to the whole population right now in the era of Covid. In Tier two, specific students who may be at risk of adverse outcomes are targeted for additional supports. An example in public health would be to caution people at increased risk like those with a compromised immune system to continue social distancing and mask wearing even when fully vaccinated. Everything at these first two tiers is focused on building health and preventing as many students as possible from needing intensive, or tier three supports.

Tier three interventions are provided when a specific child develops and illness or disability that substantially negatively impacts their school performance. In schools, the term used for children expressing mental ill health is severely emotionally disturbed. Historically, in schools, mental health supports have been provided once a child’s behaviors interfere with their learning and those of their classmates. Unfortunately by this time that failure can be entrenched and require intensive levels of support. Twenty five plus years ago we began to realize that we were spending a whole lot of money on those intensive supports with pretty limited outcomes and schools began efforts to try to prevent at least some children from getting to that level of need.

Osher D, Moroney D, Williamson S, ed. Creating Safe, Equitable, Engaging Schools: A Comprehensive, Evidence-Based Approach to Supporting Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Press; 2018

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)

SEL is about the process of learning and practicing healthy social, emotional and coping skills and is a universal or tier one strategy because it helps everyone manage stressors, build and maintain relationships, and develop prosocial behaviors. CASEL is a great resource for learning more about SEL. Their model includes 5 areas of competence, 1) self-awareness, 2) self-management, 3) social awareness, 4) relationship skills, and 5) responsible decision making.

Strength-based Practices in Education

The strengths based practice models reviewed in the resource page on strengths have multiple applications in schools. Use of student strengths should be used across all tiers. All children need to experience themselves as competent and successful, but this is especially true for children who experience risks for mental and behavioral disorders such as learning disabilities, poverty, trauma, or marginalization. My dissertation work focused on the use of student strengths to promote successful transition from elementary to middle school because that is a point at which we frequently fail children. I initially thought that I was looking for which strengths specifically promoted successful transition, but as I discuss in the resource page on strengths, I have found the most important piece of strengths identification to be what we do with youth strengths after we identify them.

It is critical that we engage in deliberate acts of encouragement to help nurture and build upon each student’s strengths. This includes strengths spotting which essentially catching students in the act of using their strengths and pointing that out. Cooperative group tasks should be selected and assigned in classrooms to include students with a range of strengths so that the group relies on each. For example, a project to research native american people who lived in a region before it was settled would need a skilled reader, an organizer, a global thinker or idea person, and an artist … but it could also highlight dancers, engineers/builders, singers and a variety of other assets. Students can be asked to deliberately seek opportunities to use their strengths to benefit their classwork. They can build research skills investigating exemplars for their signature strengths. Educators can build inclusive instruction that lends itself to celebrating a wide variety of student strengths and intelligences.

Restorative Justice Practices

Restorative justice moves away from punishment and instead seeks to help the offender “make it right”. It is about maintaining relationships and building children’s capacity to stay connected and make different choices. It uses talking circles to get everyone’s perspective and work through how to repair harms done. It teaches respect and responsibility, as well as how to disagree peacefully.

Trauma Sensitive Schools Training Resources The American Institutes of Research National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments released its suite of training materials in 2018. It is a great resource for schools and others to understand the role of trauma in children’s responses. The first critical step in appropriately supporting youth with a history of trauma is recognizing their behaviors from a trauma lens. Once you understand where the behavior comes from, you can begin to build effective strategies to support children and youth with a history of trauma. These materials are free and include activities to support a basic trauma 101 course across many environments.