EDSD 7074 Walden Intervention Models Into Multi Tiered Systems of Support HW Multi-tiered systems of support are based on the principle that all students c

EDSD 7074 Walden Intervention Models Into Multi Tiered Systems of Support HW Multi-tiered systems of support are based on the principle that all students can learn, especially when intervention begins early to address difficulties and is tailored to the individual needs of each student. MTSS are generally based on a triangular or pyramid model, with interventions becoming increasingly intensive as they get closer to the top point of the triangle. In other words, although multi-tiered models differ from each other in the number of tiers, the first, or base tier, typically includes the core curriculum and serves 80% of the students. Those needing more intense interventions may fluctuate between the remaining tiers, with those with the most significant needs rising to the top tier.

Two of the most common multi-tiered approaches, RtI and PBIS, have been espoused separately in the past but are beginning to be viewed together under the umbrella term of MTSS. Because these two school-wide intervention models have been adopted widely in school systems within the United States, it is important to understand how each evolved, the key aspects of each, and how they and other school-wide intervention models are integrated within an MTSS.

To prepare

Review the module Learning Resources. Consider how PBIS and RtI are integrated into an MTSS.
Conduct a search to locate at least three additional peer-reviewed resources on school-wide intervention models.
Conduct research on the integration of special education within an MTSS. Identify any gaps you find in the research.
Identify a school-wide intervention issue or challenge in your local district/school of interest to you, other than RtI or PBIS.

Compose a 4- to 6-page paper that includes the following three sections:

Section I: Integration of RtI in a Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS)

Provide a brief history of the status of RtI in your state. (Flexibility in terminology is allowed for those outside the United States.)
Explain how RtI is integrated in an MTSS. What are the challenges of integrating RtI with an MTSS? Note: If RtI is being practiced in your local district/school, you may respond to this prompt from a local perspective.

Section II: Integration of PBIS in a Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS)

Provide a brief history of the status of PBIS in your state.
Explain how PBIS is integrated in an MTSS. What are the challenges of integrating PBIS with an MTSS? Note: If PBIS is being used in your local district/school, you may respond to this prompt from a local perspective.

Section III: Relationship Between School-Wide Intervention Models and Multi-tiered Systems of Support

For this section, you will evaluate three school-wide intervention models: RtI, PBIS, and one other that you have researched.

Provide a summary of each model. Include the following in your summary:
Key ideas behind the model
Best practices associated with the model
Benefits and limitations
Evaluate whether each school-wide intervention model exemplifies best practices of an MTSS. Support your evaluation with specific references to the Learning Resources and outside resources.

For this Assignment and all others in this course and throughout the program, you will be expected to use APA style (7th ed.). Use the Walden Writing Center as a resource for completing Assignments.

Learning Resources

Note: To access this module’s required library resources, please click on the link to the Course Readings List, found in the Course Materials section of your Syllabus.

Required Readings

Brown-Chidsey, R. & Bickford, R. (2016). Practical handbook of multi-tiered systems of support: Building academic and behavioral success in schools. New York, NY: Guildford Press.

Chapter 1, “Introduction” (pp. 1–6)
Chapter 24, “Education for All” (pp. 266–278)
Chapter 25, “Recognition and Support for Disabilities” (pp. 279–296)

Leko, M. M., Brownell, M. T., Sindelar, P. T., & Kiely, M. T. (2015). Envisioning the Future of Special Education Personnel Preparation in a Standards-Based Era. Exceptional Children, 82(1), 25-43.

Debnam, K. J., Pas, E. T., & Bradshaw, C. P. (2012). Secondary and tertiary support systems in schools implementing school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports: A preliminary descriptive analysis. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 14(3), 142–152.

Required Media

Laureate Education (Producer). (2012c). RtI: Special education [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author.

Note: The approximate length of this media piece is 13 minutes.

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research-article2015
ECXXXX10.1177/0014402915598782Exceptional ChildrenLeko et al.
Special Features Article
Envisioning the Future of Special
Education Personnel Preparation
in a Standards-Based Era
Exceptional Children
2015, Vol. 82(1) 25­–43
© 2015 The Author(s)
DOI: 10.1177/0014402915598782
ec.sagepub.com
Melinda M. Leko1, Mary T. Brownell2,
Paul T. Sindelar2, and Mary Theresa Kiely3
Abstract
The authors consider the future of special education personnel preparation by responding to
an overarching question: What frameworks might teacher educators use as a basis to promote
special education teacher effective performance now and in the future? In answering this question,
they summarize current trends in the context of schooling and special education (i.e., Common
Core State Standards [CCSS], multi-tiered systems of support [MTSS]) and what these contexts
demand of special education teachers. The authors propose a practice-based model for
fostering effective special education teacher performance. Grounded in the science of learning,
the model includes approaches in teacher education that align with this literature. Implications
for implementing the model are provided, which recognize current constraints on schools and
colleges of education, to better promote this model for fostering effective performance.
As part of Exceptional Children’s series of
Special Feature articles, we were asked to consider the future of personnel preparation and
special education. This is a tall order given that
personnel preparation encompasses a wide
breadth and depth of topics. Thus, we focused
our work around one overarching question we
believe is essential to consider as we look to the
future of special education personnel preparation: What frameworks might teacher educators draw from to promote special education
teacher effective performance? In answering
this question, we first summarize current trends
in the context of schooling and special education (i.e., the Common Core State Standards
[CCSS], multitiered systems of support
[MTSS]) and what these contexts demand of
special education teachers (SETs). As part of
this discussion we present a case for why the
time is right to shift attention to issues of quality in special education personnel preparation.
Next, we present a model for fostering effective SET performance grounded in literature on
the science of learning and present approaches
and strategies in teacher education that support
what we have learned from this literature. We
conclude with implications for how special
education personnel preparation might be refocused, particularly given current constraints on
schools and colleges of education, to better
promote this model for fostering effective performance.
What the Current Context
Demands of SETs
Today, more than any time in history, SETs
are expected to play a role in developing and
supporting rigorous content instruction for
1
The University of Kansas
The University of Florida
3
Queens College, City University of New York
2
Corresponding Author:
Melinda M. Leko, Department of Special Education,
University of Kansas, 1122 West Campus Rd. Lawrence,
KS 66045.
E-mail: leko@ku.edu
26
students with disabilities that is technologyrich. Pressure for students with disabilities
and their teachers to meet high standards is
evident in a national movement that all students graduate “college and career ready” by,
among other things, successfully meeting a
rigorous core of content standards for various
subject areas (Haager & Vaughn, 2013a).
Many states have adopted the CCSS (National
Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers,
2010). The CCSS support clear outcomes
teachers are expected to teach to ensure students, including those with disabilities, can
compete successfully in a global economy
(Common Core State Standards Initiative,
n.d.). The CCSS provide little guidance to
ensure students with disabilities are successful in meeting the demands of a more challenging curriculum, leaving general education
teachers and SETs with the task of determining how to provide students with disabilities
appropriate instruction that achieves these
high goals (Haager & Vaughn, 2013a), including instruction in areas in which teachers may
need considerable professional development
(PD), such as writing (Graham & Harris,
2013).
At the same time states are adopting more
rigorous content standards, they are simultaneously implementing MTSS for preventing
academic and behavioral difficulties through
high quality, research-based core instruction
provided to all students and increasingly
intensive, personalized tiers of intervention
that incorporate evidence-based interventions
when students are unable to respond successfully (Chard & Linan-Thompson, 2008).
Although models of MTSS vary, most make
use of a minimum of three tiers of instruction
and support, with general education teachers
holding the majority of responsibility for core
instruction at Tier 1 and SETs delivering
intensive, personalized instruction at Tier 3
(Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2012).
To succeed in school contexts driven by
MTSS and the CCSS, SETs need to have
extensive knowledge of how to support students with disabilities in achieving rigorous
content standards. Although it could be argued
Exceptional Children 82(1)
this requisite knowledge has characterized the
work of special educators for quite some time,
today’s context ups the ante, requiring SETs
to be extremely proficient in the content,
interventions, assessments, and technology to
support students’ learning needs (LignugarisKraft, Sindelar, McCray, & Kimerling, 2014).
Rhetoric from Our Responsibility, Our Promise (Council of Chief State School Officers,
2012) underscores the greater demands placed
on teachers: “higher expectations for students
have led to higher expectations for teaching
and leading” (p. 27).
Special education teachers will need welldeveloped collaboration skills to communicate and work with various service providers
in the ways required to design cohesive and
precise instruction. This collaboration will
need a much tighter focus compared to past
models wherein SETs provided consultative
services to general educators or recommended
accommodations that would allow students
with disabilities to access the general education curriculum (Brownell, Sindelar, Kiely, &
Danielson, 2010). In current contexts, collaboration will center on (a) collecting and interpreting initial and ongoing assessment data,
(b) planning precise classroom and intervention instruction that is carefully coordinated
and targets the key CCSS content and skills
students with disabilities need to master
(c) measuring students’ response to classroom
or intervention instruction, and (d) making
changes to instructional plans based on the
assessment data. All of this will have to be
coordinated across multiple tiers, further
necessitating SETs be skilled collaborators
and data-literate (Council of Chief State
School Officers, 2012).
SETs will also need more extensive curricular knowledge, particularly (a) the general
education curriculum and the literacy and
numeracy demands the curriculum places on
students and (b) literacy and mathematics
strategies for intervening in student learning
(Graham & Harris, 2013; Haager & Vaughn,
2013b; Powell, Fuchs, & Fuchs, 2013).
Closely tied to this curricular knowledge is the
need for more extensive knowledge of technologies that can make curriculum accessible to
Leko et al.
s­tudents with disabilities and support their
learning, as well as knowledge of how learning plays out in increasingly technology-rich
modern learning environments (Smith &
Kennedy, 2014). The bottom line is SETs will
have to be more knowledgeable, skilled, and
responsive given the more challenging curriculum demands placed on students and the
high stakes accountability systems in place to
assess students’ achievement.
Quality Special Education Personnel
Preparation
The current schooling contexts we have
described, as well as more than 2 decades of
criticism being waged against teacher preparation housed in higher education (e.g., Hess,
2001; Walsh, 2001), has placed increased pressure on colleges of education to demonstrate
they are capable of producing teachers who are
able to provide more rigorous, effective content
instruction. Political pundits assert traditional
teacher preparation has been ineffective in preparing preservice teachers to be able to secure
adequate student achievement gains. Such
vocal opposition to formal teacher preparation
has spurred a heated debate between deregulationists and formalists regarding how to reform
teacher preparation (McLeskey & Ross, 2004).
As we look to the future of special education
personnel preparation, we envision this debate
lasting for quite some time and without a predictable outcome. As formalists who champion
the stance that improved SET quality will result
from improved personnel preparation, we
believe it is critical that the field makes strides
in garnering public support for this position.
Two ways to do this are (a) to redesign personnel programs so they are better aligned with
what is known from research on the science of
learning and (b) bolster the research base
undergirding SETs’ work.
To develop the knowledge and skills necessary to meet the heightened rigor and
accountability of current schooling contexts,
both preparation and policy reform will be
required. Historic supply and demand issues
in special education have resulted in broad
certification and licensure patterns and
27
­ultiple pathways into the classroom
m
(Brownell et al., 2010; Geiger et al., 2014).
In most states, SETs are licensed to teach in
PK–12 settings and respond to a variety of
student needs (Geiger et al., 2014). These
broad licensing patterns have resulted in
preparation programs that are designed to
prepare SETs to provide instruction to students across multiple content areas and
grade levels, co-teach with general education teachers, and collaborate with parents.
In addition, shortages have encouraged a
variety of approaches to preparation, including brief coursework preservice teachers
complete after they secure a bachelor’s
degree, 2 to 4 years of preparation in more
traditional undergraduate programs, and residency programs in which special educators
take positions in public schools while they
are completing teacher preparation coursework (Boe, 2014; Rosenberg, Boyer,
­Sindelar, & Misra, 2007). Such heterogeneity across programs and lack of focus within
programs are not likely to provide beginning
SETs with the practice-based opportunities
they need to learn to teach more effectively.
The time to address this challenge is now.
For the first time in the field’s history,
pressure to keep pace with unabated SET
demand has decreased. The number of SETs
employed in U.S. public schools recently
has declined (Boe, 2014). Between 2005 and
2009, the number of SETs employed in U.S.
public schools fell to 389,904 (IDEA Data
Center, n.d.), a drop of 8.8%. SET demand
decreased in 30 states, and in 12 states, the
decline exceeded 10%. The decrease in total
demand for SETs was associated with a concurrent 3.9% decline in the number of students with disabilities, most of whom have
learning disabilities. For once, it may be
possible to focus attention on issues of quality over quantity in special education personnel preparation. Yet what would a teacher
education program that focused more attention on issues of quality look like? What
research on effective learning and teacher
education might support the design of programs that help special educators acquire the
knowledge and skills to work within MTSS
28
and help students with disabilities achieve
CCSS goals?
A Practice-Based Framework for
Fostering Effective Teaching
If MTSS is to be implemented as a mechanism for helping students with disabilities
achieve CCSS, then special education personnel preparation must be able to produce teachers who can work successfully in such a
context. It will be difficult to do this if three
fundamental aspects of teacher preparation
remain the same. First, teacher preparation
programs cannot continue to prepare SETs
broadly and hope they will develop the depth
of knowledge and skill fluency needed to
teach rigorous content within an MTSS framework. Second, to develop competence, teacher
education programs must incorporate ways of
preparing SETs that help them to practice
using these essential knowledge and skills;
practice opportunities should be grounded in
research and include collaboration practice
with general education teachers. Third, general education teacher preparation will need to
change in rather substantial ways to ensure
preservice teachers have the skills and abilities to work within an MTSS framework, an
important point that requires discussion
beyond the scope of this article.
In accordance with Grossman and McDonald
(2008), we propose special education teacher
preparation return to a competency-based
approach, popular in the 1970s and 1980s, with a
few new twists. Special education (and general
education) preparation should consider moving
away from teaching about practice to constructing more opportunities for candidates to practice
teaching in structured, carefully sequenced, and
closely monitored practical experiences, ones in
which special education teacher candidates practice the knowledge and skills they will need to
collaborate around and implement tiered instruction. Although this idea may not seem novel, it is
not the status quo for teacher education (both in
general and special education) for a number of
reasons within and outside teacher educators’
control (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald,
2009; Grossman & McDonald, 2008).
Exceptional Children 82(1)
For once, it may be possible to
focus our attention on issues of
quality over quantity in special education
personnel preparation. Yet what
would a teacher education program
that focused more attention on issues
of quality look like?
In a study of preparation experiences
across various helping professions, Grossman
et al. (2005) found teacher education provides
fewer opportunities for novices to practice
elements of teaching and receive immediate
feedback compared to other professions
(Grossman et al., 2005). According to Grossman and McDonald (2008),
while the field of teacher education has developed
a number of pedagogical approaches that enable
novices to study the complexity of teaching
practice in some detail . . . university-based
teacher educators leave the development of
pedagogical skill in the interactive aspects of
teaching almost entirely to field experiences, the
component of professional education over which
we have the least control. (p. 189)
Further, Grossman and McDonald argued it
will be important for programs to reconsider
how they can begin to structure such practice
without depending entirely on PK–12 cooperating teachers who supervise preservice teachers during field experiences.
Although there are examples of SET preparation programs that have made concerted
efforts to structure experiences with an eye
toward providing candidates with appropriately sequenced, scaffolded, and structured
practice-based opportunities (e.g., Ross &
Lignugaris-Kraft, in press), it would be difficult to argue convincingly that this is common
practice. As such, we present a framework,
based on what is known about expertise and
what promotes its development, that could
guide the design of special education ­personnel
preparation to be more practice-based. Fundamental to a practice-based approach, however,
is clarity about what special education preservice teachers will.
Leko et al.
Focus on High-Leverage Practice
and High-Leverage Content
In experts, conceptual knowledge and skills
along with situational knowledge (or understanding of when to apply particular knowledge and skills) are well integrated, organized,
and easily accessible (Bransford, Brown, &
Cocking, 1999). Experts have “the knowledge
and skills readily available from memory that
are needed to make sense of future problems
and opportunities” (Brown, R
­oediger, &
McDaniel, 2014, p. 2), and such well-­
integrated knowledge is acquired through
practicing in increasingly complex settings
over time. Limited research on highly effective teachers in general and special education
suggests these findings about experts can be
applied to teachers (see Brownell et al., 2014,
for a review).
Two years of preparation, however, is
insufficient to prepare SETs or any professional to be an expert (Ericsson, 2014).
Teacher preparation programs need some way
of focusing on the essential content and
instructional practice of effective special education teaching. Researchers in general education have argued there are foundational skills
of teaching that cut across subjects, contexts,
and grade levels (e.g., leading a discussion,
assessing student work, and planning instruction), as well as essential skills and knowledge that are particular to specific subjects or
contexts (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman &
McDonald, 2008). Such practices have been
referred to as high-leverage practices and
high-leverage content.
The concept of high-leverage practices is
likely familiar to special education teacher
educators, as a competency-based approach to
personnel preparation was common in the
1970s and 1980s (Brownell et al., 2010; Christoplos & Valletutti, 1972). Thus, it is easy to
argue from research that explicit instruction,
engaging guided practice, ­corrective feedback,
and collecting and interpreting progress-monitoring data might be considered core competencies or high-leverage practices in special
education (Heward, 2003; Swanson & SachseLee, 2000).
29
Once high-leverage practices are identified
they can be modeled and practiced across different content areas using content-specific
strategies (e.g., using explicit instruction in
reading to teach a summarization strategy) so
teacher educators can demonstrate how the
practice changes depending on the structure
of the content being taught, which brings us to
an important point. The integration of what
SETs know about the content and how to use
high-leverage practices and content-specific
pedagogies to enact it is essential to developing well-integrated knowledge and practice.
Special education preservice teachers, however, often only have a year or two to develop
essential content knowledge. Thus, it will be
equally important for teacher educators to
decide on the critical content (e.g., whole
number operations, knowledge of fractions)
and content-specific strategies (e.g., schema
activation strategies) they want to target—the
high leverage content. This high leverage content could be the key knowledge beginning
SETs will need to deploy when providing
reading and math intervention instruction in
MTSS.
As preservice SETs learn how to teach,
they will also need to learn how to coordinate
their efforts with general education to provide
effective MTSS that help students with disabilities achieve the CCSS. Although there is
less research supporting collaborative teaching practice, key collaborative skills, such as
collective planning, active listening, and
negotiation, must be taught because there is a
legal foundation in special education for collaboration with professionals and parents
(Turnbull, Erwin, Soodak, & Shogren, 2011)
and because effective collaboration makes
enactment of coherent evidence-based tiered
instruction possible (Brownell et al., 2010).
We realize the idea of high-leverage practices in special education personnel preparation may feel like a “back to the future”
approach and something faculty are already
teaching to their SET candidates; however,
identification of high leverage content, and
the use of carefully crafted, sequenced
evidence-based opportunities to practice learnin…
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