EPISODE #337

Hey, Builders. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to remind you about our next masterclass, which is happening tomorrow, and it's called Supporting Struggling Students. But it's really about how to close that implementation gap between all of the things you want to do for Tier one instruction and what actually happens in the classroom. So I'm going to be walking you through a very simple system you can use to help your teachers implement Tier 1 instruction more effectively so that you are catching students before. Before they fail, and you're helping them get quickly back on track. So if you are frustrated by Tier One and you've done the training, you've done all the things, and you're still not seeing effective Tier one happen in the classroom, you're going to want to be a part of this master class. We're going to give you a proven, simple system to get Tier one finally working in your schools. So we still have a few guest tickets left, not many.

And so I'm recording this earlier, early, and if you go to the webpage and it says that we're all sold out, I'm sorry about that. We are keeping it small to make sure that everybody gets the support they need. If you're a member of the Collective or you are a member of bu, just go. Make sure you check your email because we sent you something in there. If you're not a member of the Collective or BU and you want to be a part of this masterclass, go to buildershipuniversity.com masterclass and again, it's happening tomorrow. Now, on with the show.

You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast, episode 337. How do builders like us make a dramatic difference in the lives of our students in spite of all the obstacles we face?

How do you keep your vision for your school from being held hostage by resistant teachers, uncooperative parents, ridiculous district policies, or lack of time, money, or resources? If you're facing those challenges right now, here is where you'll find the answers, strategies, and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face. You don't have to wait to make a difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Let's get started. Hey, builders. Welcome to another episode of the School Leadership Reimagined Podcast. I'm your host, Robin Jackson, and today I want to talk about Tier one Now, Bulletproof.

Before you change the channel or turn me off, hear me Out. Because a lot of principals I talk to right now are saying the same thing about Tier one instruction. They're saying, we've done the training, we've bought the resources, we've given teachers the time. And yet when I go into classrooms, everything still looks mostly the same, right? And so you've done everything. And maybe your district or your state is holding you accountable for better Tier one instruction, either because you're doing RTI or mtss, and you. You are feeling the pressure. And so today, I'm not going to train you on Tier one.

Everybody by now knows what Tier one is in theory, right? 

We've all sat through the pd. We have all gotten the training and the materials, and so have our teachers, quite frankly. So why is it not still working? Well today I want to unravel some of that for you and help you understand why there's this implementation gap between knowing what Tier 1 is and doing it effectively in schools. Because as we all know, if we don't get Tier one right, Tier two, Tier three, almost don't matter, right? So this is where the work happens. And today I want to talk to you about why it's not sticking.

Because here's the thing. Your teachers are not, for the most part, resisting Tier one. I mean, they're not confused about what it means. In fact, many of your teachers believe in Tier 1, even though they might not call it that. They believe in that. They want to do that, right? So the problem isn't the knowledge around Tier one. The problem is implementation.

They don't know how to take the idea of Tier 1 and apply it to their classrooms in real time, with real students. And so that's what I want to dig in today. There are three hidden reasons why Tier one is still not working in so many schools. And I want to show you how builders fix it. I want to show you some very simple things that you can do as a builder to overcome that implementation gap and make Tier one work in your school. Because here's the thing, when Tier one works, everything gets easier, right? Fewer kids need more intensive tier 2 support. You spend less time chasing interventions.

You don't need the same amount of resources, your teachers don't feel overworked or discouraged, and learning actually happens in the moment. So let's get it fixed. Let's figure out why Tier one is not working. There are three hidden reasons that I believe Tier one is not working, and let's figure out how to fix it. So the first reason that Tier one isn't working in a lot of schools or not working as well as you want, even if you feel like you've got some basics down pat, is that we are looking at the wrong data. Now, this one's gonna get me in trouble. I know, but stay with me, right? Because I remember I was supporting a school that was really struggling with, with getting tier one off the ground, right? So they had done everything. 

This principal done everything that she was trained to do, right? 

So she had a tier, you know, she did the tier one training. She made sure teachers understood. She started early so that they had the, you know, she started at the end of the previous year. So they had the whole summer to go to trainings, to get supports, to get resources, to get their heads wrapped around tier one. Then she changed her master schedule so that she had data meetings, she had PLCs in place, they had charts, spreadsheets, color, color coded binders. They bought computer programs that could track MTSS interventions.

You know, it was, it was, everything was perfect, right? But when I asked teachers how they knew a student was struggling during instruction, they had a hard time answering that question. They had a ton of data, tons of data, but they just didn't know how that data could help them in the moment. Have you ever felt that way? Like, you know, when you look at data, it almost feels like it's after the fact. And we are not in need of more data. We are drowning in data. We have all kinds of programs to help us with data.

The issue isn't that we need more data, but the issue is that it's hard to tell what is the right data. That's really the first problem, why so many tier one interventions don't work. We are so focused on data outside of the classroom that we are missing the critical data that is happening right in front of us. There's a moment in the classroom where students go from being on the verge of struggling to actually struggling. Because we are looking at so much benchmark data and after the fact data, we're missing the real time data where we can intervene early and prevent struggling from happening in the first place, rather than waiting for kids to struggle finding out about it two weeks later when we look at our pretty data charts and then trying to intervene at that point. Tier 1 is different. Tier 1 data is not about data after the fact. It's about responsiveness in the moment.

And when teachers don't know how to read those cues, they can't respond fast enough to prevent learning loss. What the unlock is is very simple. We have to understand that the focus of Tier 1 instruction is not to prevent all struggle. Students have to struggle to learn. The best learning comes from struggle, but it has to be the right kind of struggle. The problem is that when we try to teach teachers to be responsive, we're teaching teachers to respond to all struggle and treat all struggle equally. And all struggle is not equal. There is productive struggle where students are grappling with something and with the right kind of scaffolds and support, that grappling leads to real, meaningful, valuable, deep learning.

And then there's the kind of struggle where students are spiraling.

And it's not gonna lead to deep learning. It's gonna lead to frustration. It's gonna lead to kids giving up. And the problem is, we don't teach teachers how to recognize the difference between productive struggle and destructive struggle. And we're not equipping teachers with the skills to scaffold productive struggle and to intervene enough in destructive str. Get kids back on track right away. So the problem that we have with data is that it ignores that information that is happening in the classroom.

Where we're looking at, is this a sign of destructive struggle or productive struggle? And then secondly, how do we respond to each differently? So teachers are kind of, you know, they're sent to the classroom, they're told, you gotta differentiate. They're told that, you know, you have to intervene early, but they're not taught how to recognize that moment that requires intervention. And when they need to just kind of leave things alone and support kids as they are struggling productively to learn. Right? So they're not. We're talking to teachers about data, but we're not showing them how to be responsive to the data that's sitting right in front of them.

Here's the other thing. When teachers are in the classroom, they are trying to think of 20 million things at once. They are moving through the lesson. They're keeping track of the standard. They're watching the time and making sure their pacing is right, Managing and monitoring behavior happening in the classroom. They're thinking about what's coming up next. They're dealing with all the interruptions that happened as a part of teaching. And that's a lot for the teachers to hold all at once.

And they do an amazing job of doing that. And so if teachers are going to be responsive to data in real time, we have to make sure that that data is so clear and so. So unambiguous that teachers not only can't ignore it, but they don't have to figure out in real time what to do about it. So what normally happens in classrooms is that when a student starts spiraling into destructive struggle, the teacher may see the early signs of it, but they're also managing 25 other things so they don't catch it until it becomes just dramatic, right? The kid has a meltdown or the kid stops working. And now the teacher's trying to get the kid to work again, but the kid's already frustrated. And so now you've got got a battle of wills happening, which can lead to a behavior problem. And if the teacher had just caught that student three minutes earlier at the beginning of their struggle and had something very quick that they could have done to redirect it, that kid, that kid would have never spiraled.

That kid would have moved to productive struggle and kept learning and felt proud of himself for having worked through something really tough and done something really hard and learned. That is a critical moment in a classroom. But most of our tier one instruction training resources completely ignores that. And that's the key, right? We are cleaning up a lot of our tier one strategies. A lot of our tier one data is designed to clean up after the mess rather than prevent the mess in the first place. And so what builders do is we do something very simple.

We help teachers create ahead of time red flags.

So once teachers understand the difference between productive and destructive struggle, they don't have to always keep monitoring for it of other things that they're doing in the classroom right now. So what we do is we create red flags to let teachers know when a student has crossed from destructive struggle, I mean, from productive struggle into destructive struggle. The red flag says, hey, this is an early warning sign that a kid is about to head from productive to destructive struggle. And if that red flag gets unambiguous and clear, teachers don't have to worry about it. When the red flag pops up, the teacher has an intervention designed to help that student get back on track very quickly. And they prevent the meltdowns, they prevent the shutdowns, they prevent the behavior problems instead of waiting until at the end of the day when they look at the exit ticket and they realize, oh, that kid didn't get it. The red flag lets them know the kid isn't getting it right now, and the teacher can intervene. So at the end of the day, when they look at those exit tickets, everybody's gotten it.

So the first big mistake we make with tier one is we focus almost exclusively on after the fact data, rather than helping teachers recognize the data that's happening right in front of them. And Doing it in a way that respects the fact that teachers are already overloaded in the classroom at the moment. The red flags, once you put them in place, teachers don't have to think about it. Teachers can focus on responding to students in real time because you've made the data so hard to ignore, that when it shows up, teachers understand, hey, this is a sign. And this is data that tells me that this child needs an intervention right now. And because they've identified the red flag and they've also created ahead of time a corresponding intervention, the teachers can see the red flag. They already have the intervention in place. They put it in place, it works, the child gets back on track, and then teachers can keep moving.

So if we do that, if we help teachers to recognize and become aware of the difference between productive struggle and destructive struggle, the kind that shuts learning down. Once teachers see the difference, and once you put red flags in place to help teachers respond when they do see the difference, then they can act before students ever get off track. And it can make Tier 1 instruction more seamless, more responsive, and easier for teachers to keep up so that it doesn't feel like a one more thing. In fact, it feels almost like a relief when we show teachers how to do this then, and they put the system in place, things get easier because they. They don't have to worry about. They even teach kids, you know, hey, this is a red flag. If you see this, then you need to stop working and let me know what's happening and I can support you. And because this is all done ahead of time in the classroom, the instruction just keeps moving.

It's magical, right?

And so inside the Supporting Struggling Students masterclass, I'm going to show you the difference between productive and destructive struggle and show you how you can teach teachers that difference. And then I'm also going to show you how to create red flags so that you can help your teachers put these red flags in place. This is. This is great for, like, PLCs, you know, number of times when we look at PLCs, we're looking at after the fact data. But imagine having PLCs looking at upcoming unit and say, all right, what does productive struggle look like in this unit? What does destructive struggle look like for this unit? What are our red flags?

And together. Think about this. What if your PLC's together created those red flags and already had interventions in place? And then they go out and teach and they talk about what red flags are showing up, but they also talk about the power that those interventions had. This is I mean, think about this. When we have people, instead of drowning in data, we paid attention to the data in real time, the upstream data, the data that happens before the data that we're going to talk about in the data meetings. The first sign of struggle. Think about how different Tier 1 instruction will look at your school.

It's a simple tweak, but it makes such a difference. All right, so now let's talk about the second mistake. The second mistake that we make is related to this, right? Because we are having teachers look at the wrong data and we're focused exclusively on after the fact data. Instead of showing teachers how to recognize real time data, teachers are reacting rather than anticipating. And so most of the training that we give our teachers is reactive. We see something happening, let's give you some training to fix it. And we're training teachers to, oh, looks like the data is telling us the kids aren't understanding X, Y and Z.

Therefore, we now need to run in and do an intervention and think about what that does to people psychologically. It makes you feel like you are always behind. It makes your teachers feel like they're always behind. It makes the kids feel like, why bother trying? Because I'm not going to get it and they're going to have to intervene anyway, so they start feeling like they're always behind. And so we have created an environment that's very reactive when the whole idea of Tier 1 to begin with was to do things to make our response to students more proactive, to catch students early before they got into a free fall of struggle, to get students access to the supports they needed before they failed. But we're still doing Tier one in such a reactive way that no wonder it's not working and no wonder your teachers are saying, why bother? Because they always feel behind. Right? Well, what builders do is we aren't about reacting. 

Who has time for that? 

Instead, builders are proactive so that the moment that not only the moment that we see students start making that shift from productive to destructive struggle, we have an intervention in place where those interventions are created ahead of time. What most classrooms do is they see a kid struggling, and even if they immediately jump in to help, it's almost too late because the struggle is already crossed into destructive struggle and the teachers are making up their supports on the spot. But if we're really thinking about true Tier one support, it's proactive. It starts before the lesson even begins. It starts when teachers are going through the lesson and planning the lesson and looking at the standards and saying where Might my students struggle and they put supports and scaffolds in ahead of time.

Right. And this is what separates a classroom that's constantly putting out fires and constantly intervening from a classroom that's quietly preventing the fires from happening to begin with. Right. So what builders do is rather than showing teachers, spending all of our time showing teachers how to react, here are some interventions you can use. And here's our data meeting. And, oh, look at what we're seeing. And now let's figure out how we're going to react to that instead. Instead, what builders do is we're saying, listen, we want to.

If we know that there are places, there are friction points in an upcoming unit, let's prevent them to begin with. Let's not go and teach them the way we've always taught them and wait for kids to struggle and then like, oh, here's a support. Let me go in and rush in and get it. No, why don't we figure out how to prevent struggle to begin with? How do we put supports in place? How do we use things like acceleration? How do we set students up, up for success? And for me, this is one of the critical differences between tier one instruction that works and tier one instruction that lags.

Because when you help teachers anticipate confusion, when you help teachers do things to set kids up for success, it feels proactive. And from a psychological perspective, teachers are more interested in preventing struggle than waiting for it to happen, than having to clean it up afterwards. Words. Hey, builders, real quick, before we get on with the rest of the episode, I want to talk to you about the 100% collective. If you are interested in becoming a builder and developing that 100% mindset, then the 100% collective is for you. Not only do we have monthly masterclasses, live masterclasses, where I show you how to take some work that you are already doing, but do it like a builder. Do it in a way that is more effective, more efficient, in a way that takes the work and stops it from being drudgery and makes it actually something that feels meaningful, that moves you forward.

We also have done for you toolboxes with all the tools you need to be able to implement.

And we have step by step playbooks that lay out the entire process for you so you don't have to even think about it. You just take the playbook and you can implement it right away in your schools. And we have a support community. So this is a safe place where you can bring your challenges. And there are other people, other builders just like you, who are encouraging you, who are applauding you when you win, and who are giving you their experiences as well so that you can learn from each other. If you are tired of just kind of going through and doing the work the way you've always been doing it, and you're ready to stop being a leader and to start building something amazing, the 100% collective is where you need to be. Join us at. @bearerhipuniversity.com Community now back with the program.

We think about the difference in how you approach planning. If you are approaching planning to say, hey, you know what? I know the kids are going to struggle, and so here's how I'm going to have to clean up after it versus approaching planning from the perspective of, hey, this is a spot where kids struggle. What can I do to prevent that struggle? What can I do to set them up for success? For success. It's a totally different thing. I remember one time I was assistant principal and I was observing a math classroom.

This was a really good teacher. She was a veteran teacher. She'd been, you know, in the classroom for a long time, and she'd given the kids homework. And I got there at the beginning of class, and the. She was going over the homework with the students, so she asked them to take the homework out. And then she went to the board, and she says, now, last night, I bet many of you did this. And the students started to groan because of course they had. They had made a mistake or misunderstood something.

And she said, and then probably some of you did this. And she went through three or four different places where kids had messed up the homework. And she's standing there and the kids are looking at her like, wow, she's so, you know, she's. She's. She must be a sage. How did she know? And I'm sitting there thinking, if she knew kids were gonna mess up that way, why didn't she say, set them up for success? Now, what she did and the way she.

And this is no shade to her because this is how we train teachers to do it. What she did is then she went over all the mistakes with students, allowed them to correct those mistakes with her, and then turn in the homework. What if she had done that lesson a day before? What if she had said, hey, listen, you're going to have homework tonight. And here are four common mistakes that people make on their homework. And she went through and worked it through with them. And then the next day when they did their homework, they could turn in their homework proudly because she had prepared them and set them up to anticipate the mistakes that they were likely to make.

So when they did homework, they could recognize and say, oh, she told us about this.

And they could feel empowered that they had actually done a great job. Think about the difference that that would have made for those students. She already knew where they were going to struggle. Instead of waiting for them to struggle and then fixing it and spending, you know, half the class period fixing the mistakes that they made in her homework and hoping it would stick, she could have spent 10, 15 minutes anticipating the mistakes, preparing for them, showing them what to watch out for when they did the homework. They could have done the homework, avoided the mistakes, turned in their homework. They could have spent two, three, five minutes talking about it, turned it in, and moved on to the next part of the lesson. And now our kids are confident and they've actually learned something. That's what builders do.

Builders, the reason that your teachers are often not implementing Tier one effectively is because we are teaching them to wait for students, to show them signs of failure before they react. What we do, where we spend most of the time as builders in Tier 1 instruction, is helping teachers anticipate where students might struggle and setting them up for success. Now, I'm going to go into this in a lot more detail in the masterclass tomorrow. So those of you joining us, I'll be giving you some real examples from that, showing you how to set that up for teachers. But for those of you who are listening, just remember this. If we just switch our orientation for Tier 1 from reaction to proaction, if we just switched our orientation from Tier one from firefighting to preventing fires, Tier one would work a lot better and more teachers would do it. By the time you wait for kids to fail and then you start reacting to that failure, everybody feels like they're already behind. It feels overwhelming.

It feels like we don't have time. We're supposed to be moving forward, but now I gotta go back and clean up the mess. One of the most powerful things you can possibly do is to shift from waiting to anticipating. And when you make that one shift, everything changes. And you see a lot more of the implementation of these Tier one strategies you want teachers to see. When you focus teachers on the right thing, we are so we are so dependent upon remediation or big, long, protracted interventions, when in reality, it's those small little things that you are doing during the lesson that catch kids quickly, or those small things that you do before the lesson even begins to set kids up for success. That changes everything. We are spending all of our time and energy and money on pulling kids out or keeping kids after school or keeping them at lunch, whatever, when.

If you just made a couple of simple shifts, it could happen right there in the classroom.

All right, so that's mistake number two. And now let's talk about mistake number three. I don't know if this is a mistake. Maybe. But I think that one of the main reasons that you are not seeing more Tier one or Tier one's not working as effectively as we want it to is that teachers understand it in theory, but they have a really hard time understanding it in practice. If I were to ask teachers in your school right now to define Tier one, they probably could recite a definition. High quality grade level instruction that meets the needs of all students.

They probably could all tell me that. But if I were to ask them, what does that look like in your classroom? I bet most of them would have a hard time giving me an answer. Because we have been teaching Tier one as a theory, as a strategy. People understand it in generic terms. Terms we understand in generic terms. I bet if I were to ask you what does tier one instruction look like, you would have a hard time describing it beyond the definition that you were taught. Like, what does it look like in your school?

Right. But it's really hard to translate that definition into our own content, our own context, our own kids, our own pacing, our own vision, our own students needs. And because we understand it generically and our teachers understand it generically, we think that that's going to translate into real implementation in the classroom. But until teachers can understand what Tier 1 looks like in their context and they can see it from their perspective, they're not going to be able to implement it consistently or effectively in their classroom. So the way that you close that gap as a builder is you talk about something called mastery thresholds. Now, I'm going to try to explain this here without giving the masterclass here. I mean, not that I don't want you to understand. It's just what I'm trying to say is I'm going to try to explain it without, like, spending 80 minutes going into it.

Right. Okay. So the idea of a mastery threshold is when we think about mastery, we think about the ceiling, but we never think about the floor. Where is the moment where a student crosses the threshold between understanding something and not. Not understanding something and understanding something? Not being able to apply a skill and being able to apply a skill? Right.

If we could understand that moment and be clear about it.

When we look at the standards, we say, okay, now I understand the standard, but where's the threshold then? If we could help teachers understand that, then we could help teachers again, take that real time data they're always watching for when kids cross that threshold and understand when that happens and also understand better how to get kids across, across the threshold. I'm doing a terrible job of this. The idea of the mastery threshold is simply this. Most of us don't look at our curriculum for the exact moments when a kid has mastered something we don't know, right? And so we create arbitrary numbers, right? What's the difference between proficient and not proficient? It's an arbitrary number.

If it's okay, if they get 80% correct on a test, does that mean that they understand it? Well, maybe, but Maybe they got 80% correct and 80% and the test was written so that 80% of the test was review and 20% was on the new material. So if they got the 80% review correct and the 20% on the new material incorrect, based on the grade alone, we say, oh yeah, they've mastered, they're ready to move on, when in fact they are not. If we could spend more time with teachers helping them understand the standards they're trying to help students achieve, understand what mastery looks like, understand when a student crosses over into mastery, then tier one would make a lot more sense. Here's why. Right now, tier one and most of our data meetings around tier one, we're looking at data, we're unpacking the data, we're digging deep, and at the end of the day, those numbers, that data doesn't mean anything. What does 80% mean? What does 75% mean?

What does proficient mean? And because we don't understand what those things really mean in our context, then we can't a recognize that kids aren't getting it or aren't proficient or heading towards not being proficient except because we test them or we can't understand what we need to do differently to anticipate where they are struggling so that we can prevent that struggle to make the pathway to proficiency easier for students. Because we don't know what that looks like, we don't understand the pathway and we can't make our interventions effective.

Do you know my frustration with most interventions?

And I did this, I made this mistake myself as a teacher. I intervened generally, but not in a targeted way. When you understand what, what the mastery threshold is, if you understand what mastery looks like, your interventions can be a lot more targeted, a lot more effective. There Are kids who are wasting away their lives sitting in interventions that are never going to get them to mastery because we don't really understand what mastery is.

But if you helped teachers focus on that understanding that being crystal clear about that, their entire instructional process would completely transform. But we're throwing out curriculum to teachers two weeks before they have to teach it and not giving them time to really deeply understand it. We are providing surface level PD to tell them to walk them through the curriculum guide and to say here's where you find the vocabulary and here's where the test is and here's the two week window that you have to teach this and here are the day to day lessons. Instead of helping teachers think deeply about their own subjects and understand their subjects and understand what it is, we're trying to help help students achieve. And so therefore, we can't have really effective tier one instruction because teachers don't understand mastery. So one of the most powerful shifts you can make in tier one instruction is starting with mastery, with starting with helping teachers understand where they're trying to get kids to help teachers know where students are going because then they can more easily recognize the early warning signs that kids are struggling. Then they can design really effective interventions that get kids back on track quickly rather than wasting their entire lives in remediation. Then they can put supports in place that anticipate where kids are struggling and get them and set them up for success to begin with.

But that's the part we skip. If your tier one instruction is going to work. You got to understand what mastery is. You got to understand where you're taking kids. You got to understand what the pathway to mastery looks like so you can recognize productive versus destructive struggle. You've got to put interventions, effective interventions in place so that you are getting to kids into productive struggle quickly and keeping them from getting out of destructive struggle. You got to anticipate where kids might struggle so that you can put the supports in place ahead of time and set kids up for success. If you do that, tier one will work.

But we're focusing on, you know, oh, looking at our MTSS data and I mean, all these other things that are not going to move the needle. And again, it's not your fault. I mean, that's how your training has primed you to do it. That's why you're frustrated, because you've done the training, you're doing things exactly the way your district is telling you to do it and it's not working now you know why. And so again, that's why we're going to be doing the Masterclass tomorrow is to help you to. To take the stuff that you're being asked to do with Tier one, but actually make it work, to take the things you want to see happen in Tier one and actually help your teachers do it, to set your teachers up for success so that your kids can be more successful. Tier 1 doesn't have to be complicated, y'. All, it just.

We've made it overly complicated.

Tier 1 is a great idea. I mean, it's what we should be doing. But we have made it so opaque and overly complicated that our teachers are really struggling to implement it, even if they believe in it, because of all the hoops that they have to jump through, because of all the protocols that they. That we're putting out. All the. I mean, it's. We've just taken something really good and we've leadered all over it.

We need to wipe away all of that stuff and get back to what really matters, which is helping 100% of our students be successful. So if your tier one is not sticking, it's not because your teachers don't care. It's not because they don't know what to do. It's not because they're lazy. It's because the system hasn't helped them translate Tier one to their classrooms, and it hasn't helped them anticipate where kids are going to struggle so that they can set the kids up for failure. And it hasn't helped them see where kids are struggling in real time to focus on the right data. Not that that other data isn't important. It's just not the most important data.

It's after the fact data. It's more important to have data in real time and to be able to respond in real time. But once you fix those three things, Tier one becomes less about the training and the protocols and the stuff that we've put onto Tier one and more about. About what we're really concerned about as builders, which is every child succeeding. So if you want to see exactly how to build that Tier one system, you can join me tomorrow for the Supporting Struggling Students Masterclass Collective Members, you're already in. BU Members, you're already in. Just make sure that you. You've got a RSVP so we know you're coming.

So make sure you look out for your email for that. And if you are not a member of the collective or bull, we still have a few guest tickets, I think. So go to buildershipuniversity.com masterclass see if there are any tickets there, we can keep it small so everybody can get the support they need. But if you want to get a ticket. BuildershipUniversity.com masterclass so anyway, today I hope that you've gotten, you know, that you can now see that the reason Tier 1 isn't working isn't your teacher's fault. And it really isn't your fault either. You're doing things exactly the way you were trained.

And the problem is the way you were trained isn't setting you up for success.

But now that you know that, you know how to fix it, you know that getting helping teachers to look at more real time data in the classroom and can I just take a minute? We are relying too much on exit tickets. Can I just say that exit tickets are great, but they. You can't build an entire Tier one program on exit tickets. So that's my commercial for today. There's so much more that you could be doing that's so effective and a lot easier once you understand that and you get teachers focused on real time data and you make it easy for teachers to recognize that real time data, you make it unambiguous and hard to ignore so that it immediately creates a response. You pre plan those responses ahead of time so that teachers don't have to scramble when they see it. They can do something about it right away.

You are doing things to set kids up for success in the first place and you're doing more to help teachers understand what mastery looks like. Where are you taking kids? What does that path to mastery look like? So that your interventions get more targeted and more powerful, so that you can see the early warning signs so you can do a lot more to set kids up for success. You do those three things and tier one will begin to work. And not only will it begin to work, but your teachers are going to be more likely to implement it because it makes more sense. It's easy. When you put these things in place, Tier one gets easy.

Instruction gets better. Your life gets better. So I want you to imagine this. I want you to imagine not the Tier one nightmare that you are living, but I want you to imagine what Tier one could look like for your school, Right? So think about this. When you've got tier one working right, you walk into a PLC meeting meeting and the teachers are planning an upcoming unit and they are identifying those mastery thresholds and they're saying, okay, where might kids be confused? And they're doing things, they're making plans to set kids up for success and they're sharing resources and creating in time interventions that happen during instruction so that even if kids are starting to show signs of struggle, they can get them quickly back on track. And they, and then you go into a data meeting and they're looking at data, but they're looking at how did our interventions work, what can we do to make them stronger?

What kids are still struggling destructively. Who needs to be moved into some quick remediation to get them back on track? What is the focus of that remediation? What is the data telling us about what they might struggle with in the next unit? And then you go into a classroom and in the classroom room you see kids working and without even realizing it, you see a teacher that students are all working quietly and without you even picking up on it. You see a teacher move to a student and say, hey, I want you to try this. I think this is going to help support you a little bit more. Scaffold.

And then she announces, hey, if anybody else, I have this thing here. Would anybody else like it? Yes, yes. You have kids raising their hands. Other kids are saying, no, I'm good, leave me alone, let me just work. And, and everybody is working. And you ask students what they're working on and they tell you what they're working on, but they also tell you where they are in the work and how they're taking advantage of the tools their teacher is giving them. And they speak with confidence because they believe they're gonna get it.

They are anticipating.

You go into another classroom and a teacher is starting a new unit and the teacher is doing a warmup that is setting kids up by activating their background knowledge that they're gonna need for the unit. And then you watch that teacher smoothly transition from the warm up to the actual lesson where students are saying, oh, I get it, yes, now. And you see all these light bulbs going off in the classroom because a teacher designed it that way. And then after school, you're chatting with a teacher and a teacher's excited because a kid that's been struggling, it's finally getting it and they want to tell you about it, or a student that they haven't been able to reach, who's operating two or three grade levels behind, behind has made a breakthrough. And the data is showing that that child is rapidly making up ground. And when you go back to your office at the end of the day and you open up your computer to take a look at the data, you see a lot less red, you see a lot more yellow and a lot more green. And when you go to your next principals meeting, you sit around with the other principals and they're complaining about how it's the middle of the year and tier one instruction is still, they're still struggling with it.

And you sit there kind of quietly on your hands and because that is no longer your issue, that's what it looks like when you stop reacting in the way that you try to implement Tier one and start being proactive and how you roll it out, how you support teachers. It's what happens when you stop getting focusing on after the fact data or after the fact remediations and start focusing on proactive real data and proactive preventions rather than interventions. In other words, this is what your school could look like if you implemented Tier one instruction like a builder. I'll talk to you next time. Hey, if you're ready to get started being a builder right away, away, then I want to invite you to join us at Buildership University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you, where you'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story Right now, with the people and resources you already have inside, you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me, tons of resources, templates and exemplars, and monthly live office hours with me where you, you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now. If you're tired of hitting obstacle after obstacle and you're sick of tiny little incremental gains each year, if you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join Buildership University. Just go to buildershipuniversity.com and get started writing your school success story today.

Hey, real quick, before you go, if you enjoyed today's episode and you know someone who would really benefit from what you heard here today, maybe they're struggling with a thing that we talked about in today's episode. Would you take a moment and share this episode with them? You see, not only will it help us get the word about Buildership out to more people, but you're gonna look like a rock star because you're gonna give people something they can really use to help them get unstuck and be better at building their score goals. Plus, it would mean the world to me. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.