“[MTSS] offers a way to look at the whole child. MTSS says we're looking at the social emotional learning of the students, how their language and cultural considerations are impacting accessing the curriculum. We're looking at math and literacy and looking how all these things kind of integrate together to create the most effective and more high quality instruction or experience for the student.”
– Dr. Claudia Rinaldi in the webinar "Supporting Engish Language Learners Within MTSS"
In my first year of teaching, I was hired as a special education teacher at an alternative high school on the south side of Chicago. I had a great experience there and truly loved working with high school students. I had never considered myself to be “a math person,” but I ended up enjoying teaching math much more than I expected. What I did not expect was that I would be teaching resource classes for high school seniors who were performing at around a 4th-grade level in math. In this situation, math interventions became my new best friend.
Executive functioning in the educational setting is often used synonymously with skills associated with focus and organization. While this can be true in some circumstances, executive functioning skills are defined as “the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully.” (Harvard University) In order to find success with these skills, it is important to have the tools to filter distractions, prioritize tasks, set and achieve goals, and regulate impulses. The complexity of executive functioning and the interconnectedness of the associated soft skills are essential for academic achievement.
In education, I know what keeps me awake at night.
I would imagine that each professional in their chosen career, when asked, could identify the thing that keeps them up at night. For the day trader, it might be an unexpected stock market crash. The comedian could lie awake in fear of an empty auditorium. Restless nights may come to the dentist who lays awake thinking of drilling the wrong tooth, or the professional athlete who misses the field goal to miss the playoffs.
Teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic brought about all kinds of challenges. My colleagues and I were relieved when we could go back to in-person learning, but it quickly became apparent that our students seemed to be missing a lot of important social-emotional skills. Unfortunately, the lack of socialization opportunities over the past two years and trying to re-learn how to engage in school left them falling behind in this area.
Many educators are aware of the importance of promoting students’ social-emotional skills and how this can be done through well-coordinated and implemented social-emotional learning (SEL) programs and practices. But whether or not these approaches are being implemented effectively and the level of impact they are having on student outcomes can be a bit more difficult to determine.