4
Building Your Team and Crafting a Vision
In this chapter, we focus on an old adage, “Teamwork makes the dream work.” As cheesy as that may sound, it is true. A single person cannot support adaptive change at scale. It is critical to assemble a core leadership team to guide MTSS while ensuring that representative stakeholders from advisory teams have opportunities to contribute to strategic planning, monitor progress, and communicate impact. Numerous protocols and tools are provided throughout the chapter to support you in establishing a high‐functioning team committed to a shared vision of success for all learners.
The Ultimate Dream Team (Katie)
My kids are obsessed with sports. At dinner, they spend an inordinate amount of time constructing their favorite teams in each sport—all‐star lineups in anything from lacrosse to competitive eating. My son Brec recently announced that Joey Chestnut is the greatest athlete of all time because he holds fifteen mustard yellow belt “titles” for his Fourth of July eat‐a‐thons. We can agree to disagree.
At one point, they asked me who my favorite team was, and I didn’t hesitate to answer—the 1992 United States Olympic Basketball team, dubbed the Dream Team. It was the first year NBA players were allowed to play in the Olympics, and all my favorite players came together to make magic. I had a T‐shirt, the collector’s cereal box, and named the squirrels in my yard Stockton, Ewing, and Barkley!
What made the team so darn impressive wasn’t only their incredible talent, but how they worked together. Decades after they dominated the world’s stage in basketball, the Bleacher Report (2010) wrote, “The beauty of it was that the way they integrated all their stardom and personalities to create a flawless display of teamwork. Even though they had MJ and Bird, two of the most prolific scorers in NBA history, it was Charles Barkley who led the team in scoring. Coach Chuck Daily never had to call a timeout. The team gelled together even though they were accustomed to competing against one another.”
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
All it takes is one dysfunctional team experience to understand the value of having the right team in place. The work of systemic change is not an easy one. An unnecessary barrier to success is having the wrong team in place to lead this work. It can breed dysfunction and slow the process. In our experience, you have to surround yourself with the correct team members to bring your work and vision to life, just like the Dream Team of the ’92 Olympics.
If we are going to make robust systemic change to meet the needs of all learners, we must not hide away with a group of comfortable confidants. Rather, we must share this work with the community we serve and must engage them with diligence. It is possible to gel even with competing views. In fact, it may be a team’s greatest strength.
Establishing the MTSS Team
In an effective MTSS system, representative stakeholders with the authority to make district decisions must collaborate with each other as well as with students, staff, families, and community partners. Defined strategies for engagement are essential, such as collaboration protocols, communication plans, feedback loops, stakeholder surveys, targeted outreach efforts, and so on (Durisic and Bunijevac, 2017).
Before you craft your vision, complete your needs assessment, or begin creating your strategy for MTSS, you must build buy‐in and engagement within the organization and the greater community. Too often, the work of MTSS is done in a central office or school leadership meetings and is not shared with all stakeholders until the work is complete. We strongly advise against this practice.
The Washington Office of Public Instruction discusses the importance of the MTSS team in their state MTSS framework (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, 2020). The guidance notes:
[MTSS] Leadership teams are responsible for building the capacity of the team to lead the work as well as providing ongoing training and support to staff, families, and community partners to implement as intended. Leadership teams should have broad representation and an established process to regularly solicit input and collect data from staff, students, families, and community partners.
How does one ensure that voices from all students, families, and communities are used to drive improvement efforts? To begin with, representation on committees is a start. We also must focus on outreach efforts and assess existing methods of outreach to see if the voices being spoken and listened to represent the community, with a specific lens to remove barriers to participation (e.g., transportation or language barriers). We must not wait for our stakeholders to ask for materials to be translated but rather be proactive in our efforts to prioritize such services.
If we are going to create a system that represents the lived experiences of our students and their families, we have to commit to elevating historically marginalized voices in the planning and design process. Too often, parents find their names listed among the collaborators on strategic planning documents but feel that they did not participate meaningfully or make a substantive contribution (Graham, Kennedy, and Lynch, 2016).
Team Members On a basketball team, you need people in different positions—point guards, shooting guards, and coaches. Having a balance of players and positions allows the team to function; the same is true with our MTSS work. Systems‐level change requires a guiding team to represent the entire organization and encompass various stakeholders and decision‐makers. First, you need a coach. District improvement efforts should be led by the superintendent or the primary leader of the organization. We have had too many experiences where key decision‐makers are not leading this work. From experience, we can tell you that you do not want to facilitate meetings where everyone looks at each other and says, “Well, we really can’t decide this now. Let’s make an appointment with the superintendent to see what she thinks.”
The Minnesota Department of Education (2021) provides a roadmap that supports districts in creating their core MTSS team. They recommend that the core team consist of leaders responsible for behavioral health, special education, curriculum and instruction, equity and inclusion, technology, business and finance, and research and evaluation as well as a representation of school principals and teachers and the district’s superintendent.
Additional stakeholders can serve in advisory roles by offering their perspectives, feedback, and broad recommendations on how to build on the district’s strengths and challenges. We recommend you have a core leadership team and an MTSS advisory group with members from numerous stakeholder groups. Their input informs the work of the leadership team charged with developing the improvement plan and provides insight and input throughout the implementation of the plan. Table 4.1 shows examples of members and tasks across multiple planning teams. Of note, you will see a reference to multilingual learners in this section and throughout. We define multilingual learners as students who are linguistically and culturally diverse, and as such enhance our organizations with their assets (WIDA, n.d.).
Table 4.1 Recommended team configuration.
| Team | Representative Membership | Functions |
|---|---|---|
| Improvement Planning Leadership Team Members |
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| MTSS Advisory Team Stakeholder Team Members |
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|
Team Process A high‐functioning and knowledgeable team is essential to lead this work. If your team is collaborating to design a multi‐tiered system of support, it is important that they be a well‐functioning team and one that understands MTSS. This ensures that the work you engage in is not contingent on any one person who may or may not be there when the plan is fully implemented. We have worked with far too many districts that have to replicate this entire process every time a new superintendent is hired. The MTSS plan does not belong to the superintendent. It belongs to the district. When done well, the plan can continue despite leadership changes.
We always recommend that you take the time to immerse your core MTSS team in ongoing professional learning. Read your state MTSS guidance, have discussions about your current MTSS systems, and collaborate to complete MTSS self‐assessments so everyone on the team understands the work ahead and is committed to seeing it continue.
The amount of active meeting and workshop time is important. Ask yourself: Are our meetings frequent enough to make an impact? Some stages of planning will require more sessions than others. For example, when conducting a needs assessment, the MTSS advisory team may meet monthly, but individual members may need to host numerous focus groups and data analysis sessions in between the meetings with their stakeholder groups. The frequency of meetings and between‐meeting commitments (what we affectionately call “what happens between the boxes”) should be provided to team members in advance.
This work takes time, so at the beginning of the school year, schedule meetings for the year so you have time set aside for this critical work. When we worked together as superintendent and assistant superintendent, our core leadership team met for a half‐day twice a month to focus on MTSS and our ongoing improvement efforts. We would schedule additional meetings if we needed more time to complete projects like a document review or data analysis, which we will discuss in detail later in the text. Examples of these activities/timelines are shown in Figure 4.1 within an average school year.
Building Team Norms One of the first things the team should do is make sure everyone understands the work of the team and what their roles are within the group. This is important within your core leadership team and when working with your MTSS advisory group. Outlining the expectations for the members and their level of decision‐making is key. Another great opening activity is to have members engage in self‐reflection to harness their personal “why” for participating in this work.
Figure 4.1 Timeline of activities for core MTSS team.
It is a good idea to establish norms from the onset to establish a healthy culture during this work and to ensure that stakeholders with diverse perspectives have opportunities to share their voices (Rantung and Sarmita, 2020). Norms are important because they help groups improve teamwork skills that eventually contribute to the effectiveness of the group. We have both worked with numerous teams who feel that the process of creating norms is a little silly, but believe us, without them, people are not on the same page. For example, one person in your meeting can think it is perfectly acceptable to check phone messages during meetings while others do not. This will lead to unnecessary tension, which will impact group dynamics.
In Keys to Successful Meetings (Hirsh, Delehant, and Sparks, 1994), the authors pose considerations for creating group norms. If you have norms already, reflect on the questions and determine if your norms are sufficient. Alternatively, you may use the prompts to develop team norms (see Table 4.2).
The key to designing norms is to expand them beyond meeting expectations. It is important to create norms that consider more than starting and ending times. Long gone are reliance on norms that are limited to expectations like “come on time” and “no sidebar conversations.” Rather, norms provide an opportunity to create conditions for courageous conversations, for fostering collaboration and community and for designing systems that work for everyone within our organization. This approach must be done in an open and accessible manner. In order to support team engagement, the norms must be representative of those in the meetings. The norms must be grounded in culturally sustaining practices and a lens toward removing barriers for active participation by all. As you work with your team, use the following questions to reflect on if your team is culturally responsive and whether it embraces the lived experiences of all members of the team. Having a culturally responsive team will help to drive strategic plans that will result in improved learning for students who have been marginalized from the academic and social curricula of our school systems. To reflect on the cultural responsiveness of your team, consider the following questions (Farmer, Hauk, and Neumann, 2005):
Table 4.2 Developing norms.
| When establishing norms, consider | |
|---|---|
| Time |
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| Listening |
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| Confidentiality |
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| Decision‐Making |
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| Participation |
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| Expectations |
|
Source: Adapted from Hirsh et al, 1994.
- Does your team validate the life‐worlds, identities, and needs of all members?
- Does your team explicitly recognize the value and discussion of how cultural and personal identities mediate the design of curriculum, instruction, and assessments?
- Does your team support the development of awareness among members in knowledge, skills, and value sets associated with access to power?
To model UDL, we encourage teams to also build and/or revise norms with the framework in mind. Table 4.3 includes questions you can use with your team that are drawn from the UDL Guidelines (CAST, 2018). The answers can be adapted into team norms. For example, when we asked a team, “What must we do to foster collaboration and community,” the team realized that they had to be purposeful about setting up their meetings and subcommittee meetings in a way that honored this commitment. They created the following norm as a result: “We will foster collaboration and community by creating flexible options for collaboration in the meeting and with the creation of subcommittees, by creating topic related small collaborative groups, where each group will articulate the group’s members, roles, and goals.”
Table 4.3 UDL to guide norms.
| Provide Multiple Means of Engagement | Provide Multiple Means of Representation | Provide Multiple Means of Action and Expression |
|---|---|---|
| What must we do to optimize individual choice and autonomy? | What must we do to offer ways of customizing the display of information? | What must we do to vary the methods for response and navigation? |
| What must we do to optimize relevance, value, and authenticity? | What must we do to offer alternatives to visual information and auditory information? | What must we do to optimize access to tools and assistive technologies? |
| What must we do to minimize threats and distractions? | What must we do to clarify vocabulary and jargon? | What must we do to use multiple tools for construction and composition? |
| What must we do to heighten the salience of goals and objectives? | What must we do to promote understanding across languages? | What must we do to guide appropriate goal‐setting? |
| What must we do to foster collaboration and community? | What must we do to illustrate through multiple media? | What must we do to support planning and strategy development? |
| What must we do to increase mastery‐oriented feedback? | What must we do to activate or supply background knowledge? | What must we do to support planning and strategy development? |
| What must we do to develop self‐assessment and reflection? | What must we do to guide information processing and visualization? | What must we do to enhance capacity for monitoring progress? |
Coordinating with Other Teams
To assume full responsibility for the outcomes of all students, it is key to coordinate your work with other vital teams. The following is a sample of teams that you should coordinate with. It is not all‐inclusive and will vary by the existing or any new teams the organization is forming. We encourage regular communication with these teams and perhaps representative participants from them on the MTSS advisory team.
- Leadership Team: All members of the district leadership team inclusive of central office and building‐level leaders.
- School Improvement Teams (e.g., school councils or Instructional Leadership Team (ILT): These teams can work to design school improvement goals that align with the district plan. This supports the diffusion of the district plan in a contextual way for each specific building.
- Grade‐Level Data Teams/PLCs: These teams are essential in unpacking grade‐level, programmatic, and individual student needs and reviewing data in response to particular instruction and curriculum. The results of their review should inform the district team, and a process should be in place to share patterns and trends across these teams’ data with the district team. Team goals at this level should support district goals but apply them in context to the grade level or department.
- Student Support Teams: These teams help define tiered supports and interventions for individual students (based on data), so the work your team is doing to design systems of support should interact with these teams. For example, efforts to establish entrance criteria for services should align with a vision of proactive support.
- Collective Bargaining Team: If any planning implications impact a collectively bargained agreement, ongoing negotiation and collaboration with this committee are essential.
- Professional Development Committee: This committee can help align the professional learning options with the results from the needs assessment and associated action plan to support MTSS.
- Parent Councils and Organizations: These teams will provide a two‐way communication mechanism with the parent community.
- Student Councils: These councils will provide a two‐way communication mechanism with the student community.
Understanding Effective Instructional Practice
One of the biggest challenges in instructional vision work is a misalignment in our collective understanding of effective instruction. In the potential absence of this within your organization, we have created a list of effective instructional practices that can serve as this collective definition, as shown in Table 4.4. These are the practices that we would like to see in all classrooms at all times. The table includes a crosswalk of the effective instructional practices against the deeper learning context described earlier in the book. Note how teams can use the Skillset of a UDL practitioner in Table 3.2 to help to build their understanding of Universal Design for Learning.
Table 4.4 Elements of effective instructional practice.
| Mastery is evident when all students develop the knowledge and/or skills outlined in the standards and practices, with the ability to transfer that knowledge across situations. | Identity is evident when all students become more invested in the discipline by thinking of and seeing themselves as capable and active agents who do that kind of work. | Creativity is evident when all students shift from receiving knowledge of a discipline to acting or applying their learning to share ideas, solutions, and/or make something within the discipline. |
|---|---|---|
| Universal Design for Learning (UDL) helps instructors use multiple means of representation to give learners various ways of developing knowledge and/or skills outlined in the standards. | Universal Design for Learning (UDL) uses multiple means of engagement to tap into learners’ interests, challenge them appropriately, and motivate them to learn to support student ownership in their own learning. | Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides multiple means of action and expression to provide learners with options for demonstrating knowledge and skills by applying their learning to share ideas, solutions, and/or make something within the discipline. |
| Evidence‐based practices result in positive student outcomes for the cohort of students outlined in the standards and the ability to transfer that knowledge across situations. | Culturally sustaining pedagogy uses asset‐based pedagogical research to inform the design of schools as places where the cultural ways of the students are incorporated meaningfully into the work so students feel connected, capable, and represented in their learning. | |
| Standards‐based instruction ensures that the instruction is aligned to appropriate grade‐level and content‐specific state standards. | Linguistically supportive practices provide multilingual learners with equitable access to meaningful and rigorous learning opportunities that build on their cultural and linguistic assets as a means to see themselves as capable and active agents in their own learning. | |
| High‐Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM) ensure that the materials used are aligned to state standards and exhibit a coherent sequence of target skills, instructional practices, and understandings. | Trauma‐informed practices fully integrate knowledge about trauma and use effective strategies that remove barriers presented by trauma as a means of access to robust learning opportunities within the disciplinary content of each classroom. |
Creating the Vision
Once you have your core team and your MTSS advisory team and your meetings outlined for the year, it’s time to get cooking! Your team must lead their work via a strong, meaningful vision. The visioning process offers the opportunity to engage a diverse range of stakeholders in the school/district’s planning work and ensure that many voices are heard. Diverse perspectives in the planning process will strengthen the quality and effectiveness of the resulting plan, and inviting participation in the planning process will build ownership and advocacy for the resulting plan among both educators and the community. An inclusive approach will also contribute to a positive school/district culture, helping to build a shared understanding of the work required to serve all students as well as the relationships and trust among stakeholders that will support that work.
We worked with a district in a coastal town in Massachusetts. Resisting the temptation to jump straight into MTSS “nuts and bolts,” the district’s new superintendent and district leaders spent almost two years working collaboratively to craft a new district vision statement and theory of action that would power up school improvement efforts. The superintendent’s first move was to listen, learn, and get a feel for the district. The district team was committed to implementing MTSS, but they were concerned about buy‐in. Because academics had been part of schooling forever, leaders felt tiered supports and a focus on academics would be familiar for staff. However, SEL was still new. While it speaks to commonsense ideas (learning is fundamentally social‐emotional; kids develop social‐emotional skills just as they do academic skills), implementation options are many and varied. The MTSS leadership team knew that implementation in uncharted waters, without strategic alignment and focus, can result in a lot of boats knocking into each other at night and a lot of kids without boats. They needed to create a common vision to guide improvement efforts.
The superintendent engaged the MTSS Team to revise the existing vision, using the protocols shared in the next section. She then presented the draft to the school committee and asked members: Is this what we want for our kids? Is this how we want to see the work take hold? The school committee adopted the vision, and this vision and corresponding theory of action has guided district improvement work since and helped staff focus on institutional practices that are obstacles to moving the theory of action forward.
Although it may seem like an incredible investment in time, creating the vision and establishing buy‐in is critical for the work. We have to work with diverse stakeholders to create vision statements that center around the success of our students grounded in functioning systems. As an example, reflect on this sample vision statement:
All students thrive in school, graduate with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in the college and/or career of their choice, and contribute to the vivid life in a global community. Each day in our schools, students achieve mastery of grade‐level knowledge and skills, experiential learning that matters to them and reflects their identity, and connect content to the social context. We do this by ensuring academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical awareness. All students, inclusive of multilingual learners and students with disabilities, are immersed in grade‐level work that is interactive, relevant, and real‐world while engaging in an environment where they feel safe and hold a sense of belonging, agency, and value.
Drafting the Vision
If your organization has an existing vision statement, how well does it align with the concepts of MTSS, UDL, and deeper learning? If fully aligned, go with that! If not, you can revise it or write a new one. The vision statement communicates an ideal result, a vision. It reflects values and beliefs about how students learn best and should inspire and challenge. A vision statement does not describe what an organization currently does nor how your school operates. Rather, a vision statement details an ideal result, a state of being that the school/district would like to achieve. The following is another example of a vision statement. What do you notice about this statement? What values are present?
Students are curious, engaged learners who are gaining the tools and knowledge to become culturally responsive, positive, contributing members of local and global communities. We have a universally designed, personalized, flexible, inclusive, tiered instructional model that includes a rich, rigorous, comprehensive, and aligned curriculum measured by authentic assessments. We employ strong professionals who are enabled by continuous training and support to make decisions based on expertise, data, and research. The schools are physically and emotionally safe spaces.
You can use the following steps if you do not have a protocol for developing a vision. These steps serve as a simple approach to this work.
- As a whole group, determine the timeframe for the vision. Is this where you want to be in 5 years, 10 years, and so on? Next, break into teams of two to three people each and write a draft for the ultimate vision of a school/district that meets the needs of all learners.
- Coming back together as a group, small groups will share their initial vision statements and will combine these into one vision statement. You may type on a shared doc, project the draft on a screen, or use chart paper. Continue combining vision statements until you have a statement that reflects the consensus of the group.
- As you review your vision, consider the following and revise as necessary:
- Does the vision help to create a shared understanding of high‐quality instruction, which promotes deeper learning for all students?
- Does the instructional vision communicate high expectations and advance equitable outcomes for all learners?
- Does the vision center around the student experience and create conditions for student engagement and agency in their learning?
- Discuss/plan for how you might engage a wider group of stakeholders (i.e., the MTSS advisory group) and other district teams in the review/revision of your vision statement.
- Brainstorm ways to share the vision with the community once it is finalized (e.g., a one‐pager to distribute, adding the vision to existing documents, creating a video or visual, etc.).
A shared vision supports organizations in considering how their work provides or fails to provide all students with an equitable learning experience rooted in deeper learning, including traditionally underserved students, students of color, students with disabilities, and multilingual learners. To shift the student experience, the experience of educators in schools must shift as well. This concept is referred to as “organizational symmetry”: the mindset, social awareness, and skills we seek to instill in students must be mirrored in the work required of educators, building administrators, and systems leaders. Consider whether that is embedded into your vision as well.
Summary
District improvement efforts for MTSS begin with creating a high‐functioning core team and an MTSS advisory team that is inclusive and represents the diversity of the organization. Once the team is formed, it is critical to create norms for the ongoing work and establish a vision to guide the work moving forward. Using the vision as a North Star for improvement efforts will be key to meeting the needs of all students.
Reflection Questions
- What plans do you have to make sure that your MTSS advisory team is both inclusive and diverse with representative stakeholders throughout the district community?
- Why is it critical to create team norms that address time, listening, confidentiality, decision‐making, participation, and expectations?
- How will you create and share your vision for MTSS and inclusive practice?