Staff at Mount Rowan Secondary College (Vic), Parafield Gardens High School (SA), East Loddon P–12 College (Vic), Como Secondary College (WA) and Reece High School (Tas) discuss how they track progress of students receiving literacy and numeracy intervention within an MTSS framework aligned with AERO’s guidance.
Watch Using data in MTSS: Progress monitoring on YouTube.

Duration: 4:00

Transcript

Katie D’Antonio, Literacy Intervention Teacher, Mount Rowan Secondary College: How we measure whether intervention is successful or not is that we bring it right back to the data. So, we'll look again at their oral reading fluency and their Maze comprehension data. We do weekly progress monitoring checks of their reading fluency. So, if they’re reading more words accurately in that minute, it shows that our intervention is working. If it is not moving, it's either stagnating or going backwards, then we will look at some other interventions that we could use and we can alter that based on their need.

Christine D’Arcy, Senior Speech Pathologist, Parafield Gardens High School: We're looking to see progress in their phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonic decoding and word-reading fluency and their ability to read and write words. So, we measure those things, and we measure them pre and post and every term for those students in Tier 3. We can also monitor, during lessons, how they're responding to the intervention and adapt what we're doing accordingly.

Sally Fleming, Literacy Leader and Head of English, East Loddon P–12 College: We've worked really hard for everyone to see all the data as shared data. This is our data. It's not just your class and you're responsible just for the highs and lows of your data; we're all responsible for all of it. And when we look at the Year 9s, we know their journey from Prep onwards, we know what programs they've done at different times – if they have or haven't progressed, that's on all of us.

Kim Silva, Numeracy Learning Specialist, Mount Rowan Secondary College: This is a learning journey for the entire team. So, we do some mini assessments on a daily basis and then try to support that with the major assessment that was done at the start of the semester. So, that gives us an idea what boxes to tick off, because on every learning assessment level, you have a set of checklists that you have to fill in to be able to make that decision – whether or not the student is ready to move.

Olly Ross, Numeracy Learning Specialist, Mount Rowan Secondary College: There's a set of skills, which is essentially what our targeted sessions are based upon. Once we've worked through each of those skills on a particular zone, if we've found through our formative assessments that students are meeting all of those and can demonstrate those skills confidently, then we make that discussion about moving them forward into the next group.

Jacqueline Kolman, Intervention Teacher, Como Secondary College: During the year, we monitor them very closely through formative assessments. We are constantly watching their spelling age progress, their reading age progress. We’re constantly checking their maths work, and we will give a range of different reasons why we believe that this person should transition into mainstream.

Zachary Healey, Intervention Teacher, Como Secondary College: In terms of transitioning students out of the program, we want to make sure that they've got their solid learning behaviours that are going to see them be successful in that different context. We want to be looking at those learning behaviours that we know are going to be predictors of success throughout their whole time at school.

Kathryn McDiven, Literacy Intervention Teacher, East Loddon P–12 College: Each of the programs has pre-testing and then progress testing as well, and we're monitoring that to check that everyone's moving at an appropriate rate or whether we need to slow down and reteach or come back to something.

Zachary Healey: I think those mastery tests that we do throughout the curriculum – throughout the course – really gives us good, specific information about what sort of skills we need to target our intervention at. Maybe as a class, that we need to work on skills again or repeat learning as a class, and other skills might need to just be an individual intervention.

Daniel Franks, Assistant Principal, Reece High School: The data that we saw from the first 6 months was amazing. We had kids that we could really clearly show our staff, our students, our families that, 'Okay, in 6 month's time, this student has grown 4 years in their reading.' So, using data to celebrate success, I think, is really important for everyone within that process.


Keywords: multi-tiered system of supports