Surgeons with years of expertise still use checklists, and it has nothing to do with doubting their skill. Here’s what that means for reading instruction, and what a well-built routine gives your teachers and your students.

The first few weeks of school set the tone for everything that follows. Here are five first steps, with planning questions for each, for getting Tier 1 intervention off the ground this year.

For a lot of schools, the honest answer is “almost”: not broken, but ready for a tune-up. Here’s a five-step reset that makes what you already have work better, without adding one more initiative.

Screening and progress monitoring data only change outcomes when teams have time set aside to look at them. Here’s how to build next year’s data meeting calendar for PLCs, building teams, and district teams.

Schools are surrounded by data and still stuck making one decision at a time, student by student. Here’s how to plan next year’s data use so your team gets to system-level impact.

Disappointing mid-year growth is more common than you’d think, and it usually points to something in the system rather than to individual students. Here’s how to use winter screening data while there’s still time to act.

When reviewing progress data, we often think first of individual student intensification. More and more, I see that most students in an intervention group aren’t making expected growth. Starting progress monitoring data reviews by examining the performance of the overall group, instead of student by student, has several advantages.

Implementation science has demonstrated that to get lasting, school-wide change, selecting the right initiative (think MTSS, Science of Reading, or Science of Math) alone won’t be successful! We need to also empower educators and support change in order to see lasting success.

Should we focus on Tier 1 of my MTSS? If you regularly find that you run out of intervention capacity before you serve all students, you should shine a spotlight on Tier 1. The good news is that when you focus on Tier 1 improvements, all students benefit!

We all know an MTSS isn’t successful with interventions alone. Focusing solely on one part of an MTSS will lead to exhausted, overwhelmed educators and lackluster student growth. Maximize learning and empower educators with an MTSS plan designed around these 4 components to an effective MTSS.

MTSS looks different in every school, but four practices sit underneath the framework everywhere. Here’s each one, and the tricky part nobody warns you about.

A classroom teacher asks what MTSS actually is and what it means for their day. Here’s the plain-English answer, tier by tier.

Setting the goal and scheduling the data collection is the easy part. These seven do-this-not-that practices help teams take action on progress monitoring data.

Schools are investing in the science of reading, but commitment alone doesn’t move reading outcomes. In this short video, Sarah Brown explains what does.