It Takes a Village: An Interview with Lori Hensold, Director of the Illinois MTSS Network
Coming up on June 7, 2024, NIU STEAM and the Illinois MTSS Network are co-sponsoring the STEAMing It Up Conference: Using MTSS to Support Students in Literacy and STEAM.
To find out more about what makes this conference special, we spoke with Lori Hensold, director of the Illinois MTSS Network.
How did the idea for this conference come about?
This started from a conversation between Kristin Brynteson, director of NIU STEAM, and me. We saw that we each serve educators from different areas within schools, but they all work together to teach students. Why not show them how to collaborate better and more smoothly? Why not try to get them together and show them how things connect?
Because so often in education you go to a workshop and get a little slice of learning, and then you go back and try to use it – but it’s not connected to anything else, and that can make for a very chaotic and confusing approach.
There’s a phrase you hear sometimes – random acts of school improvement. Instead, we want school improvement to be more coordinated, connected and systematic. Discovering and creating connections among different educators and different fields is an important way to do this.
Can you share a little bit about what MTSS is and what approach you take to it at the Illinois MTSS Network?
The biggest strength of MTSS is that we focus on evidence-based practices and strategies to support students. Whatever subject or grade level you teach, those evidence-based practices can be useful tools.
MTSS stands for multi-tiered system of supports. We think of it as a framework to continuously improve the way you serve students. The bottom line is giving students what they need, when they need it and how they need it.
Some students need very little. You could practically hand them a book and walk away, then come back, and they’ve learned something. Other students need a lot more support. What we want is for everybody to graduate with the skills that they need to be healthy, happy, contributing members of society. As educators, we all share that goal! But often I hear schools saying that they don’t do MTSS because they don’t understand what it means.
What we do in MTSS is use different types of data to identify students who need something more to be successful. That “data” could be as simple as a formative assessment or maybe an observation – just walking my classroom and noticing who gets it, who doesn’t get it and who needs more support. It can be more formal assessment or even diagnostic assessment to uncover student strengths and needs.
The “something more” can be as simple as maybe I pair them up with someone who knows the skills and content really well. Or maybe I assign the rest of the class a small-group project to work on while I work one-on-one with a few kids who seem to need extra practice or feedback. Maybe I pre-teach, meeting with those students for 15 minutes in advance of class. I’m always looking for what the evidence say works best for students.
There are a lot of different ways to provide the “something more.” MTSS helps us build a continuum of supports so we can meet each student where they are.
What are some of the conference topics and sessions you’re most excited about?
The AI session from an Argonne National Lab scientist is really intriguing to me because I have no idea about that, so that will be totally new and interesting to me! I’m curious to see how it dovetails some of the other things that we do.
I’m also fascinated by the STEAM stories session from NIU STEAM – the idea of using stories that focus on science, technology, engineering, arts or math is a very interesting crossover between literacy and STEAM education.
The Illinois reading Council is also doing a session about incorporating STEAM learning into the Illinois Reads books – they’re making some connections that I think we can benefit from.
I’m also looking forward to some basic sessions our MTSS coaches are doing on, what does it look like when MTSS is successful in a school? What are some of the barriers? What are some of the ways you can leverage what you already have to make MTSS work well?
I’m also very excited for the keynote featuring three representatives from ISBE. They chose to provide a joint presentation with a literacy expert, a math expert and a science expert – so that’s going to be a wonderful kickoff for the day and start making those interdisciplinary connections right away.
We have a nice variety of sessions, and I can’t wait to talk to attendees afterwards to find out what they learned and what connections have turned up because of the conference.
Why is it exciting to have literacy, math and science together in the keynote talk and the conference as a whole?
Everything is together in a classroom, even when we try to keep the disciplines separate! If you’re teaching science, for example, the students are still reading a textbook. They’re reading background information and directions. If they do an experiment, they’re writing out their results. So that literacy component is always there, and it influences how successful students can be in other subjects.
What it comes down to is – especially with schools consolidating and having fewer staff – our approach has to be all hands on deck. Even though we each have our own area of specialization, we can better serve students when we share a common understanding and a common language about those core skills, such as literacy and math. To some extent, every teacher becomes a literacy teacher. It really does take a village!
What else do you want people to know about the conference or about MTSS?
Part of the focus of the conference is on Illinois’ new literacy plan that is mandated to be implemented across the state. Students in Illinois were struggling to learn to read, and it became clear that the state needed evidence-based teaching practices to improve literacy. That fits really well with what we do at MTSS. We are always asking, what is the evidence base? Why are we teaching this way? What teaching methods do we need to reach every student? We really want to see the literacy plan succeed and to see every student thrive. For this to succeed, we all need to pull together.
