Schoolin' Around

In this episode, Luke Morin, founder of Luke Morin Literacy Consulting and author of The Middle School Literacy Project, challenges the assumption that literacy instruction is finished by the time students reach sixth grade. Drawing on 15 years teaching middle school English in New Orleans and Denver, Luke shares the lesson that fell apart in his first year and what it taught him about the difference between rigor and simply withdrawing support. He and Larissa dig into why reteaching a standard rarely fixes what’s actually broken, and what a secondary reading intervention should look like instead.

Resources:

Substack: The Middle School Literacy Project

Website: www.lukemorinliteracy.com

YouTube: Luke Morin Literacy

Luke Morin

Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder”

5 Practical Reading Comprehension Strategies for Secondary Students

Improving Literacy Through MTSS: A Guide for District and School Leaders

Takeaways:

• Reading in middle school is not just decoding at a faster pace.
• A wrong answer tells you almost nothing about a student’s ability to infer.
• Text complexity lives in the interaction between reader, text, and task — not in a level.
• Withdrawing support is not the same thing as raising rigor.
• Watch for responses with many words and little depth; that’s the quiet symptom.
• Build the lesson around what the text demands, not around a priority standards list.
• Teach the hardest part of the lesson in intervention first, before students see it in class.
• Model thinking alongside students in the text rather than teaching skills in isolation.
• Expect a knowledge gap, not a skill gap, when meaning breaks down.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

In this episode, Dr. James Lane, CEO of University Instructors, former Virginia State Superintendent of Public Instruction and author of Leading with Laser Focus: The 7 Steps to School Success, talks with Larissa about turning good intentions into a real system of support. He starts with how leading a middle school band shaped his approach to leadership, then tells how a 300-student rural school became the testing ground for his seven steps. If you’ve ever wondered why your MTSS pieces don’t add up to results, this conversation previews his keynote at this year’s MTSS Summit.

Resources:

Branching Minds MTSS Summit 2026 registration page

Leading with Laser Focus: The 7 Steps to School Success

Website: leadingwithlaserfocus.com

Dr. James Lane on LinkedIn

Leadership and System-Level Work in MTSS

Superintendent/District Leader Guide to MTSS and Improvement Planning: a guide for district leaders on building MTSS as a system.

Takeaways:

• The concert is a moment in time; daily practice builds the program.
• Most schools have the right pieces but haven’t connected them into a system.
• Placing students in intervention based on one assessment can miss kids in both directions.
• Check longitudinal data alongside the latest benchmark before placing students in intervention.
• Tell students why they’re in intervention and what it takes to exit.
• Pair teachers’ strengths so they coach each other on intervention strategies.
• Start from yes when teachers bring ideas, then look for the flexibility.
• Raise the bar for adults and students alike; kids tend to meet it.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

In this episode, Tiffany Bergen, MTSS Coordinator at North Rockland Central School District in New York, shares how her district moved from talking about MTSS to putting it into practice in classrooms, in the year it outpaced both the state and its county in ELA and math growth. Larissa and Tiffany discuss what building a district MTSS handbook exposed, why the district rethought what Tier 1 means, and the meeting norm that changed how teams talk about students. Discover what it takes to build trust, momentum, and a real MTSS culture in the first years of implementation.

Resources:

How to Build an MTSS Handbook for Your School or District

MTSS Month-by-Month Checklists

A Guide to Self-Assessment of MTSS Implementation

The MTSS Meetings Guide and Toolkit

Request a consultation

Takeaways:

• Tier 1 is core differentiated instruction, not an intervention.
• Lower the barrier, not the bar, so every student can reach grade-level work.
• The process is messy, but the product is clean.
• Make your handbook a living draft and ask staff to find the blind spots.
• Get really good at three to five interventions before adding more.
• Start every student meeting by sharing something amazing about the student.
• Table the meeting if the prep checklist isn’t done.
• Lead from the buildings, not from a desk. Visit classrooms as a guest, not an evaluator.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

In this episode, Leah Kuypers, creator of The Zones of Regulation and founder and CEO of The Zones of Regulation, Inc., joins Larissa to talk about why schools expect students to regulate but rarely teach them how. They discuss what regulation actually means, what support looks like across MTSS tiers, and the common ways a well-meaning framework turns into a compliance tool. Leah also explains why the adults in the building are part of the work, not just the ones delivering it.

Resources:

The Zones of Regulation

Zones of Regulation Training Offerings (including Regulation 101)

Link for Resources Leah mentioned:

The Zones Climate Rubric and MTSS and Zones of Regulation Crosswalk

Leah Kuypers LinkedIn

Tier 1 Behavior and School Climate Guide for School Leaders

Classroom Management Is Much More Than Discipline

Changing the Way (and the Reason) You Document Behavior

Takeaways:

• Regulation is developmental, just like learning to read.
• Being regulated means meeting the moment, not staying calm.
• You can’t impose a strategy on a student in the heat of the moment.
• Make regulation the norm for every student, not the exception for a few.
• Model your own regulation out loud so students see adults doing it too.
• Read behavior referral data for the missing skill, not a reason to crack down.
• Let students name their own zone, and never use the zones to label them.
• Shift staff mindsets before introducing any regulation curriculum.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

In this episode, Joan Schumann, PhD, founding executive director of the International MTSS Association, traces how a fifth-grade year spent watering a teacher's plants instead of doing math turned into a career building integrated systems of support. She and Larissa get into why so many districts say they're "doing MTSS" while running something much closer to a two-tiered model, and why she thinks the research community's incentives are part of the problem. For leaders trying to sort what actually works from what's being marketed to them, Joan names the structural reasons that's so hard — and what a professional association can do about it.

Resources:

International MTSS Association

IMA Action Networks

Team Time — Santa Fe, January 2027

Journal of MTSS

Joan Schumann

The Difference Between MTSS on Paper and MTSS in Practice

Using Universal Screening For Accurate, Objective Tiering in MTSS

The Ultimate Guide to MTSS

Request a consultation

Takeaways:

• MTSS is a different operating system, not another initiative layered on top.
• The alternative to multi-tiered is two-tiered: nothing between core and long-term formalized support.
• A long-term need doesn't mean a permanent need for intensive support.
• Academic gaps often originate in the learning environment, not the learner.
• Researchers are the one group in education not held accountable for collaborating.
• Run true universal screening so support doesn't depend on which teacher notices.
• Build problem-solving teams that put the counselor and the interventionist at the same table.
• Stop using tiers as a new vocabulary for the same sorting behaviors.
• Bring leaders to researchers with the real implementation problem, not the other way around.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

This episode explores what happens to MTSS buy-in once the energy of launch wears off. Larissa looks at why buy-in fades in year two, including leadership turnover, competing initiatives, and teachers who submit data and never see what comes of it. She gives listeners a quick checklist to tell whether their school is in the slump. Drawing on her own time as a teacher and coach and on habits from Richardson ISD's MTSS Director, she offers practical ways to keep teams engaged, plus a three-question gut check for your next leadership meeting.

Resources:

6 Tips for Administrators to Sustain MTSS Buy-In Across Your District

Webinar: MTSS Leadership Essentials

Webinar: From Flowchart to Framework: Building Your District's MTSS Decision Guide

The MTSS Spark Newsletter + MTSS Month-by-Month Checklist

Article: School Leaders Struggle With Teacher Buy-in. What to Do About That (Thomas R. Guskey, Education Week)

Article: Your Foolproof Plan to Create Staff Buy-In That Sticks (PBISApps)

Article: How to Get Buy-In For Your New Initiative (Coaching for Leaders)

Article: For Leaders, Getting Real Buy-In for School Initiatives (Edutopia)

Michael Fullan, Leading in a Culture of Change (2001), the source of the "implementation dip"

Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007)

Request a consultation

Takeaways:

• The implementation dip is normal. Things feel harder before they get better.
• Teachers believe in a practice after they see it work for their students.
• Staff buy-in is both the top reason MTSS lasts and the top reason it fails.
• Audit last week's calendar to see whether it shows MTSS is a priority.
• Replace one-time PD with short, recurring, just-in-time sessions.
• Start every MTSS update with what teams should be doing right now.
• Show teachers what happened with the data they submitted.
• Ask whether MTSS would keep running if you disappeared for a month.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

In this episode, Travis Bickford, Director of MTSS at Dover School District in New Hampshire, shares how his district moved from a thick red binder on a shelf to a structured crisis response and behavioral threat assessment system. He discusses what his team learned responding to real crises without a playbook, why they resisted the pull to solve an urgent need quickly, and how implementation science shaped a rollout measured in years rather than months. If your district has ever launched something strong that quietly died by spring, this one names why.

Resources:

• Threat Assessment and Suicide Risk Screening
• The Evidence Behind CSTAG — Dr. Dewey Cornell Explains
• PREPaRE school crisis prevention and intervention curriculum, National Association of School Psychologists
• Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG), Dr. Dewey Cornell
• National Implementation Research Network (NIRN)
• NIRN Hexagon Tool for assessing fit and feasibility of new programs
• NIRN Implementation Stages Planning Tool
• State Implementation and Scaling-Up of Evidence-based Practices
• SISEP District Capacity Assessment\Ep 111: How to Integrate Behavioral Threat Assessments into your MTSS with Dr. Dewey Cornell
• Moving Beyond Zero Tolerance: A Better Approach to School Safety
• How Phoenix Elementary District #1 Improved Threat Assessment with Canopy — the closest published parallel to what Dover is building, and recent.
• Behavioral Threat Assessment and Suicide Risk Screening one-pager
• 3 Things School Safety Teams Need to Be Effective
• Request a consultation

Takeaways:

• Implementation takes two to five years, not one — far longer than districts anticipate.
• A crisis plan built for fire drills does not prepare staff for psychological trauma.
• Initial training alone yields minimal uptake; job-embedded coaching is what changes practice.
• No individual should sit with a big decision on their own.
• Assign internal staff to your highest-risk students — they already have the relationships.
• Staff counseling support across several small spaces, never one large room.
• Keep building principals running normal daily operations during a crisis response.
• Grow an in-district trainer rather than buying one-off training every year.
• Check fit with local context before adopting even a gold-standard framework.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

In this episode, Dr. Amanda Casagrande, Teacher on Special Assignment for MTSS and District SEL, PK–12 at Stamford Public Schools in Connecticut, shares how a large urban district of 15,000 students and 21 schools built a whole child approach that treats academic, behavioral, and social-emotional support as one connected system. She and Larissa dig into the mindset shifts that stall MTSS, how to phase in change without overwhelming staff, and what progress actually looks like when success isn't linear. Perfect for district leaders trying to turn "whole child" from a mission statement into a working system.

Resources:

DESSA social-emotional screener (Aperture Education)

Dr. Amanda Casagrande

Behavior and SEL: Supporting the Whole Child with Branching Minds

MTSS From Buy-in to Implementation: 8 Steps for Change

How to Have Better MTSS Meetings

"Know My Name, Know My Face, Know My Story" | A Whole Child MTSS Success Story

Request a consultation

Takeaways:

• Students can't grow academically until they feel safe and connected.
• MTSS is a diamond, not a pyramid — students needing more rigor belong in it too.
• You can't fix an academic problem when the root cause lives somewhere else.
• Adults need the same runway to learn a new system that we give students.
• Phase in implementation slowly, with monthly calibration and drop-in office hours.
• Name what a new platform takes off staff plates, not just what it adds.
• Build a meeting prep checklist so specialists arrive ready and meetings stay short.
• Use SEL walks to gather information and find bright spots, not to evaluate.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

In this episode, Kristen Smith, author of Cultivating Math Confidence and a secondary math teacher in Washington State, digs into the distance between a student's math skills and their belief that they can do math at all. She and Larissa examine what district leaders miss when they hand a teacher a curriculum and ask for fidelity, why a popular approach to personalized math practice may be undercutting the very thinking it was meant to build, and how something as small as saying a term out loud shapes what a student can do with it. Essential listening for curriculum and MTSS leaders planning secondary math PD.

Resources:

Cultivating Math Confidence: Teaching Strategies to Boost Proficiency in Grades 6–12 by Kristen Smith — publisher or Amazon page

Kristen Smith's Substack, mentioned in the close

Illustrative Mathematics — the curriculum she uses and critiques

Implementing MTSS in Secondary Schools

Addressing the Top Four Challenges in Secondary Math Intervention

Math Intervention Strategies for MTSS

Request a consultation

Takeaways:

• Math confidence is built through repeated experiences of earned success.
• Students who cannot say a math term out loud struggle to use it.
• Curriculum fidelity assumes prior-grade mastery that most students do not have.
• Probe for prerequisite skills in the lesson launch, before the curriculum task.
• Reteach a missing sixth-grade skill on the spot, then continue the lesson.
• Write your own spiraled review questions when the curriculum omits them.
• Call on every student to use math vocabulary rather than letting them opt in.
• Empower teachers to add access points instead of demanding strict fidelity.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!

In this episode, Dawn Baumgartner, a licensed clinical social worker and coordinator of social services and wellness for Phoenix Elementary School District #1 in Arizona, describes what changed when her teams stopped running a full threat management protocol on nearly every case that crossed her desk. She and Larissa get into the balance between overreacting to threats and missing real warning signs, what makes a multidisciplinary team work beyond a list of assigned roles, and why her district's first year with a standardized model produced more documented threats and fewer serious ones. Essential listening for anyone whose district has handed them school safety.

Resources:

CSTAG — Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (Dr. Dewey Cornell)

The Evidence Behind CSTAG — Dr. Dewey Cornell Explains

Transforming Student Safety in Arizona: The Phoenix Elementary School District Canopy Story

Integrating Behavioral Threat Assessment into Your System of Supports

Incorporating Threat Assessment and Suicide Risk Response into MTSS

District Panel: Building Systems to Support Student and School Safety

Learn more about Canopy Case Management!

Takeaways:

• Every behavior is an attempt to get a need met.
• A standardized model can surface more threats and fewer crises at the same time.
• Threat assessment drains emotional bandwidth that teams don't have to spare.
• Build the team before you build the protocol.
• Give each team member a lens only their role can bring.
• Ask whether a statement came from frustration before escalating it.
• Review threat and screening data quarterly for building-wide trends.
• Refuse to own school safety alone, even when it's been assigned to you.

Learn more about MTSS and Branching Minds by visiting our Branching Minds Website, or sign up for our weekly Newsletter on all things MTSS. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn @BranchingMinds. 

Send feedback or inquiries to [email protected]!