Schoolin' Around

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

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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)

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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

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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

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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]!

In this episode, Larissa is joined by Erin Meek, a senior data implementation specialist at Branching Minds and a former educator and K-12 data researcher, for a back-to-school conversation with no frameworks and no fidelity checklists. They get honest about which back-to-school PD is worth pulling teachers out of their rooms for and which could have been an email, whether any icebreaker survives scrutiny, and why the routines you set on day one shouldn't be the ones you're still running in March. Larissa also puts listener-submitted survival tips to Erin for a yes, a no, or a rewrite.

Resources:

Ep 25: Being A Reasonable MTSS Leader with Angie Plugge, Director of Learning (10/3/2023) — the "let's be reasonable" advice Larissa cites

Differentiating Your MTSS PD article

Beginning of Year MTSS Gameplan Ebook

Administrators Guide to Supporting Teachers

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Takeaways:

• The first week is a blur, so the setup that matters happens before it starts.
• PD that models bad teaching practice teaches teachers to tune out.
• Day-one routines are a starting point, not a contract for the year.
• Protect a few days for home and family before the whirlwind begins.
• Send it as an email if it could have been an email.
• Save icebreakers for rooms where people genuinely don't know each other.
• Pair morning PD with afternoon work time in classrooms.
• Ask what's reasonable before adding another initiative this year.

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, Todd Hartman, principal of Creekside Elementary in Lakota Local Schools, Ohio, and a 2026 MTSS Hero Award winner, shares what changed between his first year in the building and his fourth. He and Larissa get into why "do all the things right away" turned out to be unsustainable, what collaboration actually means once a staff defines it out loud, and the five-minute monthly practice that has become his teachers' most requested professional learning. Perfect for building leaders who want the systems they build to keep working after they're gone.

Resources:

Lead From Where You Are — Joe Sanfelippo

Ep 98: Roll Call! Addressing the Roots of Absenteeism with MTSS — Todd's first appearance, 4/1/2025 (Captivate link)

How Creekside Elementary Improved Attendance with Branching Minds

Principal to Principal: 5 Steps to MTSS Success

How To Establish a Supportive & Successful MTSS Culture

How to Master Your MTSS Meetings

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Takeaways:

• Chasing every improvement at once frustrates staff and moves nothing very far.
• Collaboration is interdependence — you feel it when a teammate is missing.
• A real legacy is a system that survives the leader, not a leader nobody can replace.
• Define collaboration with your team out loud instead of assuming shared meaning.
• Call it evidence, not data, when the word carries baggage for teachers.
• Coach your building leadership team so they can coach their own teams.
• Hand data-meeting ownership to teachers gradually, over years, not in one year.
• Invite a parent to speak for five minutes at a staff meeting each 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, Dr. Emilio Castro, Sr. Executive Director of Schools of Houston ISD, shares invaluable leadership insights from his 24 years in education, focusing on common traps that derail superintendents and strategies for building effective systems and teams. Perfect for aspiring and current district leaders aiming to enhance their leadership capacity.

Resources:

Books Dr. Castro Recommends

• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive – Patrick Lencioni
• The Five Temptations of a CEO – Patrick Lencioni
• The Advantage – Patrick Lencioni
• Good to Great – Jim Collins
• Leaders Eat Last – Simon Sinek
• The Speed of Trust – Stephen M. R. Covey

Dr. Emilio Castro

Leader Protocol Guide for Buy-In

Article: Leadership and System-Level Work in MTSS

Article: Top 5 MTSS Implementation Tips for School and District Leaders

Guide: The District Leader’s Guide to MTSS and Strategic Planning

Webinar: The Role of MTSS in District Improvement: Aligning Vision and Action

Request a consultation

Key Topics:

• Leadership traps and how to avoid them
• Building leadership capacity and density
• Effective communication and clarity in leadership
• System alignment and crisis management
• Habits and strategies for young leaders

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, Larissa revisits her interview with Theresa Donohue from Plainview Old Beth Page to explore the district's journey through MTSS implementation, challenges, and successes over the past few years. Discover how strategic planning, data-driven decision-making, and team collaboration transformed their approach to supporting student achievement.

Resources:

• DataWise Protocol
• How to Scale Up Your MTSS District-Wide
• MTSS Month-by-Month Checklists
• Request a consultation

Takeaways:

• The importance of district leadership support in sustaining MTSS initiatives
• Cultivating trust through consistent communication and professional growth opportunities
• The value of data protocols in shifting classroom culture from personal to collaborative data use
• Future focus on subgroup analysis, equity, and targeted interventions

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]!