RTI and PLCs, with Mike Mattos

In this episode of Unpacking Education, we sit down with renowned educator and practitioner Mike Mattos to explore the powerful intersection of Response to Intervention (RTI) and Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). With 38 years of experience as a teacher and principal, Mike shares how shifting from individual responsibility to collective action can transform outcomes for all students. Mike offers practical, research-informed strategies to build collaboration, embed intervention into the school day, and create a culture of shared responsibility. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Transcript

Mike Mattos 0:00
If we want all kids to succeed, some kids are going to need extra help. It could be academic help, or it could be behavior support. I have the academic ability, but I lack some key behaviors that are holding me back. All those needs I just said are in every single teacher's classroom.

Rena Clark 0:21
The topic for today's podcast is RTI and PLCs with Mike Mattos. Unpacking Education is brought to you by AVID. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:39
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education.

Rena Clark 0:49
I'm Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:50
I'm Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:51
And I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 0:55
And we're here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 1:00
Education is our passport to the future.

Opening Quote and Discussion

Rena Clark 1:04
Our quote for today is actually from Mike Mattos on his website, and he writes: "Change is the space between who we are and what we hope to become. Unless we are willing to enter this space, we cannot improve."

All right, gentlemen. Winston, what do we think about the quote?

Winston Benjamin 1:26
It's a big quote. It's heavy, but the part that I'm really thinking about is that in-between space is terrifying because that's where failure lies—the fear of not getting to what I hope to be and also ending up in a place that's different than you intended. Sometimes I think that space is so scary for individuals, and that's why sometimes they don't try. It seems like that's why they don't move forward in life. That space is so scary at times for people, so that's what I'm hearing and seeing in this quote.

Paul Beckermann 2:04
And yet that space is where we have to be. We have to get there, because if we don't get there, nothing's ever going to change. I think about myself as a guitar player. If I want to be a better finger picker but I never try, if I never try and fail, I'm never going to get better at it. I have to enter that space.

It reminds me of another quote that I used to say a lot when I began teaching: success breeds success. If we can get students through that space so they can see what's on the other side—and teachers, anybody really—that can give the confidence to maybe overcome some of that fear. Because I agree with you, Winston, it is a scary place, and the only way we overcome that is to see what's on the other side, at least initially.

Winston Benjamin 2:48
I might even update that quote to say failure leads to success, because if you don't figure out what you did wrong, then how can you improve? That's really the big part—overcoming fear. So I like what you're doing, and I agree with you.

Rena Clark 3:04
It's really about reflection. Just keep digging. Well, I'm excited to dig in and get a little deep today, and we're excited to welcome Mike Mattos to the podcast.

Mike is a former principal of Marjorie Veeh Elementary School and Pioneer Middle School in Tustin, California. He's also an author—an internationally recognized author, presenter, and practitioner who specializes in uniting teachers, administrators, and support staff (really, everyone in the building) to transform schools by implementing Response to Intervention (RTI) and Professional Learning Communities (PLC).

Welcome, Mike. We're glad to have you.

Mike Mattos 3:52
Thank you so much. Truly honored to be on your podcast.

Mike's Background

Rena Clark 3:57
We kind of gave you that introduction, but we always like to ground our listeners. If you want to tell us any more about yourself, your story, let us know who we're going to be talking with today.

Mike Mattos 4:09
Well, the one thing in that very nice intro that you shared that was missing—and what I'm most proud of—is that I was a classroom teacher for the vast majority of my 38 years in public education, a middle school and high school mathematics teacher.

I like to say I'm not a researcher. I'm grateful for people who spend their professional efforts studying what works in schools, but at some point you have to take that research and implement it in real-life schools with large class sizes and limited resources and the ever-growing diverse needs of students. How do you implement that in a doable way that also doesn't ask more and more of teachers, but instead works smarter based upon what's proven to work? That's where I've spent my career. I'm a practitioner who learned how to maybe implement some of these proven practices in practical sorts of ways.

Rena Clark 5:12
I like the engineer, because I was talking to my students about this today—the difference between scientist and engineer. So they're doing the research and you're implementing.

We're going to talk about RTI and PLC. It would also help us, I think, if we have a common understanding of how you define RTI and PLC and the relationship between both. That will help us ground the conversation.

Defining RTI and PLC

Mike Mattos 5:40
Sure. Let's think about it this way. I think, would you agree, we have way too many acronyms in our profession? So instead of getting wrapped up in acronyms, why don't we just talk common sense?

Can we agree that there's hardly an educator—whether you're a classroom teacher, support staff, admin, central office—who doesn't earnestly want every student to succeed? I mean, that's why we joined the profession. Lord knows we can make more money with the level of education we've achieved. If our goal is just to make money, you would not have chosen education as the pathway. It's because we all want to make a difference in the lives of children.

If you decide to commit yourself to that, then can we agree every student doesn't learn the same way and doesn't learn at the same speed? They don't enter with the same prior skills and knowledge, and they don't get the same level of support at home.

If we want all kids to succeed, some kids are going to need extra help. It might be extra help to learn this year's stuff. It might be extra help to make up some holes—things I should have walked in this year already knowing, but I don't. It could be academic help, or it could be behavior support. I have the academic ability, but I lack some key behaviors that are holding me back. All those needs I just said are in every single teacher's classroom.

If the answer is each individual teacher somehow has to meet those students' needs, that's a one-room schoolhouse model. That might be the way our system of education started in America for very practical reasons. Most Americans lived in rural communities where there was maybe a teacher, maybe a one-room schoolhouse. Who would you collaborate with to ensure all kids learn? It's just you.

Now we can't leave it up to every teacher alone to somehow figure it out. That's an impossible task. But what if we leverage the collective knowledge and skills of a faculty to work together? That would require us to: one, get past "my kids, your kids," regular ed, special ed labels on kids, and just make them ours; and two, embed intervention time in the school day when, by law, kids have to be with us. We can make sure that they get it. It's not dependent upon home being responsible for it, because a lot of families can't. Parents are working two jobs to pay the rent. Single moms are just trying. We're the academic experts, so embed that help in the school day and do it in a systematic, collaborative way. It doesn't matter what teacher I'm assigned to, I'm guaranteed to get this extra help.

What I just described is two research bases. The way we would work collaboratively to ensure kids learn—that's the very purpose of being a Professional Learning Community, a PLC. It's the best research-based process to focus collaborative effort on the things that would impact student learning the most. The way we would provide extra help collectively—that's the research base of Response to Intervention, or also known as a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS).

If we would focus our collaboration on the right work, part of that being how we systematically give kids extra help within our school day, our school week—having been a principal, first of a school where 80% of our students for multiple years were below grade level in reading and math, and two-thirds of them were learning English as a second language (they were halfway to bilingual but didn't have the English part yet), and a staff that couldn't work any harder—those kids weren't failing because teachers didn't care enough. Those teachers, all of them, were working way beyond their contractual hours. It's just they were asked individually to somehow get a classroom of diverse needs there.

We just dug into what the research says would be a better way to organize ourselves. That's how I got interested in both of these things—both of these research bases—serving as a principal of a school that truly was dedicated to all kids learning and said, if what we're doing now isn't working, why don't we not guess what to do? Why don't we be good professionals, look at research and evidence, and how will we start to implement some of these things in a doable way in our own school? Since then, I've just been fortunate to continue to learn more and more about it and hopefully help a few more people along the way.

Common Misconceptions and Critical Steps

Winston Benjamin 10:30
I appreciate the description of the two concepts, because again, because of education, people come in with "someone said this," "I heard it from a coworker," "this is how we talk about it in our building," "this is the way that they've learned the practice." There are so many different acronyms, and everyone describes it in different ways. So I appreciate the grounding that you provided us from the anecdotal to the academic framework.

For me, one of the things that I would like to get into is, as you described, usually students who are behind or needing support are usually in a specific type of school where teachers have to do a lot and they feel overworked. When you start implementing an RTI or MTSS in a school, there are a lot of misconceptions that come with that in terms of teacher beliefs, student beliefs. Would you mind talking to some of those misconceptions when schools try to implement an RTI or MTSS program, and what are some of the critical steps that a school needs to do to be effective when implementing the framework? Those are two big questions, but I think they work well with your deep explanation.

Mike Mattos 12:00
Those are two huge questions. I will try my best to make the answers concise, because they're excellent questions.

First one: common misconceptions of Response to Intervention or MTSS, Multi-Tiered System of Support approaches.

Number one, both good and bad: RTI has been the law of the land since 2004 as part of the reauthorization of special ed law at the federal level. The good news is federal law isn't stopping us from doing the right work. In fact, it's requiring us to. Bad news: sometimes when things are dictated to you, it turns into a compliance issue compared to a commitment issue.

If you look at the work by Daniel Pink in his book Drive—a meta-analysis of what it takes to get people to change, because change is hard—the single worst way to change a knowledge worker like us is force: "Do it or else." I think No Child Left Behind taught us that, didn't it? That approach to change schools, even if with good intentions (who would fight? We don't want to leave a child behind—that's good), but the "do it or else, we'll punish you" didn't transform schools. Instead, it built a deep level of compliance where people did just enough to appease the people making you do it, but you never get great results by doing just enough to appease.

Teachers are not afraid to work hard. They work hard on what they believe is good for their kids. If it's a top-down approach, sometimes that doesn't get their full effort because they're doing it out of "I gotta," not "I wanna."

So one misconception is "we gotta do this." Well, we should want to do it anyway if it's proven to work. It's a better tool to help students learn.

Problem number two: because they tied RTI to the reauthorization of special ed law, some people view RTI as just a new pathway to qualify kids for special education. You usually see RTI captured in the shape of a pyramid broken down into tiers. Tier One is what all kids get. Tier Two is supplemental help. Tier Three is intensive help.

Before there was a mandate for schools to be proactive in extra help (RTI), the only systematic process every school in America had to provide extra help was special ed. But how did kids qualify? They got dropped far enough behind. So it taught teachers: when a kid's problems are so big they're beyond what I could do in a classroom, I refer them for testing.

Some people now view RTI as: "Well, teacher, you just referred that kid for extra help, but before we can test them, first we have to play the RTI game where we move them to Tier Two, try for X number of weeks, and document, document, document—this could be the IEP. We have to create paperwork Armageddon for teachers. Then when that doesn't work, move them to Tier Three. When that doesn't work, now we can test them."

The problem with that is you're not really trying to solve problems in the first couple tiers. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your whole goal is to get them tested, mark me, you will. If your goal is to get them in special ed, let's keep this conversation real: how are special needs kids doing in your school, in the schools that you work with? Growing in leaps and bounds? Getting redesignated?

Special ed isn't meant to be a life sentence. It's meant to be intensive support to close gaps, to get you to grade level where you don't need that level of extra help. Yet the national redesignation rate of kids getting out of special ed since 1974 is 1.8%, and that's not because of special ed teachers, by the way. They're doing phenomenal work. It's under a system never designed to ensure kids learn. Original special ed law was a civil rights law. It was the right for special ed kids to enter the building at all. It was never designed for them to learn in.

All this is to say we're really misinterpreting why we should do a system of interventions and what the very purpose of it is in the first place if you see it as a pathway to special ed testing.

I think those would be the two primary misconceptions as schools are asked to implement what is federal law, but we should be wanting to do anyway if it's done well.

Which leads to: what would be the first steps then? RTI research is how we systematically respond when students don't learn. But if you haven't built a culture of collaboration, a culture of collective responsibility—we won't have "my kids, your kids," they're our kids—and a culture where we accept responsibility for student learning...

I think most schools have an unwritten school mission statement, because your real mission statement, your fundamental purpose, why you exist, is not often what's on your letterhead. It's what you believe in the staff lounge. It's what you believe in the parking lot after the faculty meeting when you talk to peers.

In many schools, their mission is—and you can finish the statement for me, it's so prevalent: "It's my job to teach. It's a kid's job to learn."

If that's your culture, your assumptions, then when a kid fails, do we look internally—what can we do?—or do we tend to sometimes allow ourselves to blame the kid, blame the home, blame the... "If they would just get with the program, we'd be okay"?

Don't get me wrong, there are factors outside of school that impact student learning. I'm not saying students aren't responsible for student learning, but kids are kids. They're going to make mistakes. We're the professional educators. If we focus our collaboration time on what we can't control, what can we make a parent do? Nothing. Then that makes us victims. We're just victims of all that's outside.

Compared to: what if we said, when the kid's with us, what can we do at that time, while they're in our presence for about 40% of their waking hours from the age of five to 18? What could we do differently that's proven to work?

That leads into: if we say we want every kid to succeed, we'll focus on what we can control. It'll go back to, we can't achieve it alone, so let's work together.

The PLC process is the foundation to build the collaboration part, and then kids are going to need some extra help. How do we do it? That would lead us to search out better ways to do it. We would want to do RTI if our approach was: let's focus on what we can control, and let's see what we can do that's proven to work, and how can we do it within contractual hours—not asking teachers to work harder, it's about working smarter.

Using Data Effectively

Paul Beckermann 19:08
Part of that working smarter is leaning on the data that you have, the measurement systems, things like that, rather than just relying on intuition. What are some ways that we can structure interventions so that they're timely, targeted, and based on data? How does that data piece fit into it?

Mike Mattos 19:31
If you're familiar with the PLC at Work process, which is the PLC process which I advocate most strongly for (it's the one that's most research and evidence driven, first created by Dr. Rick DuFour and Dr. Bob Eaker), there are four critical questions that drive collaboration in a professional learning community, and they're logical questions if we agree the purpose of our collaboration is to ensure kids learn.

The first PLC question is: what do we expect kids to learn? If we can't agree upon the most important things kids need to learn, how can we collaborate to ensure kids learn them? How will next year's teachers know what to build upon if teachers who teach the same course or the same grade can't even agree upon the most important outcomes that they want kids to achieve this year?

That first question focuses our collaboration. You can't collaborate on all the curriculum—it's just too many standards, it's impossible. And what's often a once-a-week teacher team meeting to talk about everything... Let's focus our time on the most important things as picked by us. We're the experts in our subject and our grade.

The second question is: how do we know kids have learned it? Can we agree, since No Child Left Behind, we've allowed high stakes exams to kind of dominate our national conversation and our PD of improving schools? "We've got to improve those state test scores."

Every teacher would agree those state test scores aren't perfect tests. Even if they were, by the time you get the results, the year is over. Those kids are gone or another year ahead. There was no time to intervene in the school year because we're waiting for data that's lagging.

Instead, the second PLC question is: how do we know kids have learned it? Why don't we empower the same teachers who work together to identify essential standards (because they teach the same course, the same grade) to decide how to assess kids on those most important things? When's the right time to assess them?

You ask most teachers: have you ever given a district benchmark test, a test that the powers that be above you demand that you give on this day? Results come back, and you figure out your kids did poorly on the things you haven't taught yet. Really? It's like, yeah, I was forced to give that test. I knew my kids weren't ready for all of it.

Why don't we empower teacher teams to also determine how we want to assess those kids, and when's the right time on these things? Let's do it in a way where there's still time left in the school year so we can do what? The third question is: how do we respond when kids haven't learned?

Now we have the right data. What's the right data? The right data to target most interventions (not all, but to help kids learn this year's stuff they need for next year)—the best data are teacher team-created or selected assessments that they give in a common way, and they use that in a formative way to identify which kids got it, which kids didn't, so we can give kids who haven't gotten it yet extra help. Because we call that an essential. We know if a child didn't learn that standard this year, they're going to struggle next year.

Let's work together. Doug Reeves, who's one of our national assessment experts over the last decades, says this: teacher team-created or selected common assessments used in a formative way are the gold standard of assessment. Nothing measures best what was actually taught in real time by real-life teachers than if the teachers who taught it have a voice and an ownership of the assessment process.

They're getting data in real time on assessments they believe in, on assessments they believe their kids were ready for, and they're short cycle. We gave it. We're not sending it to someone to grade. We'll grade it now. Guess what? I got data right here with my teammates. Which kids got it, which kids didn't? What could we do about it? Boom.

That might not be the only data a school uses, but that's the best data to guide making sure kids get this year what they need for next year.

Academic Equity

Rena Clark 23:44
It also provides an opportunity, if you're collaborating with that team, that kids, whether they're in your class or the other class, are also getting access to those same standards.

Mike Mattos 23:56
Yes, right? Isn't that the equity piece? I'm an old poly-sci major. My passion subject is US history. I read that for fun. My favorite course I've ever taught is US history, both at the eighth grade level and the junior year high school level.

To go on a quick little tangent here: I think if you read our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, I think it's built upon the concept of equity. But in a school setting, to me, equity means academic equity. Don't we want every kindergartner to learn the things they need to be ready for first, no matter what teacher I'm assigned to? So they're ready for first to succeed. You want every first grader to leave ready for second.

I have worked with schools across the world—every state in the US, every province in Canada, from Perth, Australia to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Bangkok, Thailand. Parents want the same thing. They want their kids to be safe. Keep my kid safe. They want their kid to be loved, and they want them to learn. I think it's in that order too. Make sure you send my kid back in at least the same condition I sent them to you, if not better. Show me that you care about my kid as a person—you know my kid by name, and you care about their wellbeing. Then it'd be nice if they learned some things this year too, so they're ready for next year.

I just find that everywhere I go, they want the same thing. To do that, you have to have some academic equity. It shouldn't matter what teacher your child was assigned to. There are some things you have to know this year to be ready for next year, and we're going to make sure that you get those things.

Building in Intervention Time

Rena Clark 25:49
That can help with the shift from compliance to commitment. You've also talked about implementing RTI during the school day. I'm curious—I'm going off script here, Paul—but I was curious if there are different examples you've seen. You've been all over the world.

I'm actually privileged to be at a school that does implement that, and it's amazing. I happen to teach middle school, and all my children are middle school, and they don't have that. I wish so much that you had that. We have homeroom every day, and then three days a week during that homeroom time, they get to go to their Grizz Time or whatever. Every week it might be different, and it's all based on common assessments or what they need. Sometimes us teachers have to fight over who gets who, but they get to walk to where they need to go.

I've just felt it's been very successful because kids get that opportunity during the school day, and that's carved out intentionally for 35 minutes. I'm curious—that's just one model that I'm working in, and that's in a middle school setting. What kind of models have you seen that have been successful?

Mike Mattos 27:16
The one thing that you said right up front is absolutely true: regardless of what that time might look like or how you schedule it (because you would agree, in elementary school, master schedule looks a little different than a middle school or high school), what you have in common is this: I think it is disingenuous for any school or district to have a mission statement saying "we're here to ensure kids learn" and we don't change the master schedule to embed help into the school week.

We'll go back to how we started. If we started by saying we agree all kids don't learn the same way, same speed, enter with the same prior skills or knowledge, or get the same level of support at home, then you know to get every child there, some kids are going to need extra help. Some it'll be a little help. Some it might be a lot of help. But help is for sure.

If we don't build time in the master schedule to make that happen, then we're back to individual teachers: "Somehow you figure it out."

When I was a middle school teacher and we didn't know what PLCs and RTI was when I first started teaching (this was 1987), how many lunch periods did you give up helping kids? How many before and after schools did you give up just because you care and kids are struggling? The problem is you would ask kids to come in and they wouldn't show. Then what? Your job as a teacher is somehow to chase them down and find them.

That's super hard on teachers. It's extra work. But if we say we're going to embed in the teaching day, in the contractual day of teachers, dedicated time where we're going to intervene, now we're not saying teachers, "You figure it out," so you end up being basically educational missionaries working for free to help kids on off hours. Instead, we can collectively respond, and it's when the kid has to be at school, so you can make sure they get that help.

Now with your excellent question: how have I seen it at the elementary school level? Having been an elementary and a middle school principal, it's easier to do at the elementary school level because the whole school doesn't have to run on the same schedule. The fourth grade team can shave a little bit of time off their ELA and math time and build some re-teach time, and it won't impact the kindergarten team, the fifth grade team. You could spend more or less time on stuff.

I've seen it where at the elementary school level, each grade level has a dedicated, let's say, 30 minutes, somewhere between two and five days a week for that intervention time to help kids at a grade level. I've seen schools do primary and upper grades at the elementary level at the same time. Why? Because sometimes you can share kids by need, not by age, not by grade, and it can be more efficient that way. I've seen schools do a push-in model. We'll have an intervention time at each grade level, and then if we have supplemental support staff like instructional aides, special ed staff that are free, they can push into that grade level. Now we have more adults. More adults means you could do more targeted groups. I've seen all that work.

Secondary level: the whole school runs on the same schedule. The bells ring, and every subject, every grade level moves at the same time. So you have a choice: everyone stops to do interventions, or no one does. If you're committed at all, it can't be nobody.

I think the best way to make time at the secondary level is do what we've done to have pep rallies for years, music assemblies, and assembly schedules: shave a few minutes off of every class period, bank the minutes together, insert an extra period. School starts at the same time, ends at the same time. The teacher day is no longer. You have long enough class periods you can still do some good teaching in a normal period. You didn't sacrifice those, and kids don't miss new instruction in each class to get the extra help.

The hard part is the logistics of just moving kids around and all that. Let me ask you a question. This really goes to the quote that you quoted me on about change. When your school started, was it easy at first, or were there some bumps in the road?

Rena Clark 31:26
I'm brand new to my school, and I'm coming from a place where that was not in place. So it's interesting. I'm going to actually say it's so lovely to be in a place where there's a culture of "we do this." I know there are bumps in the road, and there still are even now, because we have a spreadsheet master. Every Monday, you're putting in whether you're closed or open, and it closes at night. Then Tuesday, you're moving kids. So it's a little bit, but it also is pretty neat.

I've seen the success of students. I teach a lot of different classes, but my science class—they otherwise just wouldn't have access to that support or be able to access that support for an assessment. Having them in a small group, because then other places like PE might open up and have... if kids maybe don't need... maybe they're doing something else. So some people will have more kids.

It's work. I've seen it be really successful. Even as a team, we send kids—like you said, they don't have to come to me for that support. They might be going to a different science teacher, because we're all on the same page with common formative assessments that we've now looked at. I'm very happy because this is where I wanted other places to be, and so I've seen both ends.

Mike Mattos 32:44
How awesome, though, as a classroom teacher, to validate that I've been on the one side where we didn't collaborate and didn't have that time. You would agree, when you work together and there is the time, if you do it right, it saves you time as a teacher. It's not one more prep. It's not one more thing. If it's done right, it'll actually save you time.

By the way, I was smiling when you used the word "opened" and "closed." The second school I was principal at, Pioneer Middle School, we started trying to find a way to put intervention time in the math schedule. That school started 19 years ago doing it. Nobody was doing it. That verbiage "opened" or "closed" comes from that school, Pioneer Middle School.

I'll tell you, I take almost no credit for that system. We created a task force: one teacher from every grade level, one admin. I purposely made it not me the principal, because I didn't want the teachers to think it was top-down. We asked our union to work with us hand in hand: "We're going to do this within contract. It should not cost teachers more hours of time." Our union was like, "We don't want the day to be longer. We don't want teachers to have an extra prep." I totally get it. I wouldn't want that anyway. If I could dictate it as principal, I wouldn't want teachers to be asked to work harder. They already are, right?

They came up with that system, including the idea of "opened" or "closed": teachers can say, "Can any kid self-select for my session?" or "Do I want only the kids that I want to see?" That task force 19 years ago at Pioneer Middle School came up with that exact language.

I'm throwing out credit to the place I used to be principal at. That school is still at it, trying to get better and better, but they get credit for that. A task force from that school came up with the open-closed priority system to try to figure out the logistics of all this.

AVID Integration

Winston Benjamin 34:38
I appreciate you providing credit where credit is due. A lot of times, people come up with new interventions, MTSS, AVID, all these other things. Why was it important for you to use AVID as a part of your school's improvement program?

Mike Mattos 35:02
Let me answer that a couple of ways. Number one, I was very fortunate to be hired as principal in a district that was already a demonstration district of AVID, so I walked into a district, Tustin Unified, that had a culture of it. When I was hired first as an assistant principal there, they sent me that summer to San Diego to an AVID training to make sure I, as an administrator, was knowledgeable about what I was stepping into at our middle school being part of a demonstration program for AVID.

I was bought in immediately, and why? A few reasons. Number one, I mentioned earlier: sometimes kids struggle in school. It's not an academic need. It's a behavior need. You think behaviors—oh, kids are disruptive. No. How about just executive functioning skills? How about: how do you stay focused in class and take notes you can summarize, you have a tool to study by later? Who taught you how to do that?

For me, I was very fortunate. I came from a home with two parents who attended college. They were preaching I was going to college from day one. If you're raised in that culture, and you have family around you who has gone through the labyrinth of what it takes to navigate the K-12 system and turn that into post-secondary, you have a step up.

I know the origins of AVID is: what happens to kids who aren't born to a household where parents have the knowledge and the resources to help guide you through that? Why don't we build that in? Let's also make sure that all those post-secondary focused students have access to the most rigorous curriculum.

AVID—another part of it is the academic support, the built-in tutoring. So when those go hand in hand, we're trying to build a system of interventions into our school, and some kids may have some executive function needs, and some need help in the most rigorous curriculum. AVID was phenomenal, and we had an AVID class for some students.

Then we found this: we're having parent conferences with kids that we want to support, and we're like, "Oh, well, if they were only in AVID, they would get that, but they're not in AVID." We decided we're just going to AVID the whole school. We're going to take those executive functioning skills and we're going to teach them in a systematic way across the entire school. We're going to have a career exploration process where middle school kids are already thinking about, "What do I want to see my adult life look like, and what's the pathway to get there?" Let's make a path through high school and through post-secondary so I see relevance right now to what I'm taking, and I see that as the stepping stones to where I want to be.

We just started to take a bunch of AVID concepts and say every kid deserves this, not just only the kids who are fortunate to be part of a formal AVID elective support class.

That's how I got my toe into it, and then I became such a strong advocate for it because it is a research-based, proven process. If you look at the results that AVID students have benefited from now for 25, 30 years, the research and the evidence show me it works. What if we showed you hundreds of schools across the world benefiting from it and decades now of students showing the benefit of it? That's why I've been such a strong advocate for the AVID program.

I was thrilled to be part of your podcast. I didn't know you were AVID-sponsored. Then when Paul sent me the thing, I saw his tagline on the bottom of his email. I'm like, AVID? I got to support them. I'm in.

Winston Benjamin 38:54
We appreciate the enthusiasm. The goal is really to support our teaching staff, our student population, to really be able to reach and excel. But several times in your conversation, you mentioned tools, and it's time for What's in Your Toolkit.

What's in Your Toolkit

Transition Music with Rena's Children 39:13
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? Check it out.

Winston Benjamin 39:22
What are you using? What are you taking away in this conversation that you can apply in your future? Paul, what's in your toolkit?

Paul Beckermann 39:33
A couple resources that we have on AVID Open Access. Check out our recent podcast with Dr. Anthony Muhammad on transforming school culture. That's a good resource to take a look at. Then we also have a SMART goal template that you could potentially use with teachers or students, and we do have some virtual note-taking templates as well, if you want to look into some of those AVID strategies that Mike was talking about.

Winston Benjamin 39:59
Rena?

Rena Clark 40:02
Just to extend on that a little bit, because maybe you're not in a place where you're doing that intervention piece school-wide. We also have resources on there for you around playlists and blended learning, which is a way that you can really create those spaces for yourself if you are in that situation. Also, just that PLC at Work book, if you are in a different place, or some of that as a resource as well.

Winston Benjamin 40:32
I appreciate that, and for me, it's for those who are taking leadership stances and moving up and wanting to enact change—how do you support your team to do this work? Check out Elena Aguilar's The Art of Coaching Teams. I really think that's a really good book of getting a squad together to be collaborative, to really push on each other, to be able to support.

Mike, we got a question for you. Is there a tool you'd like to share with our listeners that they could possibly use within the next couple of weeks in their work?

Mike Mattos 41:02
You bet. I would one, echo Paul. I think Dr. Anthony Muhammad is one of the most influential voices in education across the world right now. His book Transforming School Culture—short, quick, powerful read on our assumptions about kids and about ourselves, and how do you build that healthy school culture? I'm sure he captured that in the podcast too, so that'd be worth listening to.

Secondly, sometimes it helps just to see schools that are maybe farther along in the journey than you are. The website AllThingsPLC.info—all things plural PLC.info, sponsored by the company Solution Tree. You can't buy a thing on that link. There's not a single link that sends you to purchase anything. It's just a landing site for schools and districts that are committed to this collaborative work.

On that site, we have now almost 900 model schools and districts across the world getting better results doing this: large schools, small schools, elementary, middle, high schools, 100% virtual, brick and mortar, alternative, charter, private. You name the type of school, we'll give you schools similar to you that aren't smarter than you, that probably started the journey a little before you. There's write-ups, contact info.

If you're like, "We're stuck on how to build that schedule with intervention time in," or "How do you share kids at a large high school with all the kids out at once?" why don't you reach out to a few schools that are already doing it so you can glean some ideas and get a vision of what it might look like as you create your plans? I think that's a powerful resource for people that's absolutely free.

One Thing

Paul Beckermann 42:48
Very cool. All right. Well, it's time for our One Thing.

Transition Music 42:54
Time for that one thing. Time for that one thing. Time for that one thing.

Paul Beckermann 43:06
All right, One Thing time. Final takeaways for the day. Rena, you want to go first?

Rena Clark 43:12
Sure, and I have a couple different things, but I love this because it really is about the power of culture and belief in a lot of ways. I just love the idea—it's what you believe when you go home. So how do we create that culture?

We know actions speak louder than words, and our thoughts become our actions. So it's really about: what is the belief when we go home or walk out of the room? I get excited. Sometimes I forget I don't even have the radio on because I'm thinking about all the things I want to do in my drive home. That's happening because then that happens in my actions. I'm not like, "That was terrible," and I'm moving on. Not that that doesn't happen some days, but it really is about creating that culture so that we're talking positively outside the meeting.

Paul Beckermann 44:04
Love it. Winston, what are you thinking about?

Winston Benjamin 44:08
The concept of compliance versus commitment. I think it's easy to be compliant, but the thing we're being compliant to, I'm pretty committed to. I want all kids to learn. So shifting that from just a simple thing to be like, I agree to this. I can do this.

Rena Clark 44:27
Sometimes you need that dissonance, though, because you don't know that until you're kind of forced to do it. So there's also that.

Winston Benjamin 44:33
Absolutely, absolutely. Still committed to having kids learn.

Paul Beckermann 44:40
For me, I think what's resonating is when Mike kept talking about, "We're building this in the school day, so it's not an added burden on the teachers." So we're helping our students, but we're helping our teachers at the same time. It's like a universal help plan.

I think that anytime we can have an initiative that benefits everybody—your staff and your students—it's a no-brainer. You've got to go. You've got to go there. You're helping everybody out, and you're giving everybody a hand up.

Mike, you get to play along too. What's your final thought for our audience out here today?

Mike Mattos 45:17
Final thought: let's go full circle to that opening quote. I think we as teachers need to be willing to be the students we want our students to be. Can we agree making mistakes is part of learning, and that's that space between who you are and who you want to be? That space is—we might have to pick up some new tools and some new way of thinking.

Whenever you—like you talked about guitar playing, Paul—you want to get better, you've got to be willing to get past the chords and the notes you already know how to play well, past the rhythms you already know. The ones you've practiced a lot, of course you can play and do well and look impressive. But it's when you're willing to pick up the new piece of music that's a challenge, and at first you won't play it well.

Our mindset is that's okay, because when our students make a mistake, what we want them to do is build perseverance and a growth mindset and "No worries, don't say you can't do it. You haven't learned it yet, but we're going to work at it."

Let's give ourselves as educators some grace too—some grace that if we keep doing what we've always done, we should expect the same results, and every kid's not making it right now. So we might need to pick up some new tools—working together, and some new tools of what we focus our collaboration time on, and some new tools about an intervention period. We won't be perfect at it yet, and that's okay. That's okay.

There are going to be bumps in the road. I think there's a difference between uncomfortable and unreasonable. Asking teachers to work beyond contractual hours is unreasonable. Picking up a new set of tools you might not be comfortable with yet, but they can get us better results over time—that's not unreasonable. But we have to be willing to go into that space of we're going to be a little uncomfortable at first, and why? Because it's not what we've always done. We won't be good at it at first, but that's okay. That's okay, because we're going to be students too, and we're going to learn and grow too with our students. We'll go hand in hand together.

That's my final thought.

Closing

Rena Clark 47:26
I appreciate that so much. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure for me getting to see you again and talk with you and for our listeners as well. So thank you so much.

Mike Mattos 47:38
Thank you all. Take care.

Rena Clark 47:42
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 47:45
We invite you to visit us at AVIDOpenAccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 47:58
We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 48:03
And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 48:07
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 48:09
You make a difference.