Pillar III: Tiered Student Supports

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A data guided, tiered student support system that uses early warning indicators and an integrated system of whole school, targeted and intensive supports to get the right intervention, to the right student, at the right time at the scale and intensity required (along with rapid recovery options when this does not work).

Talent Development Secondary advocates tiered support systems. This means that all students have access to appropriate support and services at appropriate times and intensities. One example of this is attendance initiatives, which can have positive effects on the entire school. Click here to learn more about successful attendance results in Talent Development Secondary schools.

Benefitting from the assets of staff experience, teachers have expanded roles in a high performing school, which often include attendance at cross-disciplinary meetings, participation in school-wide improvement initiatives and selecting and supporting targeted and intensive interventions for groups of students and individual students.

In transformational schools, adults from the community are regularly tapped and organized to come into the school as mentors, tutors and volunteers to support an initiative.  The school is organized in a way that identifies and rosters students for this community support and by the same token, recruits community adults for this service.  A school partnership coordinator or a staff member who can dedicate a significant part of his/her role to this effort is integral to this process.

In many Talent Development Secondary schools, after-school programming is organized by school staff as well as partnering outside organizations that are brought into the school. Talent Development Secondary requires that there is an organized effort to reach out to parents and community members to be a critical part of the student’s growth and development. Click here to learn more about Family & Community Support in Talent Development Schools.

Transformational schools must often provide dedicated and professional case management for the students who are significantly off-track and for those that require substantive intervention that cannot be provided by traditional school staff or volunteers. Talent Development Secondary supports this process with ongoing conversation in teacher teams revolving around students’ needs in order to determine which students require this more intense intervention. Click here to learn more about Early Warning Indicator Systems.

In a Talent Development Secondary school, all tiers of support are linked and managed by a School Transformation Facilitator who ensures that the right support is connected to right student at the right time. Click here to learn more about the role of a School Transformation Facilitator.