Illuminate Blog
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Tiers 2 and 3: What is the Difference?
By: Rachel Brown, Ph.D., NCSP As the use of a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) has become more widespread in schools, terms such as tiers, benchmarks, universal instruction, as well…
Start Gathering Social & Emotional Data Now—Here’s How
The importance of measuring and teaching social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies cannot be overstated. In fact, it is clearly emerging as one of the most effective ways to develop…
Overcoming My Personal Battle with Bullying
October is National Bullying Prevention month, and we want to do our part in tackling an issue that affects more than 30% of our young people across the nation. In our…
How to Identify & Combat Child Abuse
At a time when many Americans are preoccupied with the “war of words” between presidential candidates, a different news story captured my attention. For days, I read everything that I…
Is Catch-Up Growth Possible?
Consider this scenario: Molly is a fourth-grade student but reads at a first grade level. Her teacher knows that her reading skills are much weaker than her classmates because the…
Making Schools Safer by Tackling Bullying
During a recent flight that I took from Charlotte to Phoenix, one of my seatmates who was a neonatal unit nurse told me a troubling story about her older brother. She…
Missing Millions: The Impact of Chronic Absenteeism on Ethnic Minorities
The reality in today’s schools is that students are absent and missing out on opportunities to learn—and it’s happening at an alarming rate. According to research by the U.S. Department…
FAST Feature Focus: Assessments for Vocabulary and Comprehension
FastBridge Learning has added two new computer-based reading assessment tools in FAST™: AUTOreading and COMPefficiency. These new measures complement existing reading assessments and offer additional ways to measure reading subskills. Both…
3 Keys to Unlocking School Improvement
Someone once said that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. School improvement is a process that takes planning and careful attention. Just like any process, there are…
Understanding Your Screening Data
By: Jessie Kember As mentioned in a previous post (Assessment Literacy: Understanding Student Data), assessment serves as a core foundational component of decision-making within a Multi-Tier System of Support (MTSS) framework.…