A WIN for students: Eastview builds targeted support into the school day

At Eastview Middle School, a year and a half of exhaustive planning and intricate scheduling has culminated in a new approach designed to make additional academic support part of every sixth-grader’s instructional day.

The school’s WIN, or “What I Need,” program builds a dedicated Multi-Tiered System of Support block directly into the master schedule for every student, creating time for enrichment and reinforcement while also allowing students who need additional help to receive targeted Tier 2 or more intensive Tier 3 interventions.

The initiative is Eastview’s latest contribution to the White Plains City School District’s broader MTSS work across the district’s schools. WIN periods and intervention blocks are already familiar at the elementary level, while Eastview and Highlands middle schools have provided specialized supports such as math labs and Support for Academic Learning classes.

At Eastview, Principal Leroy Dixon and his staff set out to adapt those concepts to the structure and complexities of a secondary-school schedule and make the support available systematically throughout the sixth-grade program.

“We believe the WIN can be a win,” Mr. Dixon said.

Building support into the schedule

The deceptively simple concept involved a complex schedule that required counselors and teachers alike to be all in.

Eastview operates on an A-through-F cycle. Each sixth-grade team has its WIN period at a different point in the school day, allowing intervention specialists to move among teams and work with students who have been identified for additional assistance.

For students who do not require an intervention, WIN provides additional time with their core content teachers in English language arts, mathematics, science or social studies. Teachers can reinforce concepts, extend learning, provide enrichment or work with students in smaller groups.

Two sessions in the cycle are dedicated to homeroom, where the focus includes social-emotional learning, organization and executive-functioning skills.
Students who require additional help can instead be scheduled during the WIN block for a targeted intervention. Because that intervention occurs during WIN, students do not have to give up a core academic class to receive it.

“It is never at the expense of one child over another,” Mr. Dixon said. “It’s utilizing and maximizing all the resources, both district resources, for our human capacity to really serve students.”

The structure represents Tier 1 of MTSS for everyone, with additional layers added according to student need.

“Every day this child has an opportunity to get support somewhere else that’s really, really targeted,” he said.

For students requiring Tier 2 assistance, that can mean small-group reading, writing, mathematics, English-language or academic-learning support. Tier 3 provides still more intensive intervention, including specialized reading instruction offered daily.

“We used data to identify the students, and then we built in support to target them,” Mr. Dixon said. “That’s the idea behind MTSS.”

A year and a half in the making

Making that happen required much more than simply adding another period to the schedule.

Mr. Dixon, whose background includes years of working with secondary-school master schedules as well as coaching football at the high school level, began exploring whether a structure common in elementary schools could be translated effectively to the secondary level.

He had watched the intervention work taking place in the I-Block and WIN models at the elementary schools, and began asking whether a similar concept could be built into Eastview’s master schedule.

“I began a year and a half ago and I was like, I think I can build this schedule,” Mr. Dixon recalled.

Then came the difficult part of actually building it.

“It was a nightmare. I did it manually for the first year, because I did not want to work with IC (Infinite Campus) yet,” he said, explaining that it evolved into a “creative process the whole summer.”

The work involved administrators, counselors, coordinators, teachers and intervention specialists. Students had to be assigned to teams and classes, providers had to be available at precisely the right periods, class sizes had to be considered and intervention schedules had to coexist with the rest of each student’s academic program.

Mr. Dixon jokingly described himself as the building’s “mad scientist” as he moved through schedules, spreadsheets and individual student programs. During a tour of Eastview’s WIN classes on Wednesday, he walked quickly from room to room, pointing out the different pieces of the system and explaining how students could navigate between general WIN instruction and increasingly targeted interventions.

“Everybody says, ‘You’re over the top,’” Mr. Dixon said, chuckling. “Absolutely! I have a football background. I have a lot of enthusiasm.”

That energy has been paired with an intensely detailed examination of student data.

Eastview staff members use many different data points, including the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress Reading and Math results to help identify students who may need additional support. NWEA MAP is administered at various grade levels at the beginning, middle and end of the school year, providing educators with information about achievement.

The school’s teams will continue reviewing student progress as the year unfolds, allowing the system to change with students rather than permanently assigning them to a particular level of intervention.

Mr. Dixon refers to the intervention specialists as his “surgeons” because their work is intended to be precise and targeted. “They’re much more surgical in how they’re going to help that child who really, really needs that,” he said.

From Tier 1 to intensive support

That approach could be seen during a walk through Eastview on Wednesday.

In a social studies WIN class, students remained with their content teacher for additional reading, writing, discussion and opportunities to extend what they were learning. Elsewhere, smaller groups were receiving targeted literacy instruction.

Teacher Claudia Boller was beginning work with one such Tier 2 group.

“Well, today was day one with these students, but I think it’s, you know, it’s an idea that’s been proven to work,” Ms. Boller said, adding that the students responded positively to the smaller setting.

“They were excited. Some students like the small group,” she said. “And individualized attention that really works with some students, so… a lot of positive reinforcement, a lot of motivation.”

Another stop showed the more intensive Tier 3 side of the system.

Teacher Nora Rugova works with groups of approximately six to eight students on reading skills, with a particular emphasis on decoding and helping students develop strategies for unfamiliar and multisyllabic words.

“The Tier 3 support for reading here really focuses on decoding,” she said. “We work on letter sounds, vowel teams really helping students break apart those words.”

Unlike the rotating Tier 1 WIN classes or targeted Tier 2 interventions, students receiving this Tier 3 reading support work with Ms. Rugova daily.
“Well, it’s very nice because they do receive the support daily,” she said. “So we’re really able to see that growth.”

The work is academic, but Ms. Rugova said one of the first hurdles can be emotional. By sixth grade, students are increasingly aware of who is receiving additional help, and some can be reluctant to take risks when reading.

“Confidence,” she said of the challenge. “Sixth grade, they become more aware of who’s in what classes, who’s getting pulled, that embarrassment piece of not wanting to try to break a word apart and get it wrong.”

Her response is to establish the classroom as a place where mistakes are expected.

“One of the first conversations we have in here is we are going to be together every single day for the whole school year,” Ms. Rugova said. “We have to trust each other. You’re going to make mistakes – I’m going to make mistakes.”

Schedule that can change with student

An important part of Eastview’s model is that Tier 2 intervention is not necessarily a permanent destination.

Students are progress-monitored, and intervention specialists can determine when a student is ready to move back into the regular WIN rotation. The intent is to put those decisions close to the educators doing the specialized work.

“We put the decision making into the specialist hands,” Mr. Dixon said.

That fluidity is central to MTSS. The framework begins with strong Tier 1 instruction for all students, adds targeted Tier 2 support for students who need it and provides intensive Tier 3 intervention when necessary.

Unlike the older Response to Intervention model, MTSS encompasses not only academics but social-emotional learning, behavior, organization and other skills that can affect a student’s success.

At Eastview, those additional components are especially important because sixth grade represents a transition into secondary education.

Counselor Jessica Rivera said the new structure allows the school to provide academic intervention and enrichment while also explicitly addressing executive functioning, organization, time management, relationship-building and social-emotional skills.

“It’s an organic design of delivering instruction,” Ms. Rivera said.

The structure also gives teachers something particularly valuable in a school day: designated time.

“Within the classroom, now the teachers can identify,” Ms. Rivera said. “These kids need small group instruction. These kids need a little bit more here. These kids need enrichment. It’s not only for the gap. It’s also for ‘I’m at this level. I can go to this level.’”

That distinction is important. WIN is not designed simply as remediation for students who are behind. Students who are meeting expectations remain with their core teachers, where the additional period can be used to reinforce material or push learning further. Others can receive highly specific assistance without missing the instruction taking place elsewhere.

Sixth-grader Madison Slater offered a straightforward student interpretation of the idea.

“It’s an extra class, so you can get more experience in that specific class,” Madison said.

She said she thought WIN would be helpful and, during the class visit, was working on a book cover and hoping “to learn more about the Great Depression.”

Part of a districtwide approach

Eastview’s redesign comes as schools throughout White Plains continue strengthening and aligning MTSS practices.

Across the district, educators are using small-group instruction, specialized support classes, collaborative data review and other strategies to identify needs and respond to them. Elementary schools have incorporated WIN or intervention periods into their instructional day, while middle-school educators continue developing supports appropriate for older students.

Mr. Dixon acknowledges that Eastview borrowed from work already taking place elsewhere.

“We actually took the name from some of the elementary schools because we like what we saw,” he said.

What Eastview has attempted is to take that concept and engineer it into the complexities of a secondary master schedule, with separate teams, multiple teachers, rotating periods and specialists serving different groups of students.

Mr. Dixon believes the model could ultimately have applications beyond Eastview.

“There are still students who still lag behind in reading and writing and in numeracy,” he said. “And the question is how do we get them caught up without impacting the overall body that needs to either double down what they already know or extend their learning.”

For now, however, Eastview is concentrating on making the new system work for its own sixth-graders.

The program remains new, and Dixon repeatedly emphasized that the school will continue evaluating and refining it as staff members see what works, examine new data and encounter problems that could not have been anticipated on a spreadsheet.

“We’re building it as we fly,” he said. “We believe that every child can get the individualized support that they need.”