Fidelity Assessments: Part 1
There’s a family of assessments that are essential to the success of any MTSS framework. Most schools are already implementing universal screening, progress monitoring, and diagnostic assessments. You might think that sounds like PLENTY of assessments, right? How could we even fit anything else into our already full assessment schedule. Well ,all of those assessments mentioned are direct measures of student performance which are of course, an indirect measure of adult behavior. If you are truly interested in improving the overall quality of instructional and intervention systems then you must include the fourth type of essential MTSS assessments - and that’s fidelity!
Fidelity is all about implementing educational practices with accuracy and consistency.
In this blog post, I’ll discuss the first of three primary purposes that highlight the importance of fidelity for school leaders:
ensuring quality assurance for instruction and interventions across all Tiers
facilitating high-quality data-informed decision-making, and
optimizing resource allocation for maximum impact.
Quality Assurance for Instruction and Interventions
School leaders are tasked with fostering an environment where high-quality instruction and interventions are at the forefront of educational practices. You can purchase the curriculum that has been shown to be the most effective but if teachers or interventionist are skipping sections or delivery it for only 10 mins a day instead of 30 minutes a day then school leaders and coaches can’t possibly be confident that students are getting the instruction they need in order to make adequate or even catch-up growth. Fidelity ensuring that these practices are not only implemented but implemented effectively.
It is critical that school leaders prioritize fidelity, so that all instructional staff understand the importance of consistent, evidence-based instruction. In a tiered intervention system fidelity assessments act as quality assurance measures and mitigate the risk of inconsistent implementation.
Story Time: One example of how lack of fidelity impacts student outcomes.
One school I worked with held grade level team meetings and early on we discussed each teacher’s pacing from the previous years. Specifically, we asked how many lessons from the curriculum they covered in a year. We discovered that some teachers completed the curriculum with their students, while other teachers never got to the final two units so those students were never exposed to that grade level content. Then both of these groups of students were mixed together in classrooms the following year which created a gap in skill levels for students in the same classroom. Instructional pacing is just one facet of fidelity. For this school then we developed a pacing calendar so teachers knew where they were supposed to be throughout to year in order to cover the necessary materials. Also teachers knew when they were falling behind because their students needed to stay in a lesson longer than other classrooms and that when an instructional coach or interventionist could get pushed into the classroom to temporarily help the teacher differentiate instruction and get back on schedule. When school leaders prioritize fidelity it leads to the creation of a cohesive and effective learning environment where students receive the support they need in a standardized and reliable manner.
In the next blog post we’ll discuss our next purpose of fidelity assessments, high-quality data-based decision making. Go, Team MTSS!