Building Upon NCII Resources to Fit the Michigan Context

Building Upon NCII Resources to Fit the Michigan Context

By Melissa Nantais, Ph.D.

Michigan Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MiMTSS) is a technical assistance center that supports educators in building their knowledge and skills to serve all students equitably using MTSS. MiMTSS partnered with the National Center on Intensive Intervention (NCII) between 2017 and 2021 and is currently supporting data-based individualization (DBI) implementation throughout the state. This Voices from the Field highlights one way that MiMTSS has built upon NCII resources, including the Taxonomy of Intervention Intensity, to meet the needs of local educators. 

The Taxonomy of Intervention Intensity (Fuchs, Fuchs, & Malone, 2017) can be used to select or evaluate an intervention program used as the validated intervention platform in the DBI process. It can also be used to guide the adaptation of an intervention during the intervention adaptation step of the DBI process. The Taxonomy includes the following dimensions: strength, dosage, alignment, attention to transfer, comprehensiveness, behavioral or academic support, and individualization. NCII has created several resources on how to use the Taxonomy within the DBI process, including training materials, a self-paced module, a webinar series, and guidance for using the Taxonomy to support English Learners.

While these NCII resources provide valuable guidance on using the Taxonomy, MiMTSS saw a need to apply the Taxonomy to specific interventions widely used in Michigan. To address this need, MiMTSS created a series of Intervention Intensification Strategy Checklists organized around the Taxonomy dimensions that provide educators with examples of how they might intensify widely used interventions. NCII sat down with the creator of these resources, Dr. Melissa Nantais, Advance Tiers Coordinator at MiMTSS, to learn more about the origin and impact of the checklists.

What was the inspiration for creating these intensification checklists?

“Even though we were training people on the Taxonomy and what the dimensions meant, they were having a hard time translating that to the specifics of their selected intervention platform. And so [the intervention checklists] just made it easier for them to contextualize [intensification] for that program. It takes some of the guesswork out and people responded well to that… it's not all-inclusive, but it at least gets some of the thinking going.” 

How are these checklists being used? 

MiMTSS uses these checklists to help their TA partners contextualize the Taxonomy: “So especially when you talk about individualizing intensive supports, [a real situation] may not fit perfectly into one of the ideas that we've generated… And we think about it from a perspective of new learning for the schools and lower response effort for them… It's helpful for people to understand the Taxonomy dimension itself so that they know when that's the right button to push.”

How has your partnership with NCII influenced the development of these resources?

“All of the work we've been doing around intensification came from our partnership [with NCII], and it really helped us home in and focus on that. I don't think we would have done what we did without the support from the Center… just the [Center’s] willingness to give us feedback and shape our thinking or push our thinking is wonderful.”

These intervention checklists can be found below and are publicly available on the MiMTSS website.
Links to resources: 

About the author

By
Melissa Nantais
Melissa Nantais, Ph.D.
/ MiMTSS

Melissa focuses on the Advanced Tiers and intensifying instruction/intervention supports at the MiMTSS TA Center. Prior to her current role, she worked as a school psychologist, educational consultant, and university professor.