Does your continuum of supports for students feel like a poster that is waiting to be pulled out for reference during collaborative team meetings? Do you wish there was a better way to match supports to key issues students are experiencing?
In WeCollab, your continuum of supports can be right at your fingertips during your conversations.
When you have captured the expertise of your staff to create the continuum of supports for each focus area that will be discussed during your collaborative team meetings, it can create a beautifully organized visual that represents the accommodations, strategies, and interventions that the staff team believes is available to students in the context of your school.
(NOTE: This is just one sample of many!)
Often schools will assign the role of Continuum Curator or Captain Continuum to be responsible for referencing the visual document during collaborative team meetings. Even with the capacity of the WeCollab software, please continue to keep this role as there is also the need to record additional ideas that may come out of the conversation!
Regardless of how your menu of supports is captures, there is a section within WeCollab for the supports from the continuum to be added (thus creating a database, essentially). They are organized by focus areas (e.g. differentiating between literacy and numeracy supports, for example).
As with any software, this is an area where you get out of it what you put into it: the data entry offers incredible return on investment. Each support, when entered into the system, not only requires identification (name of support, tier of support, etc.), but includes a place for a description of the support (which is believed to be important in understanding how the support operates within the school context), the opportunity to link resources that are inherent in understanding and/or implementing the support, and the space to identify key words which might assist in finding the support when searching (which is a great place to not only include the focus area or type of support but also the key issues that might warrant the support to be accessed).
As an added bonus for districts, there is the capacity to add supports that are provided by the district (typically Tier 4 supports) as well as establish consistency across schools for supports that might be expected to be available (e.g. a definitive literacy intervention). It is even possible when entering supports at the district level to select particular schools to receive a specific support, as we know, for example, that the context of early elementary and high school are very different.
When engaged in a meeting in WeCollab (not just the collaborative team meeting, but any meeting), the continuum of supports will provide “the most popular” suggestions when the key issue is identified based on matching words from the issue to the name of the support as well as the key words that have been entered for the support.
While this may not always bring up ALL the possible supports available for the key issue, this is where the Continuum Curator role can provide additional suggestions which are also accessible within the meeting template.
This feature is also available within the student profile for individual teachers to access when pondering what they might be able to do to best meet the needs of a particular student.
The good news about WeCollab is that it operates in alignment with the fact your continuum of supports is never done. It is possible to export a PDF of the supports for reference when refining your continuum or to add as a reference for the Continuum Curator as it does have the descriptions included. The supports that have been entered into WeCollab are not set in stone. They can be edited, added to, and even removed if it is determined they are not meaningful or relevant in the school context anymore.
While Kurtis and Lorna often address the “So we’ve established our continuum of supports…now what?” question, WeCollab is in the background, waiting to help enhance the utilization of the continuum within a school’s Collaborative Response by having it at your fingertips when you need it.
Every Child has a Story
WeCollab ensures that a child’s story is never lost.
Designed by educators for educators WeCollab enhances and deepens your system’s Collaborative Response efforts.