Diving Deep into the Four Components of a Student Success System

In the third episode of season three, Tara Madden, Chief Program Officer of Talent Development Secondary, joins Dr. Robert Balfanz to discuss the four essential components of a student success system: a focus on building relationships; holistic data and predictive indicators; a response system informed by students, teachers, and families; and a shared set of student-centered mindsets among adults and what it takes to provide all students with the supports and learning experiences they need to thrive in post-pandemic times.  Madden shares several examples of recent school visits and discusses what’s taking place, how they are designing student success systems, and their impact on agency, belonging, and connectedness.

Talent Development Secondary is one of nine partnering organizations that works with the GRAD Partnership. The coalition is a national initiative that partners with communities to implement high-quality student success systems so that schools are better equipped to address the scale and scope of post-pandemic student needs and graduate all students ready for the future. The GRAD Partnership works directly with schools, districts, and local community organizations to create the conditions needed to bring the use of evidence-based student success systems from a new practice to common practice. 

Transcript

Robert Balfanz (00:01.678)

Hello and welcome to season three of the Designing Education podcast. In today's episode, we're talking to Tara Madden, Chief Program Officer of Talent Development Secondary. We can't wait to jump into the conversation. Before we start, we want to take a moment to remind you to subscribe to the Designing Education podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

We’re available on Spotify and Apple podcasts, just to name a few.  Subscribe to the Designing Education podcast and never miss an episode.  

Robert Balfanz (00:43.874)

Welcome to the Designing Education podcast series. I'm Dr. Robert Balfanz, Director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. In this episode, we're going to engage in a conversation with Tara Madden, Chief Program Officer of Talent Development Secondary. It is the third episode of our third season of conversations we are having with education leaders, thinkers, and practitioners from across the country. With them, we are talking about what it will take to create an education system that truly empowers all young people and sets them on a pathway to adult success. 

This season, we are doing a deep dive on student success systems, and today we'll be talking with Tara about their four essential components. We'll be exploring the nuts and bolts of what it takes to provide all our students with the supports and learning experiences they need to thrive in post-pandemic times.

Both Tara and I have worked for years with schools and districts to implement early warning systems to increase high school graduation rates. The core idea is that students signal early and often when they need additional supports to succeed, but our school systems historically have not been designed to see these signals and effectively respond. As a result, student supports were often provided too late and in a remedial manner, and by  large were not effective. Schools were not organized to do anything, until students failed to class or missed weeks of school. 

Early warning systems provided a means to progress monitor all students with predictive indicators and organize timely responses. The goal was to get the right support to the right student at the right time at the scale and intensity required. Early warning systems spread wildly in the late 00s and 10s, and in many places played a key role in increasing high school graduation rates. But they were not designed for a pandemic and its continuing after effects. This realization brought Tara and her organization, Talent Development Secondary, together with nine other organizations that work with schools and districts to increase student supports to form the GRAD Partnership with a goal of creating a student support system, which was robust enough to address students post-pandemic needs and put them on pathways to long-term success. Interviews and surveys with over 300 frontline educators indicated the post-pandemic student success systems needed to have four components. First, a strong focus on building positive relationships. Second, actual holistic data and predictive indicators. Third, a strategic response system informed by student, teacher, and family voice. And finally, a shared set of student-centered mindsets among the adults. These are the components of student success systems that we can't wait to dig into with Tara today. Welcome, Tara. It's wonderful to have you here with us.

Tara Madden (03:33.569)

Thanks, Bob. I'm glad to be here.

Robert Balfanz (03:35.65)

We start all our podcasts by asking our guests the same question. When you were in high school, what was a good day?

Tara Madden (03:43.841)

A good day for me would have been a sporting event. I was on swimming, field hockey, and lacrosse because then I could get to wear my uniform to school. And usually if it was an away game, I got to leave early, which also was a good day for me. 

Robert Balfanz (04:00.61)

So, a good day for you involved doing an organized activity with your peers that brought you recognition and enjoyment. Is that right?  

Tara Madden (04:09.825)

Exactly, yes.

Robert Balfanz

Alright, well, let’s get started.  First, tell us a little bit about your organization and what you do.   

Tara Madden (04:19.777)

Talent Development Secondary was designed as a result of partnership among researchers and educators at Johns Hopkins and middle and high schools in Philadelphia and Baltimore. And so, since 1994, when that partnership began, Talent Development Secondary has supported hundreds of schools across the nation to reorganize and redesign using evidence and research-based practices. So ultimately, right now, the work that we're doing is to use a proven framework, partner with educators to help create customized solutions, which lead to equitable student success. We do that through a variety of means, technical assistance, professional learning, webinars, all kinds of ways.

Robert Balfanz (05:02.05)

And before we came on, I heard you mentioned that you spent the Saturday morning out tending to your weeds. And now we're going to get into the weeds of student success systems. 

So, the first component of student success systems is about acknowledging the power of relationships and seeing their enhancement as one of the most powerful preventative actions a school can take. Why are relationships so foundational to student success?

Tara Madden (05:30.913)

Well, they're humans. We're dealing with teachers and students and educators in the building are all humans, and we have a need to connect. There's also some compelling research from a couple different places highlighting the importance of connectedness. 

When students are connected and they feel like I have a caring adult in their school that they can go to with a problem, academic or not, who will listen, they're less likely to engage in drugs and alcohol. They are more likely to get higher grades and test scores, they're more likely to attend, they're more likely to graduate on time. It's a truly preventative way, preventative action we can take, a strategy, to get more kids less involved in bad things and getting to higher graduation rates.

Robert Balfanz (06:19.778)

Great, it's common sense, but sometimes in our busy world of schools, we sometimes look past that to say it's got to be more complicated. But basically, right, we want to be at a place where people know us and care about us, and want us there, and where we want to be, and where we have different types of relationships and friendships, and it's a place we just want to be. And that's at the end all about relationships.

Can you give us one or two practical examples of how schools can build better student -teacher relationships?

Tara Madden (06:52.289)

Well, one is just to have a sense of what they currently are. So how do you measure that? It can be a little tricky, but it doesn't have to be. It's actually pretty easy. So, a lot of schools that we partner with have been engaging in relationship audits where they're looking at all the students in their building and saying which adults they are connected to and vice versa. Adults saying these are the students that I'm connected to and that then that quickly leads you to a list or a group of students who may not be connected to an adult. And then they can quickly have some action items against that and say, okay, who can we connect with Tara, who might know her, have a relationship, or would forge a relationship. So, I think that's one is this relationship audit, which lends itself to measuring and monitoring, which is lovely. 

And the second is, you know, all teachers aren't extroverts. So, they don't just naturally just build relationships with everybody and are thrilled to be out there speaking all the time. So, sometimes just a simple strategy, something that a lot of schools that we partner with really appreciate and the teachers there is a two by 10, which is two minutes a day for 10 days in a row is just talking about anything the student wants to talk about to build that rapport and that relationship and that connection with the student. So, sometimes those concrete strategies and then an opportunity to practice them and hear from their peers go a really long way and they actually don't cost any money.

Robert Balfanz (08:14.018)

Yeah, isn't that remarkable that relationships are not about a cost, they're about the time and the connection. One thing was sometimes we forget about, because we focus, you know, and importantly on that student-teacher relationship, is what about student -to -student relationships? Because when I'm in some schools and I ask the kids, which of these points of connection are we weakest on, they often say it's like, there's too much drama with my fellow students.

Tara Madden (08:42.657)

Yeah, the students, especially, everyone has experienced trauma during the pandemic and students were not excluded from that. And so, with that trauma comes an opportunity to heal and relearn and reconnect or learn some skills around communication that they had never learned before about relationships, about themselves, about how to regulate their emotions. So student to student, there's tons of schools where we're going to have some type of advisory curriculum that allows and fosters those skills, either filling in gaps where students weren't able to experience social interactions and learn from them in their younger years when they normally would have, absent a pandemic, or to help them in their continued process of healing from whatever traumas they may have experienced during the pandemic.

Robert Balfanz (09:29.154)

It's just one of those things like we put time and effort to it, we can get a big payoff, but it's a thing we often skip over. it's, it's middle school. They're crazy anyways. What can we do? Or they're high school. They won't listen to us, but kids actually want to be able to create in a supportive environment where they are able to sort of learn the things they need to learn so they can all get along.

Tara Madden (09:52.609)

I would mention just recently our team had an opportunity to visit several middle schools in a city and just listen and learn what's going on there, how they're functioning, how they're designing student success systems. And the one middle school out of seven that we visited, they had a policy of taking the cell phones in the morning. When we interviewed the students, they did not like this policy. They were quite clear that they didn't think it was fair or just in any way, but yet they did comply. They put their cell phones in a box, and they removed them and got them back at the end of the day.  The student-to-student interactions on that campus were significantly more, stronger, and seemingly healthier than we saw on the other seven. So just a little, this is a very tiny little example of just that idea of removing that device and fostering human connection just by removing the device has proved effective on that campus.

Robert Balfanz (10:47.41)

Thanks for that great example. The second component of student success systems is actionable holistic data. The GRAD Partnership stresses that in addition to the ABCs of school success, attendance, behavior, and course performance, schools also need to pay attention to the ABCs of well-being, agency, belonging, and as we've heard, connectedness, and to see well-being as perhaps the critical driver of school success. The idea being, that if you have agency, belonging, and connectedness, you're much more likely to attend school, to focus on school, to see the value of getting your work done. Can you share with us how you've been helping schools with a prior experience with early warning, on track, or MTSS, which really focused on those first ABCs, attendance, behavior, and course performance? Incorporate the ideas of agency, belonging, and connectedness into their student success work.

Tara Madden (11:40.449)

We do like to keep the indicators kind of at a low number so educators and teachers aren't looking at too much data to really tell them much and also to lean on the most predictive. So, when you say, we have some new indicators, it can set things a little a mess. So, the one indicator behavior historically has been probably the most challenging for most schools to track because in order to track mild, sustained misbehavior, which is truly the indicator that a student is flagging in need of some kind of support, some kind of intervention. It requires a lot of teacher input, data input, a lot of times during the classroom, which is just not a realistic expectation. And so, then the indicator by default for behavior becomes suspension, or an in-school or out-of-school suspension, which really doesn't tell us as much. So, this is inviting an opportunity to use agency, belonging, and connectedness as another way to sort of measure behavior and are students on track. And there are numerous free and for purchase surveys and examples that many districts and schools use to kind of measure that kind of that one of that key question is generally do you have a caring adult that you can go to if you have a challenge that is not academic or it is academic that you know will listen to you? So, a question like that posed, several of those, they can be very short surveys and they give schools an opportunity to then get a sense of that data because it's not something you can kind of walk into a building and measure quite as easily as attendance or chronic absenteeism rates.

Robert Balfanz (13:13.922)

Thanks. The third component of student success systems is building a strategic response system and one that is informed by student, teacher, and family insights. The idea being, yes, we need to pool the knowledge of the adults in the school building, but we also have to get the insights from the students and the family, right? Because they are maybe best suited to help us figure out root cause and also effective responses. So, can you expand upon then like why it's important to include student and teacher family voice when figuring out what is the best response when a student is signaling that they likely need some additional supports or a better learning experience?

Tara Madden (13:56.513)

It's super important and it leads to more efficacy when we're able to understand the root cause for a student's behavior indicator. And we as educators, I'm a classroom teacher, I might think I know why Tara is not performing at her highest level or why she's got her head down today. But without absent engaging with her and her family and her caregivers, then I'm really not 100% sure. And I could kind of guess the wrong thing and apply the wrong intervention or an intervention that's going to be ineffective.

So, we have a couple of experiences where schools have included the teacher team looking at the data and saying, yes, Tara is flagging for these reasons, and here's what we think. And then we have the parents, and the students are invited into that meeting as well to say, what's going on? Why are these things happening? What can we do to support you? And that's where we get, generally, our schools are experiencing the quickest way to the most effective intervention is by listening and designing that with the families and the students that are experiencing it themselves. And also, we've had experiences where schools have said, this is the best intervention for this student. We know it. And the student says, I don't want that intervention, and I'm not going to do it. So, then it becomes not the most effective intervention. So, I would say it's just basically helping you get to that root cause and then also getting some support with finding a solution and intervention that's going to be effective for what this child and this family may be experiencing right now.

Robert Balfanz (15:27.586)

And it strikes me it's just like instruction too, right? You can give what you think is the best lesson in the world, but if the students aren't engaged, it's not going to connect. They're not going to learn. And here, right, you could think you have the best intervention in the world, but if the students aren't going to engage, it's not going to make a difference. And it seems like we have to keep relearning that it's a two-way street and we have to really bring together the insights of the adults and the insights of the students and their families and find that sweet spot in the middle where we can really make a difference. Can you think of any other examples where it's really made a difference to include that student or family voice?

Tara Madden (16:09.185)

Last year partnering with the school that had just started to bring in the students and families into these conversations on their campus. The teachers believed the child was just, it was an 11th grader who had been performing at about a B or C level and attending regularly, suddenly sort of fall off over three months. And they thought, they weren't sure what was going on with her. She wasn't disruptive, but she wasn't engaged, and she wasn't there often enough. And so, her grades started to slip. And they really didn't know what was wrong. So, with a conversation with her, the counselor at the school realized very quickly she had suffered a lot of loss in her family. Her family had suffered a lot of loss in the last three months. And this child was trying to deal with that on her own. She wasn't one to ask for help. She wasn't lazy, she wasn't uninterested in her education, but she was not feeling connected to the school. She was feeling sort of withdrawn all together. And so, by connecting her with a caring adult who checked in on her once a week and had conversations, encouraged her to connect to a club or a sport. For the first time in 11th grade, she started running track. She's a track star. She ended up with a state title and has graduated last year with some scholarship money and an opportunity to run track at a university, which just kind of was amazing that just by listening and interacting and engaging and understanding sort of the root cause of the child's behaviors, they were able to get a support in place that cost virtually nothing. And she, instead of being a dropout or graduating later than her anticipated year, she graduated on time and entered into post-secondary.

Tara Madden (17:54.273)

And I would say there's another story similar to that with a young man in ninth or 10th grade where he basically just needed somebody to help keep him on track. Frontal lobe is not developed yet at age 16, and it's quite obvious when you're in high school, their behaviors, that that's the case. So, with a little bit of guidance, he just needed someone to help him learn how to keep himself on track by monitoring his grades, making sure his assignments were, and just get organized. And again, another success story by just kind of one-on-one and some other school-wide interventions on how to get organized changed his outcomes dramatically.

Robert Balfanz (18:31.746)

Yeah, that's really profound. And the last thing I want to talk to you about on this before I move on to the next question is that I know you've done some work with a school that's done a lot of these intensive deep dives with students and families. And one of the insights they found, and I'm going to ask you to expand upon this, is that when they did enough of those, they could suddenly see patterns and trends that were really more of a classroom level or a school level or a district level challenge. And going from those very intensive deep dives with some kids, they were able to see larger patterns and trends that they could address at that level. Can you share a little bit of that story with us?

Tara Madden (19:12.545)

Sure. That school did engage in sort of piloting this idea of what if we bring the teachers into the room, which we had been doing, looking at the data, and the student and a family member to get to the root cause, and then assigning interventions from those meetings. 

At the end of the year, the set of students that they had talked to and their families and designed and assigned these interventions, they interviewed each of the students and the families to say, what was the most effective thing we did this year? Like, what if there was one thing we would do that would help you or other students in the school, what would it be? And loudly and clearly, the response was these five-to-10-minute conversations one on one, once a week, with a caring adult to help guide them, check in with them, connect with them and say, okay, here's how you're doing. Like your attendance is way better, but what's going on in math? Those conversations, those students said were probably the key thing and that's what they wanted to continue into the next year. 

So that school thought about how might we do that for everyone? And they instituted and they kind of revamped and reenergized an advisory program. So, on every Monday, every student, every adult on campus, has an advisory of a small group of students and they have the opportunity to connect, to engage goal setting and reflective conversations with the students around their attendance, performance, and behavior. And so that learning from what worked for a few students, asking those students, valuing their input and support, and then designing a school-wide intervention, or actually kind of reenergizing a school-wide intervention that had kind of been in place before the pandemic, but we had sort of became more compliance than how we're going to use advisory well. And that has helped reduce their, they believe that's one of the key things that helped reduce their chronic absenteeism rate in this past year.

Robert Balfanz (21:05.026)

Thanks for sharing that. So, the final component of Student Success Systems is a shared set of student-centered mindsets. Can you help us unpack this? What are student -centered mindsets? And why is it important for the adults in a school to have a shared set of them?

Tara Madden (21:23.425)

Some student-centered mindsets would include empathy, just having an understanding of how those that I serve in the building and the campus I'm on experience life. We work with a lot of schools where the teachers may not look like and have the same backgrounds of those that they're currently serving. And absent that kind of understanding, you can assume root causes that are faulty or not be aware of some. So, this idea of sort of understanding with empathy rather than judging and criticizing - the belief that the communities in which we serve have a lot of assets and strengths on which to draw from and which to bring into our building. The belief that equity is important and that's manifested when we look at data and we're looking at it by subgroups and we're realizing certain subgroups of students aren't performing as well as others and we're going to take action to get to equity. They are some of the beliefs. 

Also, doing things with people. Improving with, not doing things to or for the students that we serve, the families that we serve, and the teachers that we work with. Doing it with rather than to or for can be a mindset which helps to move things forward for everybody really.

Robert Balfanz (22:41.538)

That actually really sets up my final question, which is that schools are busy places, right, with lots of responsibilities and even more so post-pandemic. So why take the time and put in the effort to create student success systems? When you were working with schools to help them move their existing student supports towards a student success system with these four components we've talked about today, what have you found to be some of the most effective ways to engage schools in the work?

Tara Madden (23:11.873)

One is that nobody that we're working with currently or in the past couple years is it a brand-new idea, this idea of early warning, or on track, or MTSS. This work has been going on in our field for a while. So, one is to sort of honor and respect the work that has been done to understand the systems that they have built and to share. 

The GRAD Partnership has an amazing tool, team reflection and planning tool, which takes them through a sort of self-guided set of questions. Because like where do you start? We already have this. Where do we go from here? And so that tool, I would highly recommend that one. And I think the other thing we're seeing people struggling with right now, because this work has been going on, is we have systems set up and there's somebody working on attendance, and there's somebody working on behavior, and then there's a group of people working on course performance and those outcomes, and they're not all working together. They're working in these silos. So, we're really finding a need in the field is how do we break down these silos? Because the work in each one of those silos is very important and there are people that are highly invested in that work, yet it is not necessarily the most efficient way to use the resources and the people power we have in the building. So, helping them move to a more holistic approach with attendance behavior and course performance all covered in one team, those multiple indicators, has been a lot of our work this year is really how do you shift that? Because these are again are people that have been working and have had some positive outcomes and were set up with good reasons and good intentions at the time.

Robert Balfanz (24:44.898)

I say that, you know, at the heart of all of this work is just relationships and data. They're sort of like water and air. They're actually abundant and available, but it's how you use them that determines how powerful they can be. Right? And I think that's what you were saying is, you know, if we just work with the schools to take what they have and show them how to even be more powerful with those, with those resources. So, this has been a great conversation, Tara. Thank you.

Is there anything else you'd like to share or tell our audience about Talent Development Secondary, the GRAD Partnership, or their work to spread student success systems? Are there websites for our listeners to visit?

Tara Madden (25:25.185)

There certainly are. The GRADpartnership.org is the one I mentioned earlier where there are resources and tools, there's articles. There's research to support this. So, a lot of times helping people move mindsets begins with conversations around a text piece, around an article about research. What do we think about this? Is it valid? That can help surface some beliefs and move people along a continuum. Talent Development Secondary, TDSschools.org, is the other website we would encourage you to visit.

And I would say one other point about sort of these systems is we have a power and a resource on campuses, on many campuses, as largely untapped. And that is the power of representative student voice and leadership. And a lot of our schools are leaning into that. So really getting a representative group of students together who we can listen to and who we can co-design solutions with has been an incredibly powerful lever that some schools are tapping into, particularly in a time when the adults in the building are overwhelmed, taxed, and feeling like I can't do one more thing. Having them work with students is incredibly energizing to find these solutions and get them in place in their buildings. Talent Development Secondary - we are big advocates for representative student voice and leadership in buildings as a way to enhance experience for everybody.

Robert Balfanz (27:06.978)

Yeah, I think I'm going to amend my statement. We have data, relationships, and student voice. That's like our water, our air, and our sustenance. And we should use all of them well. In closing, as we have heard today, the student support systems which were built in the 00s and 10s made a difference. But they were not designed for the scale and scope of student needs resulting from the pandemic.

We can, however, build upon them and from them to create student success systems which are robust enough to provide all students the supports they need to succeed. Today, with Tara as our guide, we went deep into the four elements needed in post-pandemic times to provide student supports at the scale and intensity required. To succeed, students need to believe that there are adults in the school that care and know about them as a person, and that they have a supportive peer group. We know that to be useful, data needs to be actionable and holistic and include well-being indicators of agency, belonging, and connectedness. It's also clear that we need to be strategic in finding the highest leverage point to most effectively respond to the data. And this often comes from engaging the voice of students, teachers, and caregivers as equal partners in both challenge identification and its solution, and then working to continuously improve our efforts. For this to work, wide agreement on the why we are doing this, or a shared set of mindsets is required. These are the core elements of a student success system. And as we heard today, all are within the capacity of our schools to implement. And that's just a really important point. We can't emphasize enough. This is all actionable and doable by our schools as we find them today with the resources they have. And using those resources they have in more effective ways will enable much stronger outcomes. 

This is why we look forward to seeing what Talent Development Secondary and the GRAD Partnership learns about what it will take to move the use of student success systems from a new practice to routine everyday normal activity. 

As we close, we want to ask you to please subscribe to the Designing Education podcast to stay up to date on all the revolutionary work happening in education. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a five-star review. Also, please share the show with a friend or colleague or on social media. This has been Robert Balfanz from the Everyone Graduates Center thanking everyone for listening and inviting you to listen to the other episodes in our Designing Education series wherever you listen to your podcasts. Onward and be well.