How It Works
The Miller Guidance System (MGS) has been created and refined by practitioners in a variety of settings. It is reliable, measurable and effective.
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Organize the work by completing a gap analysis and inventory of people and material resources.
The Miller Guidance "Blueprint for Change" is comprised of carefully crafted questions in a 3x3x2 rubric that are posed to district stakeholder groups. It results in a comprehensive gap analysis.
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A Master plan is created from this information and in collaboration with district leaders, a one year service calendar is established.
Plan the infrastructure needed to support the school change components by making decisions, setting policies and clearly communicating information to administration and school staff. Parents and community members are involved in the planning stages.
District leadership team decisions, policies, and training cover instruction, assessment and teaming issues.
Here is a sampling of the work that is done by the district leadership team:
- Clearly define the core program for basic skills and behavior. These definitions are represented on a Miller Guidance data team tool, "Instruction at a Glance," that is used to support grade level collaboration.
- Choose assessments for each purpose on the Assessment Hierarchy. Include plans for collecting, scoring, organizing and preparing the data.
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- Choose cut scores for the assessments and establish guidelines for setting goals on progress monitoring graphs. Miller Guidance provides clients with the research based information they require to make informed cut score and goal setting decisions.
- Establish data team frequency, duration, membership, roles and protocols.
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- Write policies for the assessment and instruction of English Language Learners and students with disabilities.
Implement the changes using collaborative, grade level data teams as the vehicle.
Miller Guidance uses a data team system comprised of five meetings per grade level during the school year. The meetings occur approximately every six weeks. The sequence of tasks on the protocols for each meeting is determined by the grade level and the available data sources.
During a two hour meeting, one hour is spent on grade level program analysis and adjustment and one hour is spent designing and/or reviewing targeted support for small groups of students with similar academic or behavioral needs.
Decision rules are standardized so that student progress is consistently analyzed across schools and changes are made in a timely fashion.
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Miller Guidance consultants are present at first year data team meetings to provide on the spot professional development and to ensure that data team participants successfully accomplish their goal.
All parents are regularly notified of their child’s progress using an established system.
Evaluate district and school trends, and set goals
Using the district’s data sources, Miller Guidance creates an end of the year data summary that is disaggregated by grade and subgroup. Intervention tools are also evaluated by looking at the progress monitoring data. Trends are analyzed for the purpose of establishing a closer link between interventions and the students that derive benefit from them.