PROJECT NEST: NOTICE
Reading Need
at All Levels
Before anyone can support a student, somebody has to notice — and then say what that student is carrying precisely enough that a team can plan from it. This strand works through what need looks like at four levels: the student, the classroom, the building, and the district. Each level holds the one beneath it. A classroom cannot run a support the building never staffed. A building cannot protect a path back the district never built. Getting this right at every level is what keeps a program from quietly becoming a place students go and do not leave.
You will learn to describe need without guessing at causes, to plan a classroom deliberately rather than reactively, to name what your school must have in place for an intensive program to work at all, and to see why implementation quality — not program choice — decides district outcomes. It also covers the relationships that carry the structure: the expertise already sitting in your building, what makes coaching usable instead of evaluative and the boundaries that keep adults functional in April. You finish able to say what is needed, at which level, and to whom.
PROJECT NEST
What's in the Notice strand?
Student Support Systems
Know what the student is actually carrying.
Student Support Systems begins at the individual level, teaching educators to describe with precision what a student whose needs exceed general education and typical Tier 2 supports is actually carrying. The first half works through what makes a description accurate rather than impressionistic, including the cultural and linguistic questions that have to be asked before any conclusion is drawn, and the evidence that a student can still connect with a trusted adult when supported. The second half maps the expertise already present in a district — administrators, receiving general education teachers, specialists, coaches, and families. Educators finish able to describe a difficulty in terms a team can plan from and to ask for help well.
Classroom Support Systems
Plan the program instead of reacting to the needs.
Classroom Support Systems covers the room where intervention becomes real, showing educators how to plan it rather than react to it. The first half builds the classroom in a deliberate order, working through prevention before correction, because most of what makes a room work happens before anything goes wrong. It also covers how to measure the balance of positive to corrective interaction for an individual student and how to correct at low cost. The second half examines coaching as a partnership teachers enter rather than receive, alongside the personal boundaries that keep adults functional across a school year. Teachers leave with a planning frame for the room and a way to keep it running in April.
Building Support Systems
Name what your school has to hold.
Building Support Systems focuses on the level above the classroom, setting out what a school has to have in place around an intensive program for the program to be possible at all and how each of those conditions erodes when nobody is watching it. The first half explains why tiers describe supports rather than children, how a school names what it offers and how a student exits it, the kinds of data a placement decision rests on, and why the program needs one administrator with both authority and availability. The second half turns to the relationships that carry the structure — what makes a coaching relationship usable rather than evaluative and the improvement cycle a building leadership team runs.
District Support Systems
Fidelity decides outcomes.
District Support Systems takes the widest view of the four, arguing that districts rarely have an intervention problem and nearly always have an implementation problem. The first half maps the continuum of services a district needs and what a gap in it costs, works through the levels of analysis a district uses when a support is not producing change, and sets the published evidence on measured implementation against systems that adopted a framework and never measured anything. The second half turns to what districts actually control: recurring consultation rather than one-time training, staffing sized by workload rather than by roster count, and the conditions that predict whether an initiative survives past its third year.