Supportive Environment is the amount to which friends, family, teachers and others around us value high achievement and positively encourage people in their goals. A supportive environment is a critical factor in the MTSS process.
Multi-Tiered System of Supports, or MTSS, is a term used to describe an evidence-based model of schooling that uses data-based problem solving to integrate academic and behavioral instruction and intervention (Florida’s MTSS Project). This definition brings together the worlds of academic instruction and behavioral intervention.
In the MTSS process, knowing how learners feels about their support systems is important information to know. Supportive environment is one of the twelve scales in our Personal Responsibility Map, which is the core assessment in our Personal Responsibility—Achieving Academic and Career Goals program.
When students lack a positive support system, it is important to help them build a support structure that will help them to achieve their academic and career goals. Our Personal Responsibility—Achieving Academic and Career Goals not only identifies the strength of each user’s support system, it also provides students with valuable information on how to build and maintain a positive support system.
Choose Your Friends Wisely
It is no accident that people who succeed have found the magic of surrounding themselves with people who support them. They know that, without the support of family, friends, teachers, or supervisors, success is a dream, not a real possibility.
One of the most important things in your students’ success journeys is their ability to surround themselves with people who will support, help, and encourage them.
Supportive Environment and MTSS
Each and every one of your students has certain psychological needs that must be met in order to become a healthy, productive person. Let’s take a look at a common theory about psychological development tied to a supportive environment.
Abraham Maslow developed his now-familiar Hierarchy of Needs theory of basic human needs. This theory says that there is a simple pyramid of needs that all of us have.
At the bottom or base of the pyramid are the physiological needs of the body. These are such basic needs as good water, air and clothing to keep warm. The next level is safety and security needs. These needs focus around an individual’s safety and well-being. Next is the need are one’s social needs, which deals with the need to have human relationships. A supportive environment is addressed with the need to belong. Next come the self-esteem needs. Self-esteem, or feelings of self-worth, leads to self-actualization needs.
In MTSS, self-actualization leads to academic, and later, career and life, success. The need to belong and to be part of a community is a basic psychological need in all of us. The understanding of the importance of a positive support system needs to be learned and continually reinforced.
Do you want to learn more about how to accurately assess and build a positive support system for your students? Click here to sign up for our trial.
